LAMMTARRA : OF LEGENDS AND WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN...

Click above to watch Lammtarra winning the 1995 Epsom Derby
(Image : Jockeysite - Footage : Sewageable)

LAMMTARRA (USA)
Nijinsky (CAN) - Snow Bride (USA)

Nicola HaywardAs I drove up the High Street in Newmarket the week before Christmas past, I tried to imagine how it might have looked early in 1904. It was difficult given the tarred road, beautiful Christmas lights and decorated storefronts - Marks & Spencer, Sainsburys, and French Connection filled with eager shoppers. Yet it was to 1904 that my mind returned, for that was when Signorina was booked to be covered by the Champion Isinglass. For a decade, the Oaks runner-up had failed to produce a foal and her owner, the Italian trainer Ginistrelli, followed on foot as she was led down the High Street for her planned assignation with Isinglass. On the way Chaleureux, a lowly stallion that was being used as a teaser, passed the aging mare. The two called to one another and refused to move apart and so, on a whim, Ginistrelli allowed his mare her ‘love match’. The result was the filly Signorinetta who in 1908 won the Epsom Derby and two days later the Oaks, a feat not accomplished since.

Myth or legend, it is one of the stories that Newmarket holds and was worthy of consideration. Of course, for one who loves the Thoroughbred, to be in the same country as Frankel, let alone to drive past the yard where he is stabled and trained, was very special. That an entire town can be dedicated to the horses that have for centuries made it their home, is quite remarkable. Bridleways crisscross the suburban roads allowing every animal to reach the gallops safely and the public happily accept that it should be so, as it always has.

Of course, one does not turn down a visit to Dalham Hall Stud. Even though a number of the stallions were on stud duty in Australia and South America, there was the chance to see the mighty Dubawi. A son of Dubai Millenium out of the Deploy mare Zomaradah, he has risen to star status. He won 5 of 8 starts and is a compact bull of a horse. Dubawi is all power and he knows it. His son Poet’s Voice, out of Bright Tiara (Chief’s Crown) was victorious in the 2011 G1 QEII Stakes and is a taller, more elegant horse than his sire. He is bay without white markings and has a beautiful head. He had let down very well and has a good book of mares waiting for his attention once the season begins. Both horses live in roomy stalls in the stallion block that overlooks the graveyard where the memorial to the great Dubai Millennium dwarfs all those around it. It takes one into the past - Singspiel, Machiavellian, Reference Point, Great Nephew…

Then, a woolly, muddy liver chestnut danced toward his stall and the world stopped turning.

Lammtarra.

By Nijinsky (Northern Dancer), out of Snow Bride (Blushing Groom), Lammtarra won his only outing as a two-year-old in 1994. His trainer Alex Scott was certain of classic success but then in a cruel twist of fate, an employee with a grievance shot and killed Scott. The colt was transferred to Godolphin, to Saeed Bin Suroor. Under Walter Swinburn, Lammtarra won The Derby in a time only bettered in 2010 by Workforce. Then under Frankie Detorri he took the King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Stakes and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe before being retired to stud unbeaten in four starts. His pedigree was impeccable - by a Derby winner out of an Oaks winner - and his record faultless. Yet at stud he was a failure. He covered one season at Dalham Hall before being sold to Japan for $30,000,000. Eventually, in 2006, Sheikh Mohammed bought him back and he returned to Dalham Hall to live out his days in retirement.

Do yourself a favour and watch his Derby win above courtesy of YouTube and you will see why it was he more than any other that made my heart soar. It was an old, sprightly gentleman who danced and squealed as his groom led him in who made me smile. It was a Champion now past his prime that made me wonder what if? Why not? And ask the question what might have been…

MICHAEL ROBERTS : A CHAMPION SPEAKS

Champion Jockey Michael Roberts
(Image : Marlirka)

A CHAMPION SPEAKS

In the immediate aftermath of Frankel’s stunning victory in the Sussex Stakes (Gr1) at Goodwood UK, on Wednesday, champion trainer Henry Cecil glowed that he was the best racehorse he’d known. He said he’d witnessed the great miler, Blushing Groom and the herculean efforts of Shergar, but he wasn’t around for the great match races between Tudor Minstrel and the best of his era. In his view, Frankel surpasses the lot, and he wasn’t surprised by his 5 length margin of victory (over a horse who was going for his third consecutive Group One).

Eleven-times champion South African jockey, Michael Roberts, who also taught the British to ride when he won their championship in 1989, reflected at dinner Thursday evening on Frankel’s performance, and remembered the other top class front runners of years gone by, Reference Point and Slip Anchor (both of whom won the English Derby end-to-end), and his thoughts were simple. The difference between those horses, as effective as they were and Frankel, is that they simply ground their opposition down, while Frankel does that ambling along on the front end, and then he finds gear-after-gear. He doubts he’s ever seen anything comparable himself, and he’s been around a few.

"LEGEND". NO OTHER WAY OF DESCRIBING GRAHAM BECK

Mick and Cheryl Goss with Graham Beck and Laurie Jaffee in Dubai
(Photo : Summerhill Archives)

GRAHAM BECK
1929 - 2010

Mick Goss
Summerhill StudThe word “legend” is a much abused word in racing, or anywhere else for that matter. But in Graham Beck, here was the real life embodiment of the coinage.

What else can one say about a man whose passing has made all of the national news headlines, that hasn’t already been said. Descriptions that race to mind are “bigger than life”; overt generosity; an infectious, guttural sense of humour; a streetwiseness of uncanny proportions, and an enormous capacity for making others feel warm, wanted and, critically, worthy.

