Daily Racing Form National Digital Edition
Appleby has Godolphin colors flying into wild blue yonder
DEL MAR, Calif. – When Charlie Appleby turned up for the first time at a California racetrack, at Santa Anita in October 2013, he surely didn’t mind getting away from racing in his native England for several days.
To be fair, the heat had dissipated from a raging firestorm Appleby had walked a few months earlier, when Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, head of the international racing and breeding powerhouse Godolphin, tapped Appleby to take over the training yard at Moulton Paddocks in Newmarket, northeast of London.
Moulton Paddocks had been the province of trainer Mahmoud al-Zarooni, for whom Appleby worked as an assistant. Raids and investigations by English authorities had uncovered widespread doping in the operation, horses regularly receiving steroid treatment. Zarooni hastily was sacked, given an eight-year suspension that, it so happens, expired this past summer. Zarooni recently was granted a training license in Dubai.
For Appleby, 46, who comes across at first blush as an English everyman, it was the best of times dropped square into the worst of times.
Given the opportunity of a lifetime for an aspiring horseman, with some of the world’s best racing and breeding stock under his care, he also had to face endless scrutiny and querying regarding a sensational news story that transcended sports coverage.
Eight years later, standing on another California backstretch, Del Mar’s, Appleby once again was front and center for overseas racing media, not because things had gone so terribly wrong, but because they had become so remarkably right.
One English interviewer began his session asking Appleby to deny the assertion that he, Appleby, standing in the Del Mar dust, ranked as the leading trainer in the entire world.
This is a humble human being, at base, but Appleby has learned the ropes regarding media sessions. He hemmed a bit, hawed a little, tried to deflect, but in the end did not deny the proposition at hand.
“The stats are there; stats don’t lie,” Appleby said. “It’s been a hell of a year – a fantastic year.”
The flat-racing year in Europe is over, but the major meeting that comes after it, the Breeders’ Cup, long has been a focus of the Godolphin racing season. Appleby, at the 2013 Santa Anita Breeders’ Cup, won the Juvenile Turf with Outstrip, and this year he has come with six runners – good ones.
Albahr and Modern Games were to race Friday in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile. On Saturday, Appleby sends out morning-line favorite Space Blues in the Mile, where he also runs live longshot Master of The Seas. In the Turf, 7-year-old Walton Street will be positioned prominently and can contend, while mercurial Yibir will wait near the back of the field and bide his time.
For Appleby, the time is now. His 2021 CV, which will soon have champion trainer in England on it, includes 10 Grade 1 or Group 1 wins, none, interestingly, in Dubai, where Godolphin dominates the World Cup Carnival from January through March. Master of The Seas isn’t one of the toplevel winners, but he missed winning the Group 1 English 2000 Guineas by a head a month before Appleby gave Godolphin its second Epsom Derby win with Adayar. Adayar subsequently beat Mishriff, winner of the $20 million Saudi Cup and the $5 million Sheema Classic earlier in the year, on July 24 in the Group 1 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, the first horse since Galileo in 2001 to win those two races the same season. Hurricane Lane, third in the Derby, won another English Classic, the St. Leger,
and with a little more luck might have given Appleby his first Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, where he finished third, beaten less than one length.
There’s a pure sprinter, too, Creative Force, who won the Group 1 British Champions Sprint on Oct. 16. Space Blues wants to run a little farther than Creative Force and captured the seven-furlong, Group 1 Prix de la Foret on Oct. 3. On Oct. 9 at Newmarket, the homebred 2-year-old Native Trail capped an undefeated, championship campaign with a powerful victory in the Group 1 Dewhurst. He’s the winter favorite for the 2022 Guineas, though not by much over the Appleby-trained Coroebus, who won the Autumn Stakes on the Dewhurst undercard.
Appleby ran wild in New York, too. Althiqa and Summer Romance had sharp winter form on the flat, left-handed course at Meydan in Dubai, and instead of campaigning them in England, where the racing is so much different, Appleby twice sent them to New York. Althiqa beat second-place Summer Romance in the Grade 1 Just a Game at Belmont in June and did the same thing in the Grade 1 Diana on July 17 at Saratoga.
Canada? Godolphin and Appleby sent three runners for Grade 1 races the third week of September at Woodbine. The results: Albahr won the Summer Stakes, Wild Beauty the Natalma, and Walton Street, a 7-year-old in career form, blasted to a 5 3/4-length score in the Canadian International. Frankie Dettori, long ago the No. 1 Godolphin jockey, rode the trio.
That felt like old times, and, indeed, Appleby has helped preside over Godolphin’s worldwide renaissance.
“The last few years, it’s been an upward curve, year by year,” Appleby said. “The quality has definitely increased, no doubt about it, and there’s a confidence around the whole team now.”
It’s true – the stats don’t lie. Over the last three years, according to the website Thoroughbred Racing Commentary, which makes global Thoroughbred ratings, Appleby ranks as the No. 1 trainer in the world. As of Oct. 31, Appleby (and Godolphin – he trains for no other client) have 32 Group or Grade 1 wins and 95 group or graded wins at any level during the period. On raw numbers, those totals trail other trainers – Aidan O’Brien with 49 and Chad Brown with 47 rate first and second in Grade 1 or Group 1 wins – but Appleby is doing it with fewer runners, 103 compared to 963 for O’Brien and 561 for Brown.
Most of the horses Appleby gets are homebreds, and Godolphin has collected a good deal of the best bloodstock in the world. He also has clearly assumed the top training position within Godolphin. As Appleby’s successes have mounted, he has received more of the outfit’s the top prospects, with longtime Godolphin trainer Saeed bin Suroor, for whom Appleby worked before moving into Zarooni’s yard, fewer. And Appleby clearly knows what to do with a good horse – how to develop them, where and over what distances to run them, and how to ship a horse around the world.
“Having success here at the Breeders’ Cup meetings, in Australia and all around Europe, as a team we’ve all grown together, and the results I think have proven that,” Appleby said. “Life’s a lot easier when you’ve got the experience to identify which horses need to be doing what in their careers, and hopefully mapping out the right places for them to be able to bring the best out of them.”
Appleby won a second Juvenile Turf with Line of Duty in 2018. In 2017, the first Del Mar Breeders’ Cup, he saddled Wuheida to win the Filly and Mare Turf. His starters this weekend all fit their spots; no one at this point is here on an exploratory mission or a vanity trip. “The team,” as Appleby likes to call his operation, has honed their craft to a fine point.
“Eight years ago, I stood at Santa Anita for the first time, and we were a young team who had just sort of been given the role of training for Godolphin,” he said. “We were all sort of trying, not to learn, because we all had the experience to do what we were asked to do, but to have the confidence with one another to make it all work.”
Some ocean fog crept through the hills around Del Mar on Tuesday morning – nothing like the dark cloud hanging over Godolphin when Appleby came to California in 2013. English everyman? Maybe not. Sheikh Mohammed chose the right guy to take his racing project, perhaps the grandest in racing’s history, form nadir to zenith.