ONE FOR THE ROAD

Click above to remember Pat Goss Snr’s victory in the 1946 Durban July with St Pauls
(Images : Summerhill Stud Archives)

“One horse he’d say, that’s all it takes.”

Mick Goss
Summerhill CEOPat Goss Snr was an unusual man. Firstly, in a family in which there was an anticipation you’d either be a devout Catholic or a confirmed alcoholic, he was neither. In fact, he was a tee-totaller, an enterprising man, a consummate stockman and a devotee, if ever there was one, of the affairs of the turf.

Secondly, he was the first, and as it turns out, the only, Pondo trader ever to own a Durban July winner. His love of the game was rewarded in 1946 when St Pauls led home a procession in record time from the outside draw. I wasn’t around then, but my forebears earned their place in history when this graduate of Pony and Galloway handicaps became the smallest winner in the annals of the continent’s greatest horse race. When Pat Goss wanted to emphasise a point to a press man or a racing man, he would squeeze his forearm in a gesture of sincerity. Pat was never short of hope and “as long as you are hoping, you’ve got a chance”. Then he’d grab the forearm again, and become a little fatherly. One horse he’d say, that’s all it takes.

His addiction to the ponies was not surprising. The Gosses have had an affinity for them dating back to the Battle of the Boyne when they fought alongside the Maguires, the former kings of Ireland. At the same battle, one of the founders of the thoroughbred breed as we know it, the Byerley Turk, took the field as Captain Robert Byerley’s charge, having been captured in the East at the battle of Buda in 1689. Just last week, we were reminded of this history by one of our Irish relatives, Andy Goss, who sent pictures of the home from whence the original settler, Michael Goss went forth on his way to South Africa in 1820. I’m lucky to have this intrepid man’s name.

In an episode which exemplified for me as I grew up, that Pat Goss was a man with a love for the game, it was the story about Giant, who cut his teeth on the humble circuits of Eastern Cape country racing. Giant grew up in the shadow of the First World War and the greatest depression the world has known, and he used to walk from my grandfather’s base in Lusikisiki to his next engagement. One of my most cherished memories growing up, was a photograph of Nelson Mandela’s mentor, Oliver Tambo (for whom Africa’s biggest international airport is named today) saddling my grandfather’s entry for the Bizana Cup, as a barefooted teenager.

Giant was no ordinary horse, but as a youngster he was certainly what the Aussies would describe as an “ornery” fellow. My grandfather rescued him as a two-year-old, when he was down to be shot on a neighbouring spread, if he’d only stand still for long enough. A big, fractious lump of a bay with a hunter’s head, he was running wild on the stockman’s property, but he must’ve been handled at least once, because he’d been gelded. No-one could catch him, and he was rumoured to be feral. The truth though, was that he was a grandson of the 1911 Durban July winner, Nobleman. An old strapper called Ndhlebende broke him in, and it was a riotous affair. His handler was a dyed-in-the-wool horseman though, and the horse soon settled. With time, he took a liking to racing, and it’s said he liked his groom, too.

Giant would set out fully a week before the next big meeting on foot, Ndhlebende on board, and by the time he arrived, he was “ready-to-run”. This was a foot soldier in the real sense, reputed to have walked more than 1600 miles during his career to these bush meetings, where he was something of a legend, not only for the distances he covered, but for the silver he took home. Pat Goss rewarded him for his exploits with a crack at the big time. It’s something of a fairy-tale that he wound up earning a cheque in Extinguisher’s 1938 Durban July. This man stood on the shoulders of giants.

Size never deterred Pat Goss, though it might have affected his judgment. St Pauls’ size (or rather the lack of it) prompted Pat to start him out in a maiden at a village meet near Kokstad. His trainer was a 76-year-old father of 13, and Duggie Talbot, as dapper as he might’ve been in the Durban Turf Club parade ring, was the owner of a badly scuffed float, which had been sighted carting horses to race tracks from Matatiele to Mthathta. Here was a battler since his first race ride in 1918, when General Botha was still Prime Minister, and Pamphlet won the first of his two Durban Julys.

