On the Derby and honouring Lester Piggott

Please don’t call it the Epsom Derby, as some have taken to doing. There are other Derbys — the Kentucky and Irish ones, for instance — but the third English classic of the year doesn’t and shouldn’t need the racecourse name to identify it. 

First run in 1780, it is older than the United States of America, for heaven’s sake. It is true, admittedly and sadly, that for quite some time now it has demeaned itself by bearing a sponsor’s name, but there it is: we live in a commercial age, not an aristocratic one. The present sponsor is Cazoo, a firm of car dealers.

However, this year is different and Cazoo, to