The rhythm of the Flat racing year allows little time for rest or reflection. With two months left of a season that has already been one of the most rewarding of his life, John Gosden is off to Kentucky for the annual sale of yearlings. This is the lot of the successful trainer. While one eye has to remain firmly on today — or at least on preparing a three-pronged challenge for the St Leger, the final Classic of the season, at Doncaster on Saturday — the other is roving the horizon. To be at the top of such a competitive profession for more than two decades demands a mastery of time and space worthy of Doctor Who. Next year’s champion is the one that counts.
At the age of 63, Gosden has been a commanding presence in British racing since he returned to England to take out a licence in 1989 after a 10-year stint as a trainer in America. He has won seven English Classics, only the 2,000 Guineas has eluded him, and claimed pretty well every big prize in the calendar while using his experience from his early days in the States to mount a series of highly profitable raids across the Atlantic. Though some regard him as aloof, even arrogant, there is no more passionate advocate or, at times, more devastating critic of his sport, no one more willing to educate and explain. Had Gosden not been a trainer, he would have made a fine headmaster.
Yet, strangely given his consistent success, Gosden won his first trainers’ title just two years ago. This season he is on the trail of his second and, just for good measure, his fourth victory in the St Leger in the last eight years after Lucarno won England’s oldest Classic in 2007 and Arctic Cosmos and Masked Marvel brought the stable back-to-back victories in 2010 and 2011. Gosden first won the race with Shantou for Sheikh Mohammed in 1996. If not necessarily his favourite Classic, it is certainly one he has a happy knack of winning.
“There are more form lines for the horses at this time of the year,” he says. “The Leger is the oldest Classic and it’s a great test for three-year-olds. It identifies potentially the great staying horses for next year. Many of them will be much better at four years old. You just have to be patient.”
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With the other four English Classics positioned so close to the start of the season, there is no room for patience. On the first weekend in May, fillies and colts have to be ready to run hard down the Rowley Mile in the Guineas when the trees have barely broken into blossom. Epsom on Derby Day is equally edgy, a step into the unknown for horse and trainer. The St Leger, perched on the end of the season and at a mile and six and a half furlongs the longest of the Classics, is a link to the past, an old-fashioned test of stamina and of temperament for thoroughbreds who have at least had a season to find their feet.
“You’re still going slightly into the unknown,” says Gosden. “It’s a searching examination of the mind and stamina of a three-year-old. The last half-furlong can still find you out. There are no hiding places. But Doncaster is a fair track and you’ve got a long straight to get yourself organised. Good pedigree, nice action, right mind, those are the qualities I look for in a potential Leger horse.”
In Romsdal, Forever Now and Marzocco, Gosden has assembled a formidable challenge for the Ladbrokes St Leger. The first two, in particular, are typical Gosden candidates. Romsdal, a fast-finishing third in the Derby, represents the Classic form — as Lucarno did seven years ago — and Forever Now is a recent Goodwood winner and a late developer closer to the profile of Arctic Cosmos. Although the betting has Romsdal as joint second favourite behind Kingston Hill, the Derby second, and Forever Now a 14-1 shot, there might not be that much in it. Stable jockey William Buick will certainly have a tricky choice to make. Marzocco, outsider of the three, “usually doesn’t get going until it’s too late,” adds Gosden. “But it might suit him.”
Adding another Classic victory to the Oaks win of his brilliant filly, Taghrooda, would increase the gap to his pursuers in the race for a title based on prize-money and make Gosden the dominant English trainer of recent years. Qipco Champions day in mid-October, the richest day in the British calendar, will decide the outcome. But with Kingman set to confirm his place as the champion miler and Taghrooda a potential challenger to Australia’s supremacy in the Champion Stakes, Gosden can head to Kentucky confident that the present is under control.