Talbot was a little man with twinkling blue eyes, rosy cheeks and the cocky air of a bantam rooster. He had a rolling gait and a falsetto voice which people liked to imitate. The voice was somehow right: part of him would always be a little boy, full of hope and derring-do. Another part of him was granite hard: he knew the world would stomp all over you, if you lay down or showed fear.

He was like a man before his tenth birthday; he’d grown up on the Western plains of the Karoo, red dust, clay pans that gave off a hard white light, hardly a tree. He lived in a slab hut with an earthen floor, and rooms divided off by chaff bags, sewn together with baling twine. Kerosene lamps provided little pools of light. Before Talbot was ten, he was working the scoop behind a team of draught oxen, killing sheep for the butcher, breaking in horses and carting water. And here he was now, handling a live candidate for the Durban July. One horse, that’s all it took.

I was prompted to recall these stories about my grandfather by a letter received from a Hartford House visitor last week. Norman Herring is an old mate and a mine of information about the old days in East Griqualand, where my grandfather had his farm. Pat’s “home” racecourses, besides those in Pondoland, were Matatiele, Cedarville and Kokstad. Getting to any of these places from the farm was a mission, as he used to go by horse and buggy, like most of his neighbours. Coming home in the twilight one day with some forty miles to travel, he found himself alongside Alex Macdonald (father of the famous Springbok polo player, Doug Macdonald). I told you at the beginning that Pat Goss was a teetotaller, but that wasn’t the case with old man Macdonald. When they reached Alex’s farm, The Meads, Pat found his travelling companion fast asleep on his buggy, and if the truth be told, his faithful horse had probably brought his comatose corpse most of the way, without him even knowing it.

So as to ensure that the buggy did not stray too far with its precious cargo, Pat only outspanned the horse, walked him through the farm gate, passed the buggy’s disselboom through the fence, and inspanned the horse on the other side. And then went on his way.

Moral of the story. Don’t drink and drive.

MAINGARD'S MAGIC

Ricky Maingard with Ice Axe - Phoenix Maiden Cup (Gr1)
(Photos : Mauritius Turf Club)

THE PHOENIX MAIDEN CUP Gr1
Champ de Mars, Turf, 2400m
2 September 2012

There’s no blue-blooded South African racing fan who doesn’t remember Wolf Power, and the fact that Ricky Maingard, an engineer by profession and a one-time motoring executive with Peugeot by trade, was the man that fashioned him into one of the world’s most formidable milers. On Sunday, at Champ de Mars racecourse in the heart of the capital city of Mauritius, Port Louis, Maingard’s considerable skills as a racehorse conditioner were highlighted once again with the victory of Ice Axe in the islands’ greatest horserace, the Maiden Cup (Gr.1). But before we describe Ice Axe’s famous victory in more detail, it’s worth dwelling for a moment on Maingard’s beginnings as a racehorse trainer.

At that time, he was living in a little-known Midrand suburb called Glen Furness, and living as he did some distance from a racecourse, without the ample means to transport his horses daily to and from a training track, Maingard persuaded his neighbours into allowing him to work his horses across their seven acre plot of land. We know this, because one of his neighbours was Pat Goss, one of the co-founders of the Summerhill Stud we know today. It wasn’t long before he made his mark, and he did so in great style with a succession of the country’s top fillies. Run For Lily was a champion, Rhapsody’s Footstep and Fairy Ring were not far behind, and then came Dancer’s Choice, who ran Olympic Duel to a length in the Fillies Guineas. It wasn’t long before the country’s top owners were clamouring for Maingard’s services, and he was quickly in a position to buy himself Wolf Power, the best juvenile prospect in the land. Maingard was an all-rounder though, capable of training them short and long, and his tally of winners included several victories in the country’s number one sprint at the time, The Gilbey’s, The Rothman’s July and the Gold Cup, from 1200m to 3200m.

