Kidnapped trainer is getting his life back on track
Antonio Sano is chasing Dubai World Cup glory nine years after staring death in the face, writes Marcus Armytage
Every day, until his wife got together a ransom, he woke up with a gun pointed at his head
Tomorrow Dubai stages the world’s richest (£21 million) and most international race day at Meydan, the racecourse whose grandstand is the longest horizontal structure in the world and which, like much of Dubai, took just two-and-a-half years from concept to completion.
Built on reclaimed desert, Meydan, which opened for business in 2010, is now in the suburbs and it will not be too long before it is part of downtown; it matters not if Dubai’s oil has run out or we all start driving electric cars, Sheikh Mohammed was a step ahead turning his domain into an international business hub and winter vacation land.
If I got my six-year-old daughter to draw a fantastical skyscraper, blindfolded, it has already been built here; sails, grandfather clocks, rockets, needles, squares, triangles, lop-sided, you name it; above all else Dubai is an architect’s heaven. Of course, a honeypot of such opportunity attracts both bees and wasps. A regular at Meydan is Ramzan Kadyrov, the hardline president of Chechnya, who has faced many allegations of human rights abuses. Some of his bodyguards seem to bear the kind of scars that were not the result of falling out of apple trees while scrumping as children.
But as much as Dubai is a broad church, so is racing. Indeed, few sports transcend the world’s barriers and borders, be they religious, political, racial or geographical, quite like the sport of kings and, as someone once so eloquently put it; all men are equal on the turf, and under it.
And while Kadyrov bids to win a slice of the £8.75million cake in the Dubai World Cup with his Uae-trained gelding North America, tomorrow night he is pitted against a man whose own dramatic story is worthy of a Hollywood script.
Antonio Sano, who runs Gunnevera in the race, was champion trainer for 19 years in Venezuela, saddling 3,338 winners and earning the nickname Czar Valencia Hipismo (King of Valencian racing) – Valencia being the track in the capital, Caracas.
But in 2009, his world was turned upside down when armed men broke into his home, bundled him into their car, and shackled him to a wall in an empty room for the next 36 days.
Every morning, until his wife scraped together a ransom, he woke up with a gun pointed at his head, wondering if it would be his last day on this earth.
“Racing in Venezuela is good, but that for me was a bad moment and for the sake of my wife and children I had to get out,” said Sano.
Talking to him, though, one thing is clear; his life is very much two parts; before and after his kidnapping.
After, in 2010, he said goodbye to his stable of 150 horses at Valencia. Initially, he thought about relocating to Italy where he had family, but racing is on its knees there, so he took a punt on Calder Race Course in Florida.
Six years later, Gunnevera, a colt orphaned at birth costing just £11,500 as a yearling, came along and the horse has gone a long way to restoring Sano to the upper echelons of his profession.
In Sano’s hands he has won five of his 15 starts, nearly £2.6 million in prize money and has contested America’s marquee races; the Kentucky Derby (seventh), the Breeders’ Cup Classic (fifth) and Pegasus Cup (third).
Rebuilding Dubai’s main racecourse may have taken only two-anda-half years – rebuilding a life, it seems, might take a little longer. But it is equally possible.