Syndicate

Chapter 2

I had spent the time since my arrival at the racecourse wandering around and chatting to other members of the Potassium syndicate and other friends, but I’m not sure that I could recall any of the conversations — my mind had been elsewhere.

Why was I so nervous? I asked myself.

If Potassium didn’t win today, it didn’t make him a bad horse. There would be more races to come, and as a former European two-year-old champion, he should already have a career assured as a stallion at stud.

So why the nerves?

Partly, I suppose, because this race really was the big one, but I was mostly nervous because of what it would mean for my business.

After more than twenty years of ever-increasing success, there was no denying that there had been a significant drop in our form during the past two. A combination of bad luck, and quite likely bad judgement on my part, had caused some of our horses not to fulfil their expectations, and I knew there were continuing murmurings on the racing grapevine that Chester Newton had lost his golden touch.

When I had started out in the syndicate business, after spending ten years as an assistant trainer in one of the foremost training yards in the country, there had been very little competition, but that had all changed. Prospective members now had a whole plethora of syndicate companies to choose from, and the only real difference between them was who was buying the horses and who was doing the managing. If my members lost confidence in me as that person, my business would wither and die faster than a rose bud starved of water.

I hoped that winning The Derby would banish the tittle-tattle and re-establish Victrix Racing as the blue-ribbon company for syndicate ownership. But losing it with the race favourite could also sound the company’s death knell.

Potassium looked wonderful in the parade ring, relaxed and assured, while many of those around him were sweating up badly in the hot afternoon sunshine, including me in my top hat and tails.

Owen Reynolds welcomed those members of the owning syndicate lucky enough to have the parade-ring badges, and he seemed to be the calmest of us all, joking about the high levels of security, even though it wasn’t a laughing matter. But I knew Owen fairly well, and I reckoned that this was his way of dealing with his own nerves, which I was certain were jangling beneath his serene exterior, just like the rest of ours.

Finally, our jockey Jimmy Ketch joined us, wearing Victrix’s distinctive racing silks of royal blue and white vertical striped body, black sleeves and white cap, and everything suddenly became very serious.

‘Now remember what we discussed,’ Owen said to Jimmy earnestly. ‘Sit tight behind one or two others uphill for the first five furlongs to settle him. Then, at the top of the rise, pull him out into free air and push him on fast down the hill, hopefully getting a jump on the others as they take a breather. Go steady around Tattenham Corner, then kick hard again. Don’t worry about going well clear. He loves to be in front and he hates to be caught.’

It all sounded so simple.

A bell was rung by an official — the signal for the jockeys to get mounted.

Jimmy walked over to where Potassium was still being led around, and Owen gave him a leg up, tossing the jockey’s petite frame effortlessly up onto the tiny saddle.

‘Good luck,’ called out one of our syndicate members as the horse and jockey walked past us before going out onto the track.

The start for the Derby is at the lowest point of the course and is impossible to see from the lawns of the enclosures, not least because of the hospitality marquees placed close to the far rail, and all of the sponsor’s tall advertising hoardings erected on each side of the winning post. And it was such a scrum to get to the viewing steps on the grandstand reserved for owners and trainers. So I decided to remain in the parade ring and watch the race on the big television screen set up at one end.

Quite a few of my fellow syndicate members clearly had the same idea, and we stood there in a group, staring at the screen in silence, too preoccupied by our own hopes and dreams to enter into conversation.

We watched as the fifteen horses made their way to the start, had their girths tightened by the starter’s assistant, and then were expertly loaded into the starting stalls.

Potassium had been drawn to start from stall nine, considered a reasonably good draw because the Derby course, although mostly a left-handed, elongated horseshoe shape, initially curves to the right, giving the higher drawn horses the early advantage.

‘They’re off!’ shouted the racecourse commentator through the public address system as the stall gates opened, accompanied by a huge roar from those in the enclosures and also from the masses on ‘the hill,’ where the fun fairs and alcoholic liquid refreshment were both in full flow.

All fifteen runners appeared to make an even break, and I frantically searched the image on the screen for Jimmy Ketch’s white cap as they sorted themselves out. After a brief moment, I found him, tucked in behind some of the early leaders, just as he’d been instructed. Potassium was always eager to be at the head of the pack, but we didn’t want him to run too free too early — not with a full mile and a half to cover.

The field was well bunched as they first swung right-handed and then crossed the course to the left-hand running rail, all the time climbing steeply.

Even though the Derby is a ‘flat race’ because there are no jumps, Epsom racecourse is far from flat. In the first half mile of the Derby, the horses have to climb one hundred and sixty vertical feet, almost the height of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. This can sap a horse’s energy, especially if it gets racing too early. Hence our aim was to keep Potassium well covered up behind the other runners at this stage. However, as they reached the crown of the hill, I watched as Jimmy Ketch eased him a little wider, thereby finally giving him a clear view of the track ahead.

Potassium took this as an invitation to go to the front, and, as we had hoped, he stole a march on others, who were taking a breather, by suddenly opening a four-length lead going down the hill towards Tattenham Corner. And still he didn’t slow down. Far from taking the sharp left-hand bend steadily, as he’d been instructed, Jimmy kicked hard into Potassium’s ribs beforehand, and the horse fairly hurtled around the corner and into the home straight.