That age has not wearied him, was evident on Sunday when Ice Axe proved emphatically that he was this year’s Mauritian Horse Of The Year. Though Ice Axe was unbeaten to date, including two victories over the country’s top horse, Il Saggiatore, it was widely expected (and his odds-on status in the betting endorsed it), that with a 3kg pull at the weights and a change of pilot, Il Saggiatore would prevail. Those of you that read our column last week, might’ve been persuaded to take the odds on Ice Axe, and you would have been an even wealthier punter by Monday morning. Despite the presence in the field at the racecourse founded in 1812 by Sir Robert Farquhar, of three candidates from the powerful Gujadhur stable, Ice Axe was always travelling like a winner. There was a moment though, with about 800m to go, when it looked like he might be out-manoeuvred, as the three Gujadhur entries surrounded him, one immediately in front of him, one just to his outside and the favourite creeping up behind that one, while Ice Axe had the rail on his inside to prevent him from going anywhere unless something fluffed its lines. The tiniest of gaps opened as they turned for home, by which time Il Saggiatore had poached a precious lead, and seemed set for home. Ice Axe rallied gamely, and finding the greater acceleration, he raced away from the son of Galileo, who himself had just celebrated a world-record ten stakes winners in a week.

This victory provides the winner’s Northern Guest-dam with her second winner at the highest level, his half-sister Icy Air having swept everything before her in the 3-year-old division of her year. His granddam, a daughter of the great French classic sire, Luthier, was a purchase at the Nelson Bunker Hunt dispersal sale in 1988, and she has since given us, through her daughters, not only these two accomplished performers, but also the champion stayer, Amphitheathre. The Hunts were famed for their monopolisation of the silver trade, but following an attempt to corner that market, Bunker Hunt was forced to disperse his enormous thoroughbred empire after five years as the Eclipse Award Breeder of America.

It was a good weekend for staying products of both Summerhill and the Emperors Palace Ready To Run programme, Ice Axe being a R425,000 graduate of that sale in his own right, and the R70,000 purchase, Winning Leap, galloping away with Turffontein’s top biller, the Emerald Cup Pinnacle Stakes on Saturday. The Dominic Zaki trainee hails from yet another fortuitous raid on the international bloodstock markets, this time for a mare called Karafa, whom we purchased from the Aga Khan, and who hails from the immediate family of the great stallions Nasrullah, Royal Charger and Kalamoun. Already a victor in Johannesburg’s top staying race, the Gold Bowl (Gr.2), Winning Leap raced back to form here at the expense of a competitive line-up of Gauteng’s top-line stayers.

Before we leave the Champ de Mars finally, it’s worth recalling a couple of interesting oddities about its history. At 200 years this year, it is the oldest racing club in the Southern Hemisphere, and the third in the world. Sir Robert Farquhar was the inaugural governor of the island after its capture by Britain from France in 1810, and the course was used as a post-war means of securing the “esteem and collaboration of the local French population”, by providing them with the entertainment of horseracing. A street runs through the course between the grandstand and the racetrack, which is in normal everyday use, except for racedays, of course. The street is named for the Duke Of York, and the raceday experience has echoes of a Greyville meeting of thirty years ago. There are more than forty bookmakers on course, and their designated area across the way from the main stand is a beehive of activity.

Despite the humid tropical climate, entry into the VIP areas is “tight” and suits are the prescribed form of dress. You daren’t remove your jacket in the Steward’s Lounge, for fear of sanction. The parade ring resembles a medieval theatre, surrounded as it is by a public stand on one side, and by four levels of private boxes on two sides. It has the feel of a Mediterranean courtyard, with flowering geraniums hanging from flower boxes on all sides. The right-handed track is notoriously tight, with a circumference of only 1298m (which means the Maiden Cup almost completes two circuits), and a straight of only 225m. That means you have to have an ability to navigate the sharp turns, as well as finding a scorching turn of foot.

At Sunday’s meeting, there would have been close to 40,000 in attendance, with the infield jam-packed with spectators using the tarred surface of the Duke Of York Avenue as a jumping castle, in their attempts at seeing over the heads of those in front of them, while others enshroud the tops of the surrounding hills looking down on the course.

