RARE BREEDS & NOBLE STEEDS
Ride with us to Newmarket, where billionaires’ obsessions run free
How did the small Suffolk town of Newmarket become a global epicentre for equestrianism? Laura Thompson visits the birthplace of thoroughbred racing, where the clatter of hooves fills the streets, moneyed magnates spend staggering sums in the service of their passion, and beautiful creatures cast a powerful spell…
When my father died, he left me a racehorse called After The Show, a bay sprinter, born in 2001 and trained in Newmarket. No pleasure has ever quite compared with the years that I spent as his owner. I remember, for instance, a summer’s day on Newmarket’s July Course, and the sight of my father’s racing colours (maroon and ivory, halved) gleaming pale in the sunshine as my boy deployed a brief turn of foot that for a moment – paradoxically – suspended time. The world, or perhaps it was just me, became entirely still as the bay horse with the fluttering silks seemed to shift into the sphere of victory.
A couple of seconds later, he had lost the race by a short head. No matter. But in that moment, when he had held his own upon the sacred Newmarket turf – the home of the thoroughbred – I had experienced an emotion so intense, so physical, that I felt kinship with the Hungarian Prince Batthyany, who had been obliged to retire his 1875 Derby winner, Galopin, lest the strain of watching the horse run brought on a heart attack.
Such is the power of racing, of the thoroughbred. It is almost overwhelming; and what is extraordinary is that it is the same whether one is me, with a solitary, averagely decent horse, or a Hungarian prince with a Derby winner, or the Queen, whose ecstatic reaction when she won the 2013 Ascot Gold Cup spoke directly to all owners. Or indeed Sheikh Fahad al-thani, a member of the Qatari Royal family who has made a significant entrée into racing over the past 10 years, and who – for all the millions that he has spent (4.5 million guineas on one filly alone in 2014; a guinea is equivalent to £1.05) – speaks about racehorses with an intimate, almost bewildered passion. ‘You can’t help but fall in love with them,’ he says. ‘The most magnificent animals. The feeling of being around them – the atmosphere of them – watching them gallop, race… You can’t really explain.’
And Newmarket, historically and spiritually, is the thoroughbred’s home, though it is not particularly beautiful. Frankly, it is above all that. What it has is a sense of purpose – more precious nowadays than beauty – unbroken and unchanged for some 350 years.
‘It is a town like no other,’ says Sheikh Fahad, who first visited in 2010, and now has a house there with his wife. ‘Because the horse comes first. It’s a completely different atmosphere from a place like Kentucky, where you have the town industry and the horse industry. Here, it’s not separate. You drive through the streets and there are stables hidden in every corner! It has a unique charm.’
The destiny of this ordinary little market town was formed by the great Heath that surrounds it: 2,800 acres of resilient and peculiarly taxing turf, unparalleled for the muscle development of the thoroughbred. Carved into that Heath are the two racecourses, the charmingly rustic July Course, and ‘the matchless Rowley Mile’ (as a 19thcentury racegoer described it), a vast wide straight that stages major races such as the Guineas.
The Heath also contains the network of gallops used to train the resident racehorse population of about 3,500. The most totemic, Warren Hill, is so named because in the early 17th century it was alive with rabbits. James I – the first of many monarchs to patronise Newmarket – discovered it to be a perfect coursing ground, and built a small palace there where he could escape affairs of state. This he did with such success that in 1612, 12 members of Parliament visited with a petition, asking him to return to London.
It was a hint at what was to come: from the Restoration until the late 18th century, Newmarket was a de facto alternative capital city. Its lure was irresistible. Charles II’S entire court would pile into carriages and decamp there, transporting tents for those without lodgings.
Indeed, it was Charles II who established Newmarket, once and for all, as the centre of racing. He gave it a symbolic national importance. Having endured the trials of his early years, he understood the importance of what was trivial, and became the sum of all wisdom about sport in this country.
