Weekend Preview: The Renaissance Age

In the style of Family Fortunes, we asked 100 people who won the Hennessy last weekend?

1……………………………………

2 Many Clouds                  41          

3 Leighton Aspell             4

4 Trevor Hemmings          2

5 Racing                           2

Sadly, the two people who said that racing was the winner were tried and executed on the spot for sappiness (sappiness, the greatest crime you can confess, I thank the Lord that I’ve been blessed, with not one hint of sappiness), but even a curmudgeonly cynic like me couldn’t and wouldn’t begrudge the outpouring of emotion for and from the man at the centre of the post-Hennessy euphoria, and the survey’s top answer, Oliver Sherwood.

At the risk of sounding like a sap, the communal sport of racing is a family, albeit a bickering, fragmented family who only unite under extreme circumstances these days, rallying as one in bad times, such as the Wigmore Hall denigration, or good times, like last weekend’s celebration, which felt like an impromptu welcome home party for Oliver Sherwood, rejoiced like a brother returning from the war.

Sherwood’s battle was all uphill, a long trek to climb a slippery mountain for the second time, and the Hennessy win with Many Clouds was the culmination of a trainer’s renaissance that had been boiling up for a few years. For want of a headline act, the renaissance artists have been all the fashion this jumps season.

The climate is right for right for the reawakening horses, with some older stars dimming or missing, while the younger ones aren’t fully formed. Menorah is leading the charge of the relight brigade, and, odd though it might seem, Hurricane Fly’s twentieth Grade 1 win represented a revival of sorts, a hero’s comeback in more ways than one.

Hurricane Fly’s history was the gunpowder for the explosion of emotion with his resurgence, and that’s the common denominator for all the great renaissance works: history is to a renaissance what a renaissance is to history.

There’s a quiet renaissance going on in the North, at a stable rich in history. Two Grand National winners – Lucius and Hallo Dandy – were sent out from Greystoke, Cumbria, under the stewardship of Gordon Richards, whose final and finest achievement was One Man, the top chaser of his day and one of the best 20 ever in Timeform’s experience.

With the exception of the mighty Monet’s Garden, who used to do a fair impression of One Man, pickings have been slimmer for Greystoke and Nicky Richards in the intervening period, but triumph comes from adversity, and adversity is a precursor for renaissance.

In the words of John Fowles: ‘In essence, the Renaissance was simply the green end of one of civilization’s hardest winters.’ There were a number of hard winters for Nicky Richards, and difficult times are all the more challenging when it’s beyond your control, as happens to trainers, who are just part of a business chain.

‘When the recession first hit me, and hit racing in general, I lost 60 horses in about two or three weeks,’ says Richards. ‘All the major power owners up the North made dramatic cutbacks very quickly. At the time it was understandable really, but I had ten or so horses for both Trever Hemmings and Sir Robert Ogden, who was edging towards the Flat at that stage. Ashleybank Investments, who were absolutely fantastic to us for about 30 years, went out of it, and Duncan Davidson had 25 horses with me at the time. They all had to think more about their businesses than racing and you can’t blame them for that.’

There’s no tone of bitterness or self-pity, just a hard-hitting statement of the hard-hitting facts, a near-overnight exodus that would have put paid to stables – and trainers – with weaker foundations. Weathering the storm took time, conviction and allies: ‘All my lesser owners stuck with me, which was great, and they’re all big supporters of National Hunt racing up the North.’

By the power of Greystoke, so began a renaissance that has gathered pace this season. Only four British trainers – Ferguson, Greatrex, Newland and Fry - are operating at a higher strike-rate this campaign, and the improvement the stable is making is best illustrated by plotting a graph of Richards’ Timeform Trainer Rating – measuring the productivity of the string – over the last 15 months.

In cricket, on Sky, such a graph is called the worm, and it’s clear this worm has turned, turned a big corner. A diagnostic check makes for healthy reading, results on the up across the board: the youngsters are more promising (median Timeform performance rating of the bumper horses is significantly up on previous seasons), the regulars are getting better (see Top Billing and One For Hocky), and the flagbearers are flying.

‘There are only four horses rated 150+ in the North, and I’ve got two of them. I’m quite proud of that.’ You sense the pride comes not only from having two chasers of that standard, but also representing the North. A geographical divide in racing is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as well as a specious state of affairs, the line drawn intermittently depending on convenience in a widespread sport whose cycle affects individuals and not districts. But if it’s motivation for some – and it is – then all the better for fuelling a renaissance.

One of the Greystoke top chasers, the one, is venturing South on Sunday for the Peterborough Chase at Huntingdon. The maturing machine that is Eduard was a revelation when sent over fences last season, culminating with a 20-length win in the prophetically-named Future Champion Novice at Ayr, and his reappearance came in what could be called the Renaissance Chase at Carlisle, because it was a fight between him and Oliver Sherwood’s Many Clouds, Eduard actually emerging the better horse at the weights that day conceding 6 lb and going down by just a length and a quarter.

‘He’s got a fantastic pedigree,’ said Richards about Eduard, ‘a proper National Hunt horse. He’s from the family of Monty’s Pass (won 2003 National) and Harbour Pilot (placed in two Gold Cups). A lot of the Greystoke horses over the years have been very nice jumpers, and Eduard is a very nice jumper.’

The Peterborough Chase is a big deal, especially for Richards, who won it with Monet’s Garden in 2008, following in the historical footsteps of two of the biggest Greystoke guns, Clever Folly (1989) and One Man himself (1997), but Huntingdon is also a potential springboard to the premier league for Eduard, who still has an entry in the King George. It’s exactly that robust jumps breeding which makes Richards ‘fairly confident he’ll stay three miles’ when the time comes.

The Peterborough Chase is for Greystoke, in some way, the connector between yesteryear and this year, the halcyon days and these resurgent ones, but there is another, namely the evergreen Brian Harding, who rode One Man at the end of his career and is currently steering Eduard in the right direction. ‘The great thing about Brian is that he’s a superb horseman,’ said Richards. ‘His greatest asset is when he comes to a hurdle or fence; he gets them jumping beautifully.’

There’s plenty going on in the jumps world this weekend, but make the time to watch the 2.05 at Huntingdon on Sunday, when there’s a star in naissance, for a stable in renaissance.

We asked two people whether this was indeed the renaissance age? Oliver Sherwood said yes. Nicky Richards said: ‘Hopefully we’re slowly starting to turn it back around again. But I’ve been well brought up never to count my chickens.’ Richards has also been well brought up to train. He and Eduard are proving the point, increasingly so, impressively so.