For more information, please visit :

www.mauritiusturfclub.com

NORTHERN GUEST : THE BLOOD OF AGES

Northern Guest (Inset - as a foal)
(Photos : Summerhill Stud Archives)

NORTHERN GUEST (USA)
Northern Dancer (CAN) - Sex Appeal (USA)

Mike Moon
Tab NewsNorthern Guest’s 10th Broodmare Sire of the Year title was an outstanding achievement of the past racing season. It’s a modern-day world record, eclipsing even the nine titles of legendary USA broodmare sire Mr Prospector.

Northern Guest never set hoof on a racecourse, yet he made a titanic contribution to the racing game in South Africa.

He was well named for his role in life, being from the Northern Hemisphere and taking up residence in the South. But he was much more than a visitor. He founded a thoroughbred dynasty and his name will live on for decades, thanks to a happy knack of fathering superb daughters who, in their turn, produced champion horses. Golden Apple, the dam of 2012 Vodacom Durban July winner Pomodoro, is a daughter of Northern Guest. The great international sprinter JJ The Jet Plane is out of Mystery Guest, another of his daughters.

Not that the colts were bad - they include Angus, Senor Santa and Spook And Diesel, to name a few.

It’s often said that the performance of a stallion makes or breaks a stud farm and there is no disputing Northern Guest was the making of Summerhill Stud in the KZN Midlands.

Summerhill claimed an eighth successive Champion Stud trophy at the Equus Awards ceremony earlier this month. In the same 2011-12 season Northern Guest won an unprecedented 10th Broodmare Sire of the Year title.

Summerhill boss Mick Goss makes no bones about who he and his team have to thank for their bounty.

“Look around you at Summerhill… and you won’t find a windowpane, a pebble in the tarmac or a piece of roof sheeting that Northern Guest didn’t contribute to,” writes Goss on his website.

If Northern Guest built a farm, he also contributed large building blocks to the edifice that is South African racing today. His influence is everywhere in the game, his blood flowing in many of its protagonists.

Goss brought one of the great thoroughbred pedigrees of the world to South Africa, being a son of Northern Dancer - the world’s greatest sire of the 20th century - out of the blue hen Sex Appeal.

Other aspects of Northern Guest’s beginnings were auspicious. He was bred by EP Taylor, the Canadian who bred Northern Dancer himself. Businessman Taylor was recruited by Winston Churchill to co-ordinate Britain’s World War II supplies from North America. After the war he crafted a multi-faceted corporate empire and notably built Carling Black Label into the most ubiquitous beer brand in the world. An avid racing man, Taylor reshaped the game in Canada, consolidating small tracks in Ontario into a profitable industry focused on fewer venues and better horses. He stood Northern Dancer in the USA and top mare Sex Appeal was sent to him three times. She produced Try My Best, European champion two-year-old, Northern Guest and El Gran Senor, the highest-rated horse in the world in this three-year-old year.

Northern Guest grabbed headlines early when his blue blood saw him become the first horse to be sold for $1-million. He was just five weeks old. Ireland’s Coolmore team bought him and sent him to legendary trainer Vincent O’Brien. But Northern Guest would never be tested in a race. On the Ballydoyle gallops one day he crashed into a fence and a wood splinter skewered his foot. The wound healed badly and he limped for the rest of his life.

In the early 1980s brothers Mick and Pat Goss were trying to make a go of Summerhill, a small stud near Mooi River. Mick had given up a thriving legal practice in Durban to pursue his obsession, while Pat was keeping his hand in as an accountant.

Deciding they needed a top-class foundation mare, the Goss brothers spotted a likely candidate on the UK’s Newmarket December 1982 sale called Maroon and belonging to Queen Elizabeth II. Heavily in debt, the brothers borrowed more money to meet the £30,000 estimated price and jetted off to England.

Having bought Maroon, Mick and Pat took a trip to their ancestral homeland of Ireland, where they ended up visiting Coolmore’s Longfields farm. Stud master Tommy Stack, a former champion jumps jockey and pilot of Red Rum in his third Grand National victory, paraded before them Hello Gorgeous, a promising sire at the time.

“Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a horse being led past,” recalls Mick. “I turned and had a look, and he took my breath away! He had the look of eagles. Spectacular. Who the hell was this?” Stack replied: “Northern Guest. Not for sale.”