In the 1660s, he built a replacement palace on the High Street, with, behind it, Palace House stables. The world’s oldest training yard, it was in use until the 1970s, and is now home to the National Horseracing Museum. The King sat at the top of Warren Hill in a special chair and watched his horses galloping towards him, their breath puffing white into the clear taut air, exactly as one does today. ‘Quite magical,’ as Sheikh Fahad says, ‘to be there in the morning, when a thousand horses are coming in and out of the gallops…’
Charles also inaugurated a race called the Town Plate, whose detailed conditions represent the first serious attempt by racing to regulate itself. It is still run every year for amateur riders. In 1666, it was won by the King himself; in 2016, Sheikh Fahad, then aged 27, emerged victorious, a remarkable achievement, since owners of that stature tend to let others do the riding.
‘Craziness!’ he says. ‘But I wanted to get the whole atmosphere. And it gave me so much respect for the riders – people see two minutes of a race, they think it looks quite easy… No. It was very, very difficult. I had to learn how to ride,
and I had to lose four, five stone – all within five or six months… but I was very adamant, very motivated to do it. I wanted to try to get inside racing.’
People in racing are in thrall to it: why, otherwise, would they do it? Take the jockey, the professional one. It is a wellnigh impossible life, even for the A-listers who do not have to scavenge for opportunities. Riding out on the gallops in the early morning; trying to sweat a precious couple of pounds from a body already pared down to the wire; driving to the races (helicopters are for the few, not the many); racing, telling owners what they want to hear, quite possibly racing at an evening meeting; getting home at the end of a day during which it is most likely that there has been no win; and not even the consolation of a decent dinner at the end of it all… Richard Hughes, now a trainer, formerly a brilliant jockey but almost six feet tall, once said that to get through the day, he would eat some cucumber with paprika on it, ‘for the heat’. I have never forgotten that.
A trainer’s life is hard, too. Again, there are the hours, the travelling, the demands of owners. It is hard work even if one is John Gosden or Michael Stoute, who inhabit two of the most splendid yards in Newmarket, and whose Group One victories are too numerous to list. But the town is also home to smaller yards – such as the one where After The Show was trained – that may be just as efficiently run, with wonderful dedicated stable staff, but with no multimillionaire owners to ensure that ends meet each month without straining.
Richard Spencer, who runs the fine Victorian establishment Sefton Lodge, is a private trainer to a British owner. This is a lucky situation, as he is all too aware. Winning with a two-year-old at Royal Ascot, as he did in 2017, also lifts some of the continual pressure, although it soon rebuilds, dealing as one is with these mysterious animals, who so rarely perform exactly as expected. (One could – for instance – mate a mare with immaculate bloodlines to a stallion that won several Group One races, and the progeny will struggle to be placed in a handicap at Yarmouth.) In other words, these horses can be controlled, up to a tantalising point; and it is that point – the fact we can own them and breed them and they can always elude us – that captivates the rich and powerful, just as it did the aristocrats who ran racing back in the 18th century. The thoroughbred is a constant challenge: it is, in the end, the one thing that cannot be commanded.
Spencer started out as an amateur jockey. ‘I had a lot of fun with it but it was never going to be a career,’ he says. A high point was riding, once, for the Queen: ‘I gave her a terrible ride on a horse called Handiwork. A friend of mine who works for her sent me a text saying, you should be put in the Tower…’ One day, riding at Warwick, ‘I got catapulted into the ground and broke my back. I couldn’t move for about 60 seconds – it was agony – before it wore off, and I ended up driving myself to hospital… I did three vertebrae.’ That fall, he says, was the reason he started training. ‘If it weren’t for that, I’d still be galloping around a grassy field pretending to be a jockey.’
Spencer worked as an assistant to the famously shrewd Barry Hills and, in Newmarket, to Michael Bell. Then he saw an advertisement for a private trainer to the owner Phil Cunningham. ‘Eighty other people applied for it, from what Phil told me, including quite a few well-known trainers. So I came for the interview, I was the first person he saw, and he offered me the job there and then.’
