Success can come at a hidden price. For Tom Queally, a heady sequence of five group one winners in 2009 meant his targets for this year were “almost unachievable”. In seeking to consolidate his new stature, the young jockey faces a critical seven days.
First, at Sandown Park on Saturday, Queally will ride Twice Over, favourite to give Henry Cecil’s stable its first Coral-Eclipse winner for 32 years. Then, on home territory at Newmarket on Friday week, Queally hopes to win a second successive Darley July Cup on Fleeting Spirit.
He has an inscrutable face, ideal as the weighing-room prankster he is known to be, but the enormity of these mounts is clear. “What I did last year was unbelievable, really,” he said yesterday. “It made me more confident but I also knew I’d got it all to do this season — it set me an almost unachievable target.
“People are saying I seem quiet, and they may be right, but if I could end up with two or three group ones it will still be a marvellous year.”
So far, this has been a summer of frustration for Queally. He thought he had ridden his first classic winner, on Jacqueline Quest in the 1,000 Guineas, only to be deprived in the stewards’ room. Fancied rides for Cecil, his employer, in the Derby and Oaks both disappointed, before Twice Over narrowly failed in Royal Ascot’s most prestigious race, the Prince of Wales’s Stakes.
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Six years after becoming champion apprentice in his first British season, Queally, 25, is philosophical. “That’s the way it is, with the highs and lows,” he said. “You can’t get too bogged down by expectations — things go wrong more than they go right.”
So he takes nothing for granted about the coming week — not even the mount on Fleeting Spirit. This electric filly has had five jockeys in her past eight races but only Queally has secured a group one win on her. Jeremy Noseda, her trainer, is evidently keen that the partnership should resume at the scene of her greatest triumph.
“I’d be hoping to ride her but it’s not cast in stone yet,” Queally said. “I was offered the ride in the Golden Jubilee at Ascot but had to ride for Henry instead. I know she was only fourth but she’ll have improved a bit for the run and the draw had a major influence there.”
His features soften as he recalls the July Cup a year ago. “It was very much a last-minute thing, getting the ride, but it was a magnificent day,” he said. “She’s as quick as anything I’ve ridden and, as I live in Newmarket, the July meeting is special to me.”
Cup day will be a Friday for the last time next week. Following commercial fashion, Newmarket is moving the fixture to encompass a Saturday in 2011 — hopefully, a less cluttered sporting Saturday than that which confronts Sandown this week, with the Eclipse having to fight its corner against Wimbledon, Henley and Lord’s, not to mention the World Cup.
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Queally will notice no distractions, at least until Twice Over has run. He finished only seventh behind Sea The Stars in the Eclipse last year and was then given a two-month break, Cecil nursing him back with two lower-grade wins before successfully aiming at the Champion Stakes.
Similar targets await this autumn but Queally, who rode work on the five-year-old yesterday morning, is confident he will not have to wait so long for fulfilment. He said: “He wasn’t beaten far at Ascot. I was further back than I wanted to be early in the race — I just couldn’t get enough momentum to hold a position — but he’d have a big chance on Saturday. The race is starting to cut up.”
Right on cue, Aidan O’Brien declared that his six remaining entries will be reduced to just two runners — Viscount Nelson and a pacemaker. “We have other races in mind for Steinbeck, Beethoven and Fencing Master,” he said.