But the Goss brothers would not be denied. They secured him for £200,000 - money they did not have and had no further credit line for.

“I was worried, but my brother - the accountant, the conservative one - said, “Don’t worry, we’ll syndicate him on the plane home.”

The target group of South African breeders on the plane returning from the Newmarket sale didn’t bite. Despite the horse’s pedigree, they curiously didn’t see benefit.

The brothers were stuck with a R400,000 headache, the landed costs of an expensive stallion. In today’s money, it would be more than 10 times that amount.

The 12 weeks it took for exchange control permission bought time. They came up with Plan B, a black-tie dinner at Durban Country Club for all the moneyed people they knew. Tommy Stack volunteered to fly out to help secure the syndication - and delivered a compelling speech at the do. It worked. Northern Guest was over-subscribed; the deal was done.

But the solution brought its own problem. Many of the new owners were not established breeders or even racing people and bought Northern Guest many sub-standard mares. Nay-sayers began writing off the stallion and the farm. To save its investment Summerhill started buying shares whenever it could afford them and within two years had a 70% stake. But the prospects for the early crops were not good and negative perceptions for a stallion are a kiss of death. But few people reckoned on just how good Northern Guest was at his job.

He’d left behind two dozen foals in Ireland. He never stood there commercially, with Coolmore not wanting to compete with his brother Try My Best who had a stellar racing record to market. Northern Guest’s Irish offspring were the result of coverings for friends and employees, all with mares of little account. That Irish handful produced five stakes winners - at a world-class 20% strike rate.

The first South African crop was not earth-shattering, the star being the excellent Naval Guest, winner of the Champion Stakes. But the second crop was another story: Senor Santa, 15 wins and five Grade 1 titles; Northern Princess, nine wins including the November Handicap; Gentleman Jones, seven wins including the Administrator’s Handicap; Rip Curl, five wins, and Target Five, nine wins, saw their dad on his way to fame and glory.

Northern Guest secured three Champion Sire titles in the 1980s on the back of these and subsequent brilliant horses. There were also two Champion Two-Year-Old Sire gongs. When the first award was collected, a dying EP Taylor sent Mick a photograph of Northern Guest, taken on that day in 1977 when the foal went for a million.

Good horses kept coming - Gun Drift, Northern Flame, Unaware, Spook And Diesel, Levendi, Royal Thunder, Dangerous Donald and Dance Every Dance among them.

Travel North won the 1994 SA Derby, Imperious Sue the 1997 J&B Met and Angus the 2002 J&B Met.

Northern Guest’s legend was secured among racegoers with the famous match race on New Year’s Day 1989 between his daughter Northern Princess and his son Senor Santa. The Germiston contest followed a dispute over Senor Santa being eliminated from the 1600m November Handicap on the argument that he would not stay the distance. Great jockeyship from Michael Roberts saw Northern Princess narrowly prevail. A year later, Senor Santa won the FNB Stakes over the gruelling Turffontein 1600m.

Northern Guest was extremely fertile into his old age and was still successfully covering mares in his mid-20s.

Fatefully, both his illustrious full brothers, Try My Best and El Gran Senor, proved low on fertility.

Several big-money offers came from overseas for the champion but Summerhill was prevented from cashing in for various reasons - the farm profiting in stature rather than cash.

Mick recalls Northern Guest having a “wonderful, wonderful temperament, which became a hallmark of the tribe”.

Consistent quality was another stamp. The daughters were particularly striking, with notable femininity and fertility. Even smaller specimens had good carrying room as broodmares and all were caring mothers.

They produced Bold Ellinore, Emperor Napoleon, Icy Air, Art of War, Vangelis, Amphitheatre and hundreds more.

Mick is fond of telling the story of how Northern Guest, on his way from barn to paddock each day, would stop outside the stud office and survey the farm scenery. Management staff would adjourn their morning meeting to go out on to the balcony and pay homage to their great benefactor. “He’d never look at us, just gaze out at the paddocks. And we’d stand cap in hand.”

