Moore picks right as Ten Sovereigns justifies Darley Cup gamble
At last, Ryan Moore got on the right one for Aidan O’Brien in a domestic Group One this season when he rode Ten Sovereigns, the 9-2 second favourite, to an emphatic victory in yesterday’s Darley July Cup, highlight of Newmarket’s July Festival.
If Moore was doubting himself when riding the supposed first string for Ballydoyle, he could only have been encouraged by the money bookmakers took for last year’s Middle Park winner all morning, the No Nay Never colt being backed in from 10-1.
Moore let last year’s Middle Park winner roll and he led his group up the centre of the course all the way. The stands-side group headed him at halfway but he picked up very well and the runner-up, Advertise, who beat him nearly three lengths in the Commonwealth Cup, could never get a shot in, finishing 2¾ lengths behind.
O’Brien, who took the race last year with US Navy Flag and was winning it for the fifth time since Stravinsky 20 years ago, pointed out the colt’s work had been “unbelievable” coming into the race, clocking four 11-second furlongs in his last gallop.
“He was very good last year and we saw what he did in three races over six furlongs in a month,” he said. “We slowed him down all winter to help him get a mile [fifth in the 2,000 Guineas] and he very nearly did.
“He took a while to come out of Newmarket. We were happy with him going into Ascot [where Advertise beat him] but he hadn’t really woken up to sprinting again. Today, he came alive.”
Moore had gone two weeks without a winner of any sort coming into the July meeting but you do not become a bad jockey overnight.
Even the world’s best jockey needs a confidence booster occasionally and Ten Sovereigns will have given him plenty. “Aidan had him in tip-top shape and he liked being back on faster ground,” he said. “He was a bit rusty at Ascot.”
Ten Sovereigns’s stable companion Fairyland was third, Pretty Pollyanna fourth and So Perfect fifth, the five three-year-olds in the race filling the first five places.
Otherwise one of the busiest afternoons in racing’s summer calendar was all about King Power Racing. It won the John Smith’s Diamond Jubilee Cup with Pivoine and the Fred Cowley Memorial Summer Mile at Ascot for the second year running with Beat The Bank in a 10-minute spell.
The owners will remember the afternoon as bitter rather than sweet, though, as the brave Beat The Bank sustained a complicated fracture of his near-hind pastern in the last stride of the race and had to be put down.