Invaluably to an businessman who, however well-off, is not in the mega-league of Qatar et al, Spencer has an eye for a yearling and is a clever buyer at the sales. ‘A lot of people look at the catalogues and say, “That’s a really nice page” – by which they mean the pedigree. Barry Hills says, “You can’t train the piece of paper, you have to train the horse.” They aren’t even two years old when you’re buying them – they’re about 19 months, so you have to envision what that horse is going to look like in the future.’ He prides himself on spotting a bargain. ‘We don’t like spending money on horses,’ says Spencer. ‘I was set a challenge: to buy five, and average 10,000 guineas a horse. I spent under 50,000 anyway – and they all won. Book 1 is so overpriced, and they’ll spend millions without even looking.’
‘Book 1’ is the premier sale at Tattersalls, a firm that began auctioning horses at Hyde Park Corner in 1766 (when the Prince Regent was an eager customer), then at Knightsbridge Green, and now occupies manicured premises at the heart of the bloodstock industry in Newmarket. All racehorses, by definition, are well-bred, but at the Book 1 sales, the blood is not merely blue, it is blazing ultramarine. This is an arena where, in 2019, a son of the most successful stallion in Britain – Sheikh Mohammed al-maktoum’s Dubawi – became the world’s highest-price yearling, selling for 3,600,000 guineas.
And Book 1 at Tattersalls is, more than anything, a piece of theatre, in which representatives of alpha-money square up to each other across the auction ring while, in the middle, the objects of their attention slope slowly round and round, baby haunches winking with the promise of power, heads occasionally raised in faint consternation. Outside, where the as-yet unsold yearlings circle the paddock
beneath the darkening autumn sky, one hears their whinnies catch at the air. There is something intolerably poignant about their ignorance of their own weighty value: these are the blessed ones, the ultimate products of thoroughbreeding, but they don’t know this about themselves. They simply parade the beauty of which they are unconscious. Here is something that defies analysis, the dual nature of these creatures, the fact that they have lineages that can be traced back 300 years, that their registered names will feature in databases and possibly on gilded lists, that they may achieve renown or even mythic status; and yet here they are, just young horses.
When After The Show retired, he stayed in Newmarket, where he still lives on a friend’s stud farm, a comfortable middle-aged gelding among preening equine gigolos. But I left, and no longer go racing. My goodness, though, how I loved it! Owners, perhaps more than anybody, are under its spell. The economics of the sport make that clear, as in my ludicrously small way I know. My horse won seven times and was placed in a third of his races: he should have paid his way. Alas, the truth is that because prize money in this country is so generally pitiful, most people who own racehorses are effectively accepting that they will be taking their money and pouring it down the drain.
Even at the top end, where the gains can be enormous, so too are the losses. How many of the horses who sell for seven-figure sums at Tattersalls become Group One winners? Sometimes the equations of thoroughbreeding produce the correct result. Often they do not. Not all Dubawis are worth that quarter of a million fee; how can they be?
Racing is a vast business with a profoundly flawed model, one that depends upon the willingness to give without demanding a return. Almost everybody in it is a gambler. And what compels almost all of them, as it so clearly does Sheikh Fahad, is the dream of the thoroughbred.
That is why the story of Newmarket is one of love over logic. Fabulous sums have been spent, countless races have been run, hope has been defeated over and over, and still people have come back for more, compelled – as I was for years – by something majestically and idiotically romantic.
Unlike Newmarket itself, which is simply getting on with the job. Although it is, in essence, the same place that it was 300 years ago, modernity is inevitably encroaching. Literally so, with the threat of a large-scale housing development – the project of the current Earl of Derby, whose ancestor’s famous stallion Hyperion is immortalised in statue form outside the Jockey Club – which would almost certainly destroy the sui generis eco-balance of a town made for horses.
A more subtle threat lies in the panicky desire of the racing authorities to demystify, when Newmarket is all about mystique. The closer one gets to it, the more inscrutable it becomes. This is not because it is striving for enigma; quite the opposite. It is always in the here and now, briskly accepting its own innate romance.
Newmarket has what almost nothing in the modern world is allowed to have: a future that is the same as its past. Will it continue to get away with it, and be left alone to do what it does best?
‘IT’S MAGICAL TO BE THERE IN THE MORNING, WHEN A THOUSAND HORSES ARE COMING IN AND OUT OF THE GALLOPS’