There will be better horses than Big Orange running here this week, and faster ones too, but none will embody the enduring thrill and fascination of thoroughbred racing quite like the horse who crossed the line a short-head to the good at the end of Thursday’s Gold Cup.
Michael Bell, Big Orange’s trainer, talked afterwards about the gelding’s “enormous stride pattern”, while James Doyle, the winning jockey, compared him to “an old-fashioned jumps horse, big, long and great to ride”. But beyond his build, his strength and the way he covers the ground, there is an attitude about Big Orange that has made him the most popular Flat horse in training. He runs as though he lives to race.
There are few horses that rise so visibly to a challenge. Big Orange had been in front for well over a circuit as Order Of St George, the odds-on favourite, charged down the middle of the track and drew alongside with less than a furlong to run. It seemed for a moment that Ryan Moore would surely edge last year’s winner into the lead with a stride or two to spare.
Big Orange, though, was not for passing. He sensed the favourite’s challenge and found just enough to hold him at bay in one of the great, nose-bobbing conclusions to a Gold Cup.
After two-and-a-half miles it came down to a couple of inches, and while some of those who backed the favourite inevitably complained that Moore had given Order Of St George plenty to do, a front-running ride that is judged as perfectly as Doyle’s is very difficult to counter. Moore started to make progress towards the lead well before the turn for home, and it should be noted too that Doyle felt Big Orange would have won by more had he been joined at an earlier stage.
Doyle was a late replacement aboard Big Orange after Frankie Dettori, his intended partner, was ruled out of the meeting on Tuesday morning with a fractured shoulder bone. Following a gap of nearly two years between his Group One wins in the 2015 Falmouth Stakes and Tuesday’s St James’s Palace Stakes, he has now won two Group Ones in three days.
“I spoke to Frankie the other night and he gave me the low-down on the horse,” Doyle said. “You just don’t interfere with him really. Roger Charlton’s horse [Quest For More] led us for a couple of furlongs but I was sitting there thinking, ‘I’m interfering with him, I definitely shouldn’t be doing this’, so I just pulled him out and let him go to the front.
“I wish something would have joined him a bit sooner as then I think he would have won a bit more impressively. It’s a long way to make the running, when you’re in front crossing the line with a circuit to go. I don’t know whether Order Of St George was just lugging into him a little bit, but it definitely gave him a wake-up call and I always knew he was going to hold him to the line.”
The front two were six lengths clear of Harbour Law, last year’s St Leger winner, and Doyle was so certain that he had held on for victory that he punched the air almost as Big Orange’s nose crossed the line.
“I knew I’d won,” he said. “He’s a people’s champ, a real people’s horse and it’s just a pleasure to ride him.
“He’s a real proper old-fashioned stayer, really gutsy and he wears his heart on his sleeve. I wish that most of the horses I rode tried as hard as him.
“He feels like a big old-fashioned jumps horse almost, he’s so long to sit on. You can really sit into him and chase him along, he’s just a real, battle-hardened champion.”
Bell, who had not saddled a Group One winner since August 2011, will now aim Big Orange towards a third successive success in the Goodwood Cup in early August, which has been promoted to Group One status for the first time this season.
“He’s an absolute superstar,” Bell said. “He wants to race and he’s a colossal racehorse, and on fast ground in the height of the summer, he’s a monster.
“We knew we’d probably have to do the donkey work in front, but we were happy to do that. You can’t check his stride pattern. Quest For More went to make it but he wasn’t going fast enough for him. You can’t check his stride pattern, he’s got an enormous stride and you’ve got to let him use it.
“This is the feature race of the meeting and it was an epic race, taking on a very good horse and beating him in a proper horse race, and I can’t tell you the pride I’ve got in him.”
Dettori missed out on two likely winners on Thursday’s card as John Gosden’s Coronet recorded a narrow success in the Group Two Ribblesdale Stakes. The Italian was also booked to ride Lady Aurelia, Tuesday’s easy winner of the King’s Stand Stakes, which suggests he would have been alongside Moore on three winners after the first three days of the meeting had he not been injured in a fall in the parade ring at Yarmouth last week.
Coronet got up in the final stride under Olivier Peslier to deny Mori, the 2-1 favourite who would have given Sir Michael Stoute a record-breaking 76th winner at the meeting.
“I told Olivier that this filly would come strong,” John Gosden, Coronet’s trainer, said. “I thought Mori was going to win and then Olivier came and grabbed it. She loved the uphill at Epsom [when finishing fourth behind Enable in the Oaks] but not the downhill. She deserved this success, and the second is an exceptionally good filly as well.”
Gosden will take time to consider a plan for Coronet, but a run in the St Leger at Doncaster, the season’s final Classic, must be a possibility at least for a filly who seems sure to stay beyond Thursday’s trip of a mile and a half.
