Brough Scott
The Times
22nd August 2026
The beast was off the leash. Each morning on the Knavesmire and for five hazardous plunging minutes on the way to the start yesterday, we wondered what would happen when American sprinter Bacio was finally allowed to run. The answer when stall ten opened was as close as it gets to firing a horse from a gun.
This was a bullet on the hoof. It took him just 2.25 seconds to hit 20 mph. From that standing start he hit the furlong pole in 13 seconds and past the quarter mile on this rain softened ground in 13.78. Within 20 strides he was out and gone and hard though they battled none of 17 Nunthorpe rivals could lay a glove on him.
Famously fast starters like Night Raider, American Affair and Jim Jungle tried scorched in Bacio’s wake but the effort burnt them all. 300 yards out Night Raider got within a couple of lengths of him before fading away as Juan Hernandes flourished the whip and Bacio drew clear to seal the deal.
Starlust and Bacio ran on from the back to get within a length and a half but in truth there was never any danger. Bacio had become the first American winner in the Nunthorpe’s 123 year history and compensated Kentucky trainer Wesley Ward for the narrow defeats of Acapulco and Lady Aurelia in 2013 and 2014. What happened once the stalls opened was rightly hailed as a triumph, but what was achieved beforehand was even better.
For when Wesley, who was watching by satellite from his Keeneland training barn says “he is a real speed ball” he doesn’t add that Bacio wants to rocket away at every opportunity. At exercise every morning on the Knavesmire Bacio was never let off the leading rein, pulling and plunging off a luckless stablemate called Redneck Ways as he trotted and cantered up the course. It looked pretty hazardous in the morning. In the afternoon it seemed near impossible. On the way to the start runner and minder were an unhappy, bucking, reaching duo with the other runners queued up behind them and both Hernandes and a diminutive hero called Carlos holding the lead rein on the clearly fed up Redneck Ways did simian type miracles to stay in their saddles.
Hernandes hails from Mexico but now rules the roost in California and it is to there that he has now returned. He and Bacio hit the starting gates at 3.36 pm, took 59.42 seconds to cover the five furlongs and by 4 pm, presentation and other formalities over, his helicopter was in the sky heading south to catch the 6.15 pm flight west to ride in tomorrow’s Pacific Classic at Del Mar where he is leading jockey.
“When the gate opened he was all fire,” the rider said of Bacio before rushing off heavenwards. “Thanks to Wesley Ward for taking me here. It’s really special and never something I imagined would happen to me when I started racing in Mexico.”
People keep saying that racing has to produce new story lines and yesterday they got some. But I wouldn’t want to have Carlos’s arms this morning.