Every day this week the well-dressed and half-cut have stopped to pose for photographs with a bronze horse. This horse is Best Mate, frozen in his pomp 20 years after the start of his Gold Cup triptych, and a permanent reminder of how some animals can leap the last into the public consciousness.
“He was front page news of The Times when he won his third Gold Cup,” Henrietta Knight says of the horse she trained to his 2002 to 2004 hegemony with her late husband, Terry Biddlecombe. “And sadly he was on the front page again when he died in 2005. An important person had passed away that day. I can’t remember who.”
Look on social media this week and the anti-racing legion has been a strident voice of dissent as the Festival has had its fun. Knight, now 75, is an interesting counterpoint, damning the overuse of the whip but defending Sir Mark Todd, the Olympic champion horseman banned after a video was circulated of him using a branch of a tree to make a horse move.
After Gordon Elliott’s sit-down protests, this was more fuel to the ire of the animal rights lobby. “A stupid moment which he bitterly regrets,” Knight says of Elliott. “But I think what they have done to Mark Todd is far worse. So many people would pick up a stick and say to a horse, ‘Get through there’. There’s no damage to the horse from waving a few leaves at it. It’s crazy he was stopped from training, but it’s the perception.”
Knight is still involved in working with horses for various trainers but is not afraid to ruffle feathers. Her recent remarks about the respective merits of Irish and British trainers caused a ruckus in yards near and far. “Racing over here does need changing,” she says. “Individual trainers have wonderful set-ups, but the programme book does not suit a lot of horses coming through. Ireland has places like Tipperary with two days of schooling-bumpers and hurdles with 600 horses.
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“People say the Irish have got more money, but they find it easier to make them into champions because they have the facilities to make it happen. The way we run bumpers in England is not to the advantage of the horses in them.” She advocates using courses that sit dormant through the winter to bring on the next generation. “When I’m dead it might happen,” she adds bluntly.
It was in Cork, Ireland, that Knight and Biddlecombe, the Gold Cup-winning jockey from 1967, first saw Best Mate. It was a wet day and he was pulled up in a point-to-point race, but it was just one of those educating rides she thinks are missing over here. “There was an air about him,” she says. “Go to a good race meeting and the top horses have that ‘look-at-me’ stance. The ones with their heads down don’t tend to win the big races. You need a showman and he had star quality.”
The first Gold Cup win was emotional. Knight’s mother had recently died and she was beset by pessimism as she sat in the press tent and watched the race on television. “I was flabbergasted,” she recalls. She ran out of the tent and wished her mother were there to share the moment. She and Biddlecombe celebrated with a Chinese takeaway. There was an air of eccentricity about the couple too, the former biology teacher and jockey and their practical magic laced with superstition, a mix of clutched pearls and pearls of wisdom.
The second win was the easiest and took Best Mate and his jockey, Jim Culloty, to the cusp of a rare hat-trick. Only Golden Miller, Cottage Rake and Arkle had won at least three Gold Cups. The pressure mounted. Hope was supplanted by expectation. “Everyone thought they owned him,” Knight says. Technically, Jim Lewis did and he was there in his lucky Aston Villa scarf. Knight was too angst-ridden to touch her lunch. And then Best Mate hung on to see off Sir Rembrandt and Harbour Pilot, rising to a level that would earn him his place on the pedestal by the winners’ enclosure.
Al Boum Photo could win a third today but is yet to become that crossover star. Back in Lockinge, Oxfordshire, Knight recalls seeing the postman labour up the street with bulging bags of mail. “I went on holiday to Connemara, my favourite place, and packed a suitcase of letters and cards and tried to reply to them.” In the social media age they sound like love letters to a bygone past. “The structure of racing has changed and everything happened at a slower pace then. We relied on the fax machine. Terry couldn’t use the telephone.”
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It ended tragically. Best Mate died of heart failure at Exeter racecourse in November, 2005, although The Times suggested he had “died of generosity”. He was one of those horses that make people ascribe human characteristics to an animal. A best mate, a film star, a show off.
Some felt Knight was cold in the immediate aftermath, which shows perception issues are nothing new in racing. “In a competitive sport like racing, a horse can die in battle, so to speak, or he could have died in a field or crossing the road. I had to take a grip on myself. I believe in fate and fate took its toll. The horse was in fantastic form and looked magnificent that day. When I got home I cried my eyes out but you can’t do that in public. I had to be strong.
“There are so many rules and regulations about where you can bury an animal. You could bury your dog in the back garden and no one would know, but he could not be buried at Exeter.” In the end his ashes were scattered by the winning post at Cheltenham. Ashes to ashes, gold dust to dust.
Is this stuff cruel? Plenty think so and if the emotional bonds between human and horse go beyond gongs and bank balances, the whip remains an issue. “I think they are very bad in Ireland, worse than they are over here,” she says. “A lot of jockeys have been suspended in Irish point-to-point meetings because of the use of the whip. At Cheltenham some jockeys go way over the top. I am very sensitive about how horses should be treated and it’s not thrashing them, which is what some jockeys do.”
Biddlecombe died in 2014 and Knight had already faded from the racing world to care for him. “My role was to look after him, not care for other people’s horses. I could not do this without Terry because he was my other half and had so much knowledge and put so much into it. One of the keys is not getting too upset when things go wrong. Terry was good at that.” An empty yard is a “terrible” place, though, and she drifted back in, visited yards, talked to everyone. She says she knows more about horses now than she ever did, but only one “changed my life”.
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She still does not think Best Mate gets the recognition he deserves, which may have come from the lack of a great rival and running him sparingly. “Today we would have got daily abuse,” she says. “They said we wrapped him in cotton wool. And we did. I didn’t realise that was unfair to the public. Quite honestly, I was thinking about the horse.” Twenty years on from the start of something special, she won’t be alone.
