Dan’s Dream can clean up for charity

If Dan’s Dream wins today’s Qipco 1,000 Guineas at Newmarket, the filly would be hitting the jackpot in more ways than one; it would be Mick Channon’s first Classic winner and it would add a further £310,000 on top of the £54,000 she has raised for the spinal injuries charity to whom she is leased.

Dan’s Dream is her owner-breeder Steven Smith’s first Classic runner. The story began when Smith, then a hobbyist jumps breeder, was attacked in his holiday home in the south of France by three armed robbers. After a scuffle, he jumped out of a window into a ravine.

He landed on the bank, breaking his lower back, was paralysed and spent the next six months in hospital. He now has 70 per cent use of his legs and walks with a stick, while the robbers, later caught by their DNA, were sentenced to 34 years between them.

Since his injury, he has become a director of the Nicholls Spinal Injury Foundation, a charity set up after Dan Nicholls, 18, was paralysed from the neck down in a swimming accident.

After his near-miss, Smith teamed up with former cricketer Andy Lloyd, who had a shared passion for the horses, and bought the 75-acre Hunscote Stud near Wellesbourne.

Henry Candy bought the dam, Royal Ffanci, for him, and though she never raced at two, Smith put her in foal at three to the stallion Cityscape, in which he had bought a 40 per cent share.

The offspring was Dan’s Dream, which he offered to the Nicholls Spinal Injuries Foundation as an auction item. He kept a leg, Lloyd used his contacts to bring in Ian Botham and Gareth Edwards as joint-owners to make the remaining leg more attractive and, between them, Fred Watt and Simon Peckham – big beasts in the private equity world – paid £15,000 for their quarter. She has already won the Fred Darling Stakes.

Today, she has to overcome the massed ranks of Ballydoyle and Godolphin and my idea of the winner, Anna Nerium, but she is a 14-1 shot – and stranger things have happened.