SUNDAY TIMES
28th July 2024
He should have been called David. The French challenger Goliath ran out an easy winner of the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II Stakes despite starting an unlikely 25-1 outsider against the best in Europe and putting off paddock watchers with his weird, jerky, stringhalt, walk.
“Stringhalt”, or to be veterinary exact, “equine reflex hypertonia,” is a rare neuromuscular condition which sees a horse pull one hind leg up as high as a stamping guardsman. It’s occasionally been seen on a racecourse but virtually never amongst the winners of what remains Britain’s most prestigious flat race
But as hot favourite Auguste Rodin came out onto the track gleaming as a Derby, Royal Ascot and Breeders Cup winner should, there was Goliath stamping his left hind leg up and down like some equine version of John Cleese’s Ministry Of Silly Walks.. Punters pointed and laughed at him. They are not laughing now.
True, it was by some margin the best performance of Goliath’s ten race career and indeed the first time he has even run in a Group One event, but, as ever, you can make sense of it afterwards. He is a progressive and very well trained and ridden four year old who at last got the pace and the going and the run of the race to suit him.
Much had been made of the forceful tactics Ballydoyle were likely to employ to suit Auguste Rodin and his Group I level stable mate Luxembourg and their “partisan” Hans Anderson duly set off in front to do the donkey work.
With the leader clocking fractions fast enough to produce by far the best comparative time of the day, Luxembourg and August Rodin, kept close with the Godolphin globe trotter Rebel Romance right with them and Goliath and star French jockey Christophe Soumillon at the back of this bunch.
Luxembourg took over before the turn with Auguste Rodin getting a run on his inside and the massive Rebel Romance looking even stronger on the outside. These three had won 15 Group One races between them from Europe to California to Dubai and Hong Kong. The mind told you that the race had to be between them. But now the eye had a different story.
For as their jockeys pushed and strove, , Soumillon still sat motionless in tow. 300 yards out he went for gold and in a few strides the race was over. The leaders had punched themselves out, the filly Bluestocking ran on from the back to be a respectful two length second , Rebel Romance was a full three lengths away in third with the three year old Sunway running past the Ballydoyle pair to take fourth.
Goliath is the latest and one of the best products of Germany’s 150 year old Schlenderhan Stud represented here by the young and enthusiastic Baron Philip Von Pullman. Goliath was not so lucky in his youth, a cist in his nether regions necessitating a gelding operation so it’s the racecourse not the breeding shed for future attention.
This means that he is not eligible to run in the Arc de Triomphe which continues a surely unsustainable ban on castrated thoroughbreds and Goliath’s end of season target will be the Breeders Cup Turf by the beach at Del Mar in California.
Wherever he goes he will not lack expertise from his trainer 47 year old Francis Graffard who last month saddled the Aga Khan’s Calandagan to become his first winner at Royal Ascot in six years. Four years around Newmarket working for Sheikh Mohammed’s operation after becoming a graduate of the first Godolphin Flying Start scholarship programme he left him with an engaging sense of English understatement. “I thought” he said of Goliath, “that he would be only famous for his walk.”