Eclipse narrowly dodges whip row
The Sandown feature had much to discuss but a Barney Roy win would have been controversial
Saturday’s Coral Eclipse Stakes at Sandown Park was either an epic duel of generations or a tactical catastrophe, depending on which horse you backed. One should take nothing away from the first two home, Ulysses and Barney Roy, who quickened away from the other runners with authority and fought out a thrilling finish.
The winner, Ulysses, is a tribute to his breeders, the Niarchos family, who followed the adage of sending the best (Light Cavalry who won the Oaks for them) to the best (Galileo) and then hope for the best. Although choosing Michael Stoute, as patient and sympathetic a trainer as there is, to nurture the colt was hardly merely ‘hoping for the best’.
Barney Roy ran a gutsy race and might have won if the race had been run a year ago, when threeyear-olds received 11 pounds from the older horses; that allowance has since been reduced to 10 pounds.
Had he won, however, a whole can of worms would have been opened, because his jockey, James Doyle, used his whip with excessive frequency and will receive a lengthy ban.
Personally, I did not find Doyle’s ride in any way offensive; probably because I know that modern whips are no more painful than children smacking each other with balloons. But it is hard to think of any other sport where one can break the rules and still win. Had Barney Roy won by an inch, backers of Ulysses may have felt extremely aggrieved.
This is an invidious ‘no man’s land’ position for a sport to find itself in. Racing either has to say ‘these whips are harmless and the jockeys can do what they want with them’, which may create a bad impression to the uninitiated; or ban jockeys from hitting the horses completely.
If your money was on Coolmore’s Cliffs of Moher, two events not entirely unrelated signalled the departure of your cash at an early stage.
The only way a mile and a half colt (Cliffs of Moher) is going to beat a miler (Barney Roy) over a mile and a quarter at Sandown – where the sweeping bend into the home straight gives the horses a bit of a breather – is if the field goes hell for leather from the starting stalls to the end of the back straight. And it stands to reason that if you do not want to set that pace, someone else has to. But no one did that on Saturday.
So Cliffs of Moher’s chance of outstaying his rivals had been compromised well before he got brutally hampered by a concertina effect halfway down the back straight caused by the lack of pace.
Under the circumstances he did well to finish fourth. Trainer Aidan O’brien reported that jockey Ryan Moore did not say much after the race. Which says it all for me. After nearly being put over the rails, I would imagine Moore may have been a bit more forthright with his views when he got inside the changing room. Write this horse off at your peril; his day will surely come.
Eminent’s race was also a disaster, fashioned by human error of one sort or another. Eminent is a long-striding horse, who clearly has a devastating cruising speed – a bit like his sire, Frankel.
In his early races, Frankel was allowed to do things his own way – blazing away at the front of the field, his jockey just keeping him balanced and not fighting him. Notable judges scoffed at these tactics and opined that it was no way to educate a horse. They were wrong.
Eminent was desperate to get on with it on Saturday; but either as a result of instinct or instruction, Silvestre de Sousa decided to have a wrestling match with him all the way down the back straight. As a result the horse never got into a rhythm and wasted his energy fighting De Sousa, who, it should be added, had never ridden the horse in a race before.
It is, of course, always the prerogative of an owner and trainer to sack their jockey – which is what happened to Jim Crowley after he rode Eminent to fourth in the Derby. But had Crowley not been ‘jocked off ’ this enigmatic colt, who tried to bite another horse halfway up the home straight such is his fighting spirit, perhaps lessons learnt at Epsom might have paid dividends at Sandown. As it is, Eminent is still a very talented work in progress. And Crowley won the Eclipse on Ulysses.