South African racing in general and the Jewry of Johannesburg in particular were once blessed with the “Three Musketeers”, Graham Beck, Cyril Hurwitz and Laurie Jaffee, now all passed on, and presumably, in the Elysian Fields. We say “presumably”, because they could at times be wickedly naughty, all three of them, and we’re not quite sure what the test is for entry to this apparent paradise. What we do know though, is that whatever the verdict on the first to go, (Cyril), it would’ve been the same for the other two, so the one assurance we do have is that they’re now together, and they’re probably looking down on us wondering whether we’ll see their like again. For my money, that’s c’est non possible. And you’d have to ask yourself, whether the makers of J&B have a factory big enough up there.

How do we place this man into perspective? In racing terms, he was a colossus, one of the greatest and most benevolent owners the game has ever known. Three things stand out for me in particular, not that they were necessarily, by any stretch, momentous in his life. The first involved the purchase of my first filly off the track from Graham, in a private transaction in his office. Given his stature and my own relative insignificance at 27, he couldn’t have been more accommodating, in what could’ve been frighteningly intimidating.

The second involved his purchase of Gainesway Farm. I happened to be representing the TBA on a trip to Kentucky, when I attended the Breeders Cup meeting. Just the day before, I made the acquaintance of a fellow solicitor, a Mr. Bishop who was counsel to one of the two greatest stallion stations in the world, Claiborne Farm; the grapevine, he said, was that a South African had purchased Gainesway, the other of the two great stallion stations. This was astounding news given that it was 1989, and that no South African had ever made such a splash in the bloodstock world.

The following day, Graham asked me to join him at his table at the Breeders Cup itself, there beside us was the founder, John Gaines himself, as cultured and intelligent a man as I’ve had the pleasure to know in racing. In that instant, Graham Beck had acquired the gigantic likes of Lyphard, Blushing Groom, Riverman, Vaguely Noble, Irish River etc, some of the noblest names of all thoroughbred breeding, and South Africa had “arrived”.

Henceforth, and for some time, Graham Beck would be Kentucky’s most favoured dinner guest, and his legacy at Gainesway today is one of the most beautiful farms on the planet. As a farmer myself, I should use this moment to applaud his stewardship of the land. That is his, and his lovely lady, Rhona’s signature, wherever they have invested.

The third instant reflected his own international standing in the thoroughbred world. I was in Dubai for the inaugural World Cup, and I received a distressed message from Graham’s office in Johannesburg, enquiring whether I could intervene in getting his private aircraft which was already in flight into Dubai. His sin was that he was Jewish himself, and that his aircraft had been to Israel on its journey to Dubai. Given the difficulties Israel and its Middle Eastern neighbours have experienced over the decades, aircraft emanating from there were not always welcome.

There was no one bigger in the thoroughbred world at that time than Sheikh Mohammed, and there was no-one more capable of influencing events in the Middle East than him. Within an hour, the big plane was not only welcome, but Sheikh Mohammed attended personally at the airport to fetch Graham.

In every material respect, Graham Beck was an enormous man, big in personality, big in generosity, massive in his contributions to our game, and in the lives he touched. At Summerhill, his Highlands Farm was our biggest competitor, and no-one competed “better” than he did.

Rest in peace, old pal. Your life has been hectic, and you deserve it.

WORDS WITH A SAGE

J&B MET 2010
GRAHAM BECK AND ANTONY BECK

For a man who had little in the way of a “horsey” background, Graham Beck has had a remarkable association with great horses. He was telling me on Saturday that he kicked off with a R42 000 buy in Big Swinger (a multiple Graded Stakes winner), but it’s mainly for his stallions that this el padrino of our game will always be remembered. Persian Wonder, Elevation, Harry Hotspur, Jungle Cove, Lords, Badgerland, National Assembly and Jallad rush to the mind in local parlance alone, and while these include several South African Champion sires, we mustn’t forget, this is a man who’s been associated with some of the greatest stallions in history.

His acquisition of the famed Gainesway Farm in the United States from the founding father of the Breeders Cup, John Gaines, included at the time some of racing’s greatest names, Blushing Groom, Vaguely Noble, Riverman, and Lyphard and through modern day associations, extends to Unbridled and the current “big hiters”, Tapit and Birdstone.

It must be ten years or more since we saw Graham’s son Antony at the races in South Africa. Now the master of Gainesway himself, his respect extends throughout the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and he sits on both the Breeders Cup and Keeneland Association boards. As the owner of one of the most beautiful stud properties in the world, it was reassuring from a Summerhill perspective to have Antony remind us again, that most of what he knows, he learnt from Summerhill, and that this farm, for its systems and practices, could hold its own with the best in America. Pity he doesn’t come home more often.

LEADING 2009 NORTHERN HEMISPHERE BROODMARE SIRES

Kingmambo
(Photo : Thoroughbred Times)

LEADING BROODMARE SIRES OF
2009 NORTHERN HEMISPHERE GRADE/GROUP1 WINNERS

Stallion	Sire	Winners
KINGMAMBO	Mr Prospector	5
RAINBOW QUEST	Blushing Groom	4
SADLER’S WELLS	Northern Dancer	4
SEEKING THE GOLD	Mr Prospector	4
KRIS	Sharpen Up	3
MR PROSPECTOR	Raise A Native	3
STORM BIRD	Northern Dancer	3

CORRECT AS AT 14 NOVEMBER 2009