Warm sunshine, cold beer and Frankie on the favourite: it will be a heady mixture when around 15,000 spectators arrive on Saturday for Coral-Eclipse day, the most important afternoon of Flat racing here all season. Golden Horn, the Derby winner, was quoted by most bookmakers as a 4-11 chance on Friday afternoon to remain unbeaten after his first start outside three-year-old company. Even the brilliant Dancing Brave was only 4-9 for the same race back in 1986. Is Golden Horn really that good?
The difference, of course, is that Dancing Brave was up against the top-class French racemare Triptych, not to mention Teleprompter, a winner of the Arlington Million the previous summer. Golden Horn’s main market rival, on the other hand, is The Grey Gatsby, the winner of the French Derby and Irish Champion Stakes last season but at the same time a colt consistently underrated by punters and bookmakers alike.
Cougar Mountain, the next horse in the betting, is stepping up to a mile and a quarter for the first time and in five previous starts at Group One level has made the frame only once.
It is, on the face of it, a very straightforward task for Golden Horn, so much so that bookmakers were offering prices about his winning margin after the five-day declarations on Monday.
But racegoers who plan to pay for their day out with a big bet on Golden Horn and Frankie Dettori should perhaps consider also that, if the Eclipse has not quite been a bookies’ benefit in recent years, it has certainly played its part in maintaining their share prices.
Over the last quarter of a century, Authorized, Motivator and Erhaab have all started at odds-on for this Group One contest after winning the Derby, at 4-7, 2-5 and 4-6 respectively, and all three were beaten.
The John Oxx-trained Sea The Stars, who won at 4-7 in the middle of his exceptional season in 2009, managed to follow up his win at Epsom but Bosra Sham (4-7) and Ouija Board (2-1) have also been expensive failures for the punters. In all, 17 of the last 25 Eclipse Stakes favourites have been beaten.
John Gosden, Golden Horn’s trainer, also had the beaten favourite last year when The Fugue was only sixth of nine runners on what turned out to be her final start. As a result he remains cautious about the favourite’s chance.
“I have a lot of respect for The Grey Gatsby, looking at his form from last year and the form of his last race, finishing second in the Prince of Wales’s [Stakes at Royal Ascot],” Gosden said on Friday. “Then you have the horse that finished third in [Royal Ascot’s] Queen Anne [Cougar Mountain], which is the best form over a mile, so these are top older horses we’re taking on.
“I think the odds are a little bit unusual and I don’t think they’re representative of the chances the other horses have. I’ve no illusions about it. It’s a mile-and-a-quarter on a track that can favour front-runners and against older horses. I’ve bags of respect for those horses and nothing is a given.”
Tactics could also have a role to play in such a small field, although the most obvious strategy for Dettori to adopt on Golden Horn if the pace is slow would be to make the running himself. Stamina, as Epsom demonstrated, is not an issue for Golden Horn, while both The Grey Gatsby and Cougar Mountain, who had the pace to finish within a length and a neck of Solow at Royal Ascot, might match him for speed in a dash for the line.
Motivator was the last unbeaten Derby winner to line up for the Eclipse, while Nashwan, in 1989, was the last to extend his unbeaten record at Sandown.
Gosden, though, says that maintaining a perfect record with his colt is not uppermost in his mind.
“I don’t let it bother me,” he said. “Any horse can get beaten. It happened to Nijinsky, [Gosden’s] Kingman in the Guineas. I’m never going to let that worry me. If the horse’s ability is there and they’re in good form and come out of their races well, that matters to a trainer probably more than anything else.”
The horsebox that travelled from Mark Johnston’s yard to Sandown on Thursday evening provided an impressive return on a tankful of diesel when the trainer’s three runners on the card completed a treble in the first three races.
Johnston himself was absent to attend his son Charlie’s graduation from university but he will be at Haydock on Saturday hoping to see if either Watersmeet or Notarised extend his winning streak inthe day’s big handicap, the Old Newton Cup.
Midlander, at 9-2, took the opening sprint handicap at Sandown with Andrew Elliott in the saddle, while James Doyle steered home Riflescope (9-4) and Miniaturist (9-2). Doyle also went on to complete a treble when Tha’ir, at 11-4, made all the running to beat Provenance, the 4-5 favourite, in the Listed Gala Stakes, the feature race on the card.