Mick believes the stallion gave the whole Mooi River district a boost. With scores of mares coming in to visit the champion, a number of boarding farms sprang up nearby, many of which have endured, providing much-needed employment.

Northern Guest died at Summerhill in 2002 at the age of 25.

“He was the stallion of a lifetime,” reflects Mick. “Every breeder is looking for the next outstanding sire, but perhaps us more so now that we’ve seen the top of the mountain.”

Extract from Tab Online

THE DURBAN JULY : A CITY'S REFERENCE POINT

“THE DURBAN JULY”

Mick Goss
Summerhill Stud CEOLong ago, before Ben Hur won the first Interdominion, the philosopher Diogenes envisioned a race as big as the Durban July. Clothed under various sponsor’s mantles since its inception in 1897, the great race is to Durbanites what the Melbourne Cup is to Melbourne.

For any self-respecting citizen of Durban, the July is a reference point. A few wounded, fresh returned from the nightmare of Delville Wood, limped around Greyville to see Pamphlet blast home in 1918. The year after the Second World War, the hero named for the cathedral which survived the “blitz”, St Pauls kicked the butt of Moscow, just as the Allies realised they’d licked Hitler, only to inherit Stalin. In 1966, the race was “robbed” of one of its most famous sons, Sea Cottage, through the treachery of a gunman’s bullet. In the same year, an assassin delivered a similar fate to apartheid’s principal architect, the Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd.

Yet it’s hard to explain the July to an outsider. The English and Kentucky Derbies are about the supremacy of genes and the buying power of the ruling classes. The public is allowed to join in for the crowd scenes. The best colt usually wins and is hurried off to stud for fear of losing his value.

Our July is quirky. Got up by the people, for the people. A cross between a horse race and a folk festival. It mocks convention because it’s a handicap, which means the outcome is not preordained. One of the cherished pieces of Durban’s folklore is that any battler can win the July. And a few have, though fewer than mythology allows. In 1977, Dessie Rich, a struggling dairy farmer from our village, turned history on its head with Lightning Shot. The stewards invited him to the committee lounge for a drink. “Thanks,” he said, but he had to rush home to milk the cows.

For the past 116 years, the Durban Turf Club has hosted “Africa’s greatest horserace” on the first Saturday in July. The Birch Bros of Doordrecht, who dominated the national breeding scene for almost half of the last century, produced six of its winners. We rank second, with four that’ve have tasted the green, green grass of home.

Which brings us back to St Pauls. The July was different in 1946, the first time the crowd numbered more than 100,000. These days, horses fly in for the contest with a personal dietician. St Pauls came by train with cattle and sheep, and they unloaded first. He was the pride of Pat Goss, a former stock inspector, who, like some of us, was quite at home with a pair of sheep shears in his hands. And that’s the part that tickles us. In Mooi River, a sheep shearer has always been thought as good as a Sheikh. Better really, because a Sheikh isn’t much use if your merinos need a clip. Mowgli, who was trained from the end box of the Hartford yard, as most of our top horses of that era were, was one of the all-time greats of the South African turf. He may even have been the greatest if it weren’t for a wind affliction which plagued him to death, literally in the end. When he settled the July field in ‘52, he collapsed within yards of passing the post. Minutes later, he rose, Lazarus on four legs, and walked away. Here finally, was proof that racing exists mainly to remind us of our fallibility. Here was the horse that took the round-they-go-again sameness out of the sport. Here was the horse who gave us not one, but ten undying moments.

Mowgli dominated the 50s the way Mohammed Ali dominated the heavyweights in the 1970s, and the analogy is not meant to be trite. Mowgli was that rare thing: a natural. He made the hard things look easy, the mundane look graceful. The qualities which, in any sport, separate the gifted from the sloggers.

Racing is good sport. It is great sport when you see an Igugu and a Pierre Jourdan in full flight down the Greyville straight, tooth-and-nail for the biggest prize in racing. It isn’t always good business, but when you win the July, it most certainly is. Racing is a way of living, and a way of thinking. It has its own language and its own humour. It is loaded with danger, physical and financial, and it comes with a hint of conspiracy. It doesn’t necessarily build character, but it throws up some great characters. Igugu is trained by one of them. Mike de Kock is the man everyone wants to know. He’s become the idol of a social set to which he never belonged, and to which, you suspect, he never wanted to belong. De Kock knows the rich and famous, he has himself become rich and famous. Yet fame has not changed him, not outwardly anyway. He doesn’t conform. He can’t; he isn’t like anyone else.

