THE TIMES
2nd November
It’s time for delivery not dreamland. All the talk about City Of Troy being the next Pegasus is irrelevant to what happens when the starting bell shrills, the 14 gates slam open and the runners for this Breeders Cup Classic are under way.
Hopes thrive but doubts linger. It may all be over in the first three jumps. If City Of Troy breaks slowly down on the inside stall three. If one of the horses beside him lug across. If he starts receiving the heavy kick back of the American dirt surface, jockey Ryan Moore is into racing’s version of Mike Tyson’s line: “everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the face.”
Ron Anderson is the doyen of jockey’ agents and now handles a promising new import called Frankie Dettori. He booked Fernando Toro to win on Royal Heroine at that first Hollywood Park Breeders Cup in 1984 and took dozens more with the legends that were Gary Stevens and Jerry Bailey.
“City Of Troy is obviously a very good horse,” said Anderson with quiet bespectacled wisdom, “but on this track there is always a lot of speed up to that first turn and American horses always break faster than the Europeans. It will be very difficult.”
Studying the track these last few mornings was to do more than revel in the delights of the palm trees, the inner lake and the castellated Spanish towers on the grandstand with the Pacific just across the road. It was to swallow hard at just how little room there will be for manoeuvre.
For those first three furlongs from the start to the first turn are by far the longest straight run on the track. Once swung into the back straight there is less than a furlong and a half before the long swinging final turn and then just 919 feet to the winning line. If City Of Troy is to hit that famous long, reaching stride he will need it before that first turn.
But just as the sun warms the morning chill so has the sight of City Of Troy these last few mornings. As he filed out for duty with the Aidan O’Brien’s raiding party on Tuesday he was edgy and sweating despite the “half clip” he and his stablemates had been given before travel. Wednesday was composed and by Thursday’s higher tempo exercise he was an image to treasure.
He is not an imposing horse like his mighty sire Justify but ask any uninformed outsider to pick a star from the troop filing past and they could not miss the elegant prince with the head erect and the silky stride. When the exercise canter upped to a more meaningful gallop and work rider Rachel Richardson moved alongside former Irish Champion Stakes winner Luxembourg here was an athlete to drool over.
What will happen in the white heat of competition we will find out this evening, but Richardson will not forget the feel she had beneath her. “The other lads said they were travelling,” she said, “but he was floating. He just loved the surface.”
Meanwhile Ryan Moore was much too wise, not to mention cagey, to be drawn into silly predictions but there was a smile on his face as he stood outside City Of Troy’s stable alongside owners Derrick Smith and Michael Tabor. “Of course we can’t be sure how he will handle it,” Moore said in that clipped way of his before paying tribute to an “exceptional” horse with the cryptic comment “the first time I rode him he did something no other horse has done. He frightened me. I couldn’t pull him up.”
Pressed as to pressures the world’s greatest current jockey was not allowing introspection. “Someone asked me if I was going to be nervous,” he said, “if the horse is happy leaving the paddock I will be happy. For me this is going to be a bit of fun.”
Ryan Moore’s “bit of fun” could be a lasting gift to racing’s story.