Legacy? What’s a legacy?” Alexander Hamilton asks in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical. “It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.”
It is a thought that will hang heavy in the air if Bangkok can win the Derby at Epsom on Saturday afternoon. Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, the former chairman of Leicester, planted many seeds in Flat racing in the autumn of 2017, scarcely a year before his shocking, untimely death in a helicopter crash at the King Power Stadium last October.
The seeds have flowered throughout the spring of 2019, as one three-year-old after another has carried the late owner’s colours to victory. Now Bangkok could be the most brilliant bloom of all.
The Derby is no longer the most valuable race of the season, or an event that grabs the attention of the nation as it did a century ago but it is still the race that most owners, gripped by the desire to compete at the highest level in the sport of kings, want to win above all.
Again, to some extent, it is about legacy. The names of Derby winners run through the pedigrees of future champions like a watermark for decades to come.
Sheikh Mohammed, who has spent more money on bloodstock than any owner in history, has never looked as happy on a racecourse as he did at Epsom last year, when he finally saw a colt in his own colours pass the famous winning post in front.
That victory arrived after more than three decades of trying. King Power Racing, the racing operation that Srivaddhanaprabha founded less than two years ago, stands on the brink of a Derby winner at what is, effectively, their first attempt. Bangkok failed to register a success in three runs as a two-year-old last season but that was never the plan. King Power’s horses were bought to peak as three-year-olds, in their Classic season – a flourishing the man who bought them cannot witness.
“We used to refer to him as the chairman,” Alastair Donald, who was the bidder for King Power’s horses during a multimillion pound spree in 2017 and is now the operation’s racing manager, said.
“He spent a lot of money at Book 1 [Europe’s most prestigious bloodstock sale] to buy good-looking horses with exciting pedigrees. We very much had a three- to five-year plan. We said the first year would be development and then hopefully things would start happening when the horses turned three, and that’s very much been the case.
“Now is it starting to pay off and we have got a good chance in the Derby but he’s not around to see the excitement and the fruition of the investment he put forward.”
Srivaddhanaprabha, who built a single duty-free shop in downtown Bangkok into a billion-dollar business, expanded his sporting interests into racing a year after Leicester’s astonishing success in the Premier League, having started the season at odds of 5,000-1.
He was a keen polo player too, employing the game’s best players to line up alongside him in the King Power Foxes, a dominant force in the sport in recent years.
“They [Srivaddhanaprabha and his family] are born winners,” Donald says, “and when they put their mind to something, they like to do it at the top table. When he invested in racing, he wanted to be winning these types of races but as we know it’s easier said than done, and it’s not done yet, either.”
In the immediate aftermath of the crash, there was a chance King Power Racing would disappear with the untapped potential of their late chairman’s bloodstock investments still unrealised.
“There was a lot of grief to pass over initially,” Donald says. “We never mentioned the subject of the horses [to Srivaddhanaprabha’s family] until they were ready to come to us and say, right, this is what we want to do.
“We were hopeful when there was talk about wanting to carry on the father’s legacy that it applied to the horses as well and there would be no greater tribute to him than for this horse to win the Derby.”
Srivaddhanaprabha’s son, Aiyawatt, has taken charge of his father’s sporting interests and Donald expects “a good crowd” from the founder’s family at Epsomon Saturday, when Bangkok will be ridden by King Power’s retained jockey, Silvestre de Sousa.
“It was very much the chairman’s decision that he wanted a stable jockey,” Donald says. “Silvestre was the best available and he’d always said he was a guy he liked. He’s very much working with the team and putting his heart into it, and it’s working.
“Bangkok ticks lots of boxes. He’s got the pedigree, the ground, the trip, the turn of foot and he’s the right physical type as well, so we go there very hopeful. It’s probably the most interesting Derby there’s been for a while, with about five horses under 10-1 and no standout.
“Even the name of the horse is very apt, it was very important for the chairman to promote Thailand and if we could win a Derby with a horse named after the capital city, it would be fantastic.
“Thailand will be cheering him on and all the Leicester fans will be supporting him, and I’m sure lots more people with their feeling for the sadness of the story. I’m sure there wouldn’t be a more popular winner.”
