Say cheese: Zoffee strikes in Chester Cup to delight Owen
The trophy – and the 30lb Cheshire cheese that comes with it – were handed to Alan Peterson, the owner of Zoffee, after the Chester Cup, but it was a sign of how much this unique race means to the locals that Michael Owen, the landlord of Manor House Stables where Zoffee is trained by Hugo Palmer, was celebrating as if he had just scored the winner in an FA Cup final. “That’s pretty much a lifelong dream to win that race,” Owen said. “I said to the owner before the race: ‘I know it’s your horse, but they’re all mine at Manor House,’ that’s how it feels.”
Victory for a yard that was built from scratch by one of Chester’s most famous sons was, in many respects, the ideal result in a race that marked the Chester Cup’s 200th anniversary.
Zoffee had been denied in the final strides 12 months ago, but he was 3lb lower in the weights this time and enjoyed a copybook Chester ride from 18-year-old Harry Davies, part of Palmer’s operation since, as the trainer put it, “he needed to stand on a bucket to put the tack on his pony”.
Davies got away swiftly from stall one and saved ground on the rail through two circuits before asking Zoffee to quicken past the front-running Aztec Empire. “We all love this horse,” Palmer said. “He might not be the highest-rated horse in the yard, but he’s got the loveliest look on his face and he loves his job.
“Me and Harry have been a big part of each other’s lives for a long time. His mum Angie is my assistant, and she’s been with me for 12 years and Harry’s only 18. He’s been in the yard a long time, we kept racing ponies for him in [Palmer’s old yard in] Newmarket.
“This is a massive, historic race and the 200th year. There aren’t many handicaps outside Royal Ascot that have this prestige, so it means a lot being local, and we were third two
years ago and second last year, so we’ve been inching closer.
“We’ve said last year that we’d come back and win this year, Harry rode his first stakes winner for us last year, he’s won this race for us now and with a bit of luck he might ride his first Group winner at Lingfield for us tomorrow [on Stenton Glider].”
The Huxley Stakes is one of the more recent additions to the May Festival’s programme but it is the only Group Two of the big meeting here and saw a deeply impressive winner yesterday as Sir Michael Stoute’s Passenger showed a Group One turn of foot to run down Israr and potentially book himself a place in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot next month.
Passenger was sent off as an 8-1 chance for last year’s Derby at Epsom, just six weeks after making a successful racecourse debut in the Wood Ditton Stakes at Newmarket and following a luckless run into third in the Dante at York.
He failed to cope with the fasttrack into Group One company, but Passenger could hardly have made a more promising start to his fouryear-old season, for a trainer who has few, if any, peers when it comes to late-maturing horses.
Passenger’s career has many echoes of that of his sire, Ulysses, who also ran down the field in the Derby – at odds of 8-1 – in 2016 before blossoming into a dual Group One winner, in the Eclipse Stakes and the International Stakes, as a four-year-old.
He broke the track record in yesterday’s success and while he was initially quoted at 14-1 for the Prince of Wales’s Stakes after crossing the line, that was soon cut to 11-2.
‘It’s pretty much a lifelong dream to win that race’ Michael Owen
Stable owner