When de Kock entered the Summerhill box after the July, we asked him if he’d like a drink. “Or is that a silly question?” It was a silly question.

The above is an extract from the 2012/2013 Summerhill Sires Brochure to be released soon. Are you on our mailing list?

Enquiries :
Linda Norval 27 (0) 33 263 1081
or email linda@summerhill.co.za
www.summerhill.co.za

ONE HORSE : THAT'S ALL IT TAKES

Please click above for a little racing nostalgia from 1946.
The presentation can be paused at any point using the navigation controls, bottom left.
It can be viewed full-screen by clicking the view button, bottom right.

(Photos : Summerhill Stud Archive)

“One horse can change everything.”

Mick Goss
Summerhill Stud CEOSuccess on the turf often has unpretentious beginnings. That’s part of the daydream that still tempts young people to persist with the prickly beast with bad legs that cost him a few thousand Rands, and arrived with a patched-up headstall and a torn rug. They remember the folklore, and are comforted by it. We should not be sniffy about these fantasies: racing runs on them. One horse can change everything.

The late great Sydney Laird trained seven “July” winners, more than any other man in history, yet for him the one that changed everything, that set him up for life, was probably the weakest of them. Kerason last-gasped the July at 40 to 1 in the 1961 edition, and everyone knew then that Syd had learnt his lessons well. He came up under the watchful eye of his uncle, the immortal Syd Garrett, and the ink under Left Wing’s name in 1960 (Garrett’s last July winner) was scarcely dry, when his apprentice handed the master a lesson in the art in what was his first year as a professional. I once asked an aging Syd over breakfast, whether the rumours about his tossing it in, were true. “I’ve got a number of youngsters in the yard, and nobody ever jumped from the top floor while he still had an unraced juvenile in his care”. That was Syd. Herman Brown Snr remembers Gatecrasher, while David Payne will tell you, his “one horse” was undoubtedly In Full Flight. Just one horse.

“Dynasty” is a word reserved for famous successions, and in the world of racehorses, we have our share. Syd Laird’s son, Alec, was fired up by London News, his champion trainer cousin, Charles by Novenna, while Dennis Drier, another scion of this “manure-in-the-footsteps” family, says it was Sea Cottage. They all suffer from the disease for which there is no cure, and it’s all because of one horse.

Mike de Kock, who trained Horse Chestnut (the best horse since Sea Cottage,) and Igugu (the best since Horse Chestnut,) would surprise you that his jolt came not from those two, but from Evening Mist, who delivered up his first Group One, and gave notice to the world that here was a young man capable of filling the ample boots of his mentor, Ricky Howard-Ginsberg. De Kock has trained 87 Group One winners, and while he isn’t that sentimental about horses, you knew that Evening Mist was the one horse who’d wriggled her way into his heart. One horse.

For my own part, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the horse that got my juices going, had to be St Pauls, diminutive winner of the 1946 Durban July for my grandfather, Pat Goss. I wasn’t around then, but my forebears earned their place in history when this graduate of Pony & Galloway handicaps (reserved for horses under 15 hands) became the smallest winner in the annals of Africa’s greatest horse race, from draw 20. I remember making a collect call during my military training in 1969, when the operator, as he was wont to do, asked for my name. When I volunteered it, he enquired whether I was related to the “St Pauls” Gosses? The operator was one Nic Claasen, in his reincarnation one of those indestructible characters of the South African turf, a man inspired by the money he’d made on St Pauls to become a racehorse trainer. Later in life, when old Nic wanted to emphasize a point to a television presenter, he would grab his forearm and squeeze it in a gesture of sincerity. Nic was never short of hope, and “for as long as you’re hoping, you’ve got a chance”. Then he’d grab the forearm again, and become a little fatherly. “One horse”, he used to say, “that’s all it takes”.