By the time he passed the three-furlong pole, Potassium had established a lead of almost eight lengths, and I began to believe he really could win. But the others were in hot pursuit, and now they began to close the gap.

One of the major factors that had attracted Potassium to me when I’d first seen him as an unnamed yearling at the sales was his front end — his huge chest. In deciding which horses to buy, I always took careful note of what was known as the depth of a horse — the greater the depth, the larger the lungs and hence the greater the amount of oxygen available to be delivered to the muscles, which in turn indicated that the horse might be able to sustain its gallop for longer.

Almost all horses slow down in the latter stages of a race as they begin to run out of puff. Those that appear to be increasing their speed towards the finish are actually the ones that are sustaining their gallop for longer, and therefore slowing down the least.

Now I was banking on the fact that Potassium’s large lungs would be able to sustain his gallop long enough for him to reach the winning post while still in front.

At the two-furlong marker, his lead had been cut from eight lengths to six, and that was halved by the time he reached the one pole.

At Epsom, the ground rises again in the final half furlong, further depleting a horse’s stamina, but as Owen Reynolds had said in the parade ring, Potassium loved to race in front, and he hated to be caught.

As two of the other runners closed in on him rapidly, he stuck his neck out and found more. But would it be enough?

Come on. Come on. Hang on. You can do it.

The three horses flashed past the winning post side by side, with Potassium closest to the far rail.

‘Did we win? Did we win?’ shouted one of the other syndicate members, grabbing me from behind and sending my top hat spinning off my head.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

‘Photograph. Photograph,’ announced the judge over the public address.

Had Potassium held on? Or had he been caught?

I stared at the screen as it showed the slow-motion replay of the finish.

It looked worryingly that Potassium might have been headed right at the death, but the TV camera position was some ten yards short of the finish, which meant it wasn’t looking straight along the line, as the photo-finish camera would be.

The replay was run over and over on the screen and, the more it was shown, the more convinced I became that Potassium had lost. But the length of time the judge was taking to declare the result meant it must be very close.

The noise level of the crowd swelled again as everyone was discussing the possible outcomes, and some bookmakers were even shouting their odds for bets on which horse’s head had reached the line first.

‘Here is the result of the photograph,’ announced the judge through the loudspeakers, causing the crowd to fall silent in expectation. ‘First number nine. Second number two. Third number ten. The distances are a nose, and the same.’

I leaned down and calmly picked up my top hat from the grass.

Potassium was horse number nine.

We had just won the Derby.

My moment of isolated calm quickly evaporated as I was swamped by other syndicate members, all of them cheering loudly and slapping me on the back.

‘We won! We won!’ shouted the man who had previously grabbed me.

His name was Nick Spencer, a millionaire London property lawyer who owned many shares of Victrix horses. He was usually a quiet and measured man, but now he was literally jumping up and down with excitement.

‘Indeed we did,’ I replied quietly, still hardly daring to believe it.

All my racing life, my burning ambition had been to win an Epsom Derby, and now it had finally happened. Yet strangely, at this moment of triumph, I was totally relaxed, subdued even. I realised that my overriding emotion was one of relief rather than elation. Maybe that would come later.

‘Come on, Chester,’ said Nick, seizing my left arm and dragging him with me. ‘Winner’s circle, here we come!’

Unlike at many British racecourses, such as Ascot, York, Cheltenham, and Aintree, where the unsaddling enclosures for the first to fourth placed horses are positioned within the parade rings, Epsom had a space reserved exclusively for the race winner — a railed circle situated right in front of the Queen Elizabeth II grandstand.

As Nick and I moved through the throng, I was accosted by the same BBC radio journalist as had met me at the racecourse entrance earlier, again with his live microphone at the ready.

‘So, Chester Newton, owner of Potassium, do you think he was a lucky winner?’ he asked, thrusting his microphone in my direction.

‘In what way?’ I replied.

‘The TV images clearly show that in just another stride Potassium would have only been third. So don’t you think he was lucky to win?’

I stopped walking and looked straight at him.

‘But the race distance wasn’t another stride long,’ I said in a strong but measured tone, resisting the urge to get angry about such a ridiculous question. ‘The winner of the Derby, as in every other race, is the horse that gets from the starting stalls to the finish line in the shortest time, and today, here, that horse was Potassium. So he’s a worthy winner. There was no luck involved. The race was run exactly as we had planned it, right down to that last winning stride. It is a famous victory for Potassium, and also for Victrix Racing.’

The reporter seemed quite taken aback by the forcefulness of my reply, and I was a bit surprised by it too, but I was determined not to allow Potassium to be labelled as a ‘lucky winner’ when he’d won the race fair and square. But I suppose it was better than being labelled as an ‘unlucky loser.’

By the time I’d elbowed my way through the crowd to the winner’s circle, Nick Spencer and all the other Potassium syndicate members were already in there, many with their partners, such that there was hardly room for the horse.

Owen Reynolds had a grin on his face as big as that of the Cheshire Cat as he led the winner in. Why wouldn’t he? Never mind anything else, he’d just won twenty-five thousand pounds from his bet.

The jockey, Jimmy Ketch, raised his arms above his head in a victory salute that sent the other syndicate members into greater raptures.

I, meanwhile, leaned quietly on the white rail, taking in the ebullient scene. Inside me was forming a warm glow of satisfaction, and I could feel that a smile was slowly spreading across my face.

Surely my business would be safe after this?

If only.