Dubai: As well all know, the months of June and July serve up some of the best flat racing action in Britain and Ireland with Newmarket’s July Festival and Glorious Goodwood offering a valuable follow-up to the perennially breathtaking highlight of the year — Royal Ascot.
The thing to like about flat racing in these countries is the modus in which the calendar progresses from the early Classic races to the all-age contests like the lucrative Coral-Eclipse Stakes at Sandown and the Sussex Stakes at Goodwood, the even more lucrative Darley July Cup and the enormously lucrative King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes. Accumulatively these four races are worth over £2 million (Dh12.5 million), with the King George alone carrying a whopping purse of £1 million.
Add to this Ireland’s showpiece event, the €400,000 (Dh2 million) Darley Irish Oaks, and you could not have asked for anything better.
First up is the prestigious Eclipse next Saturday, a race that has been won by some outstanding horses including Sea The Stars, Daylami, Nashwan, Dancing Brave and Mill Reef more recently, and this year’s renewal has all the making of another thrilling contest.
Night Of Thunder, Mukhadram and True Story carry Dubai’s hopes, provided they make the starting line-up, while the horse to watch out for has to be The Fugue.
She is truly something special. Forget The Fugue we saw at Meydan earlier in the year, that just wasn’t her.
The real Fugue is the one that turned up at Royal Ascot to upstage the boys and win the Prince of Wales’s Stakes. That’s The Fugue we all want to see strut her stuff at Sandown and continue trainer John Gosden’s incredible form for the season.
She has such an amazing turn of foot and one her day, I think she could be one of the best mile and a quarter horses in the world today.
She had the measure of top horses like Magician and Treve at Ascot and looks fully capable of repeating that feat in the Eclipse.
Of course we would all love to see a Dubai-owned horse win the great race, but The Fugue is what fairytales are made off and if she keeps on winning like she does there’s every chance that Andrew Lloyd Webber might be inspired to compose a musical about the great sport. He could even call it A Night at the Races or just plainly Horses, as he did with Cats.
I’ll certainly be the one rooting for her and I simply love a horse with passion, and she clearly looks to be bristling with a passion for success.