But for me it wasn’t St Pauls. For me it was a horse called Dan, who cut his teeth on the humble circuits of Eastern Cape country racing. Dan grew up in the shadow of the First World War and the greatest Depression the world has known, and he used to walk from my grandfather’s base near Lusikiki to his next engagement. One of my most cherished memories growing up, was a photograph of the erstwhile mentor to Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo (yes, the man after whom Africa’s biggest international airport is now named), saddling my grandfather’s entry for the Bizana Cup, as a bare-footed twelve-year-old.

Dan was no ordinary horse, and there was no ordinary transport to take him to his next assignment. Not that it would’ve helped. Pat Goss rescued him as a two year old, when he was down to be shot on a neighbouring spread, if he would only stand still for long enough. A big, fractious lump of a bay with a hunter’s head, he was running wild on the stockman’s property, but he must’ve been handled at least once because he’d been gelded. No-one could catch him, and he was rumoured to be feral. The truth though, is he was a grandson of the 1911 July winner, Nobleman. An old strapper called Ndhlebende broke him in, and it was a riotous affair. For all that, his handler was a dyed-in-the-wool horseman; the horse became tractable, and with time, he actually took a liking to racing, as well as his groom.

He would set out fully a week before the next meeting on foot, his Dick King lookalike on top, and by the time he arrived, as one wag recently put it, he was “ready-to-run!” This was a foot soldier in the real sense of the word, reputed to have walked more than 1600 miles during his career to these bush meetings, where he was something of a legend, not only for the distances he covered, but for the silver he took home.

Dan’s reward for his all-conquering exploits on the country circuit, was a crack at the big time. In one of racing’s great fairytales, he wound up earning a cheque in the “big two”, the Cape Metropolitan and St Seriol’s 1945 Durban July. How’s that for killing the giants?

As for St Pauls, his size (or rather the lack of it) prompted the decision to start him out in a maiden at a village meet near Kokstad. His trainer was a 76 year old father of 13, and Duggie Talbot, as dapper as he might’ve been in the Durban parade ring, was the owner of a badly scuffed float, which had been sighted carting horses to race tracks from Matatiele to Mthathta. Here was a battler since his first race ride in 1918, when General Botha was still Prime Minister, and Pamphlet won the first of his two Durban Julys.

Talbot was a little man with twinkling blue eyes, rosy cheeks and the cocky air of a bantam rooster. He had a rolling gait and a falsetto voice which people liked to imitate, sometimes to his face, which never seemed to bother him. The voice was somehow right: part of him would always be a little boy, full of hope and derring-do. Another part of him was granite hard: he knew the world would stomp all over you, if you lay down or showed fear.

He was like a man before his tenth birthday; he’d grown up on the Western plains of the Karoo, red dust, clay pans that gave off a hard white light, hardly a tree. He lived in a slab hut with an earthen floor, and rooms divided off by chaff bags, sewn together with baling twine. Kerosene lamps provided little pools of light. Before Talbot was ten, he was working the scoop behind a team of draught horses, killing sheep for the butcher, breaking in horses and carting water. And here he was now, handling a live candidate for the Durban July.

A recent octogenarian visitor to Summerhill, Alistair Stubbs, reports that as a teenager, he was on hand at New Amalfi Station near the family farm, The Springs, when the owner was loading a rather non-descript little fellow onto a cattle truck, destined for Durban. “You’ve just seen the Durban July winner,” proclaimed the owner, a full four months before the race was due to get underway. Such was Pat Goss’ confidence that he booked out the Kew Hotel for the victory celebrations a few days later, and in one of those few stories in racing’s folklore that actually come true, he bolted home under Georgie Foster’s hands-and-heels urging in record time. The party, it is said, lasted two days, and within a few more, The Kew was a smouldering ruin. The little horse, who was named for the London cathedral that withstood the blitz of the Battle of Britain, had brought about, it seemed, the destruction of one of Durban’s most famous landmarks. But it wasn’t before every Durbanite who shared Pat Goss’ reverence for the Durban July, had joined the revelry at this queen of hotels.