Delacroix win must not just be glorious wave of racing's ebbing tide

Times

2 days ago

Forgiveness can be beautiful, and in Delacroix and Ryan Moore's last-strides' victory over the favourite, Ombudsman, in this Eclipse Stakes at Sandown, desperately dramatic too.
The last time we had seen the pair, they had started favourites for the Derby, but after being bumped around at the top of the hill, they trailed in a disappointing ninth.
The irony of Saturday is that for a long while it looked as if they had got themselves impossibly trapped once again. After jumping out fast and securing a good position on the rail behind the French horse Sosie, and the Irish raider Hotazhell, Moore found himself imprisoned as Oisin Murphy and the hard-pulling Ruling Court came up his inside and then William Buick moved Ombudsman outside to block any escape.
As Maxime Guyon set steady, full 12½-second sections on an ears-pricked Sosie up front, with all five rivals poised behind him, the analogy of a horse race as a high-speed version of an Agatha Christie crime mystery has never been more exact.
All the possibles were in the dining room, we thought we knew their potential, but in 40 seconds rather than 200 pages, we would know the result. And for a long time, it looked the least expected.
For while the chief suspect, Ombudsman, came up to lead at the quarter-mile pole, Delacroix had been denied every exit and was now on the outside and plum last.
Some sharp soul snapped up 170-1 on the exchanges as last month's Derby flop set out for atonement. It looked impossible, but this is a talented horse, a master jockey, and of course the Sandown hill always takes a toll on the leaders.
So Ombudsman clocked the last two furlongs in 11.93sec and 12.77sec while Delacroix closed sharply in 11.91sec and 12.39sec. The differences may seem innocuous on the page, but out on the still-green Sandown turf they made for a cheetah-like burst on a fleeing prey.
Half a furlong out Delacroix could surely not do it, but as the post flashed towards them, Moore and he made certain of their kill.
Ruling Court and the wrong headline maker, Murphy, ran on after a troubled passage to be a length and half away in third, just pipping Delacroix's stable-mate, Camille Pissarro, for third, with Hotazhell and Sosie completing the file.
It was Moore's fifth win in the Eclipse and Aidan O'Brien's ninth, but a first success at group one level for Delacroix. He is a long way from the greatest Eclipse winners, but being by the super sire Dubawi out of the brilliant mare Tepin, he is one of the best bred.
For Coolmore this is crucial, but for the racing game the thrill of this galloping mystery's solution is what mattered most. For this million-pound event was well worthy of the 150-year history which Sandown Park is celebrating this summer. But whether the course, or the sport, can maintain such a position is very much another question.
The big stand, opened to much acclaim in 1973, is now showing its age, and the likelihood of the money being available for its refurbishment will recede even further into the distance if the government raises the 15 per cent tax on racing bets to the 21 per cent levied on totally dissimilar wagers on casino and slots.
With the number of horses in training in decline, and betting in freefall because of the well-intentioned but dumbly implemented 'affordability checks', it is no exaggeration to say that racing in Britain faces an existential crisis.
All this is easy to forget amid the glamour of Eclipse Day, so it's good to welcome a short video that beautifully captures the warmth at the heart of the game.
Shot by Arena Racing it features the legendary hurdler Paisley Park and his heroic unsighted owner Andrew Gemmill, and all those associated with the horse in trainer Emma Lavelle's stable.
It is entitled Thanks To The Thoroughbred, and the script features the lines of Ronald Duncan's famous An Ode to the Horse, spoken consecutively by everyone from owner to groom to box driver to vet. The poem starts with the great question: 'Where in the world can man find nobility without pride, friendship without envy, beauty without vanity?'
Not always in Westminster, perhaps, but it is to be hoped that our legislators might take note of how much the thoroughbred game can still give. If they don't, what Delacroix did at Sandown would just be a glorious wave of an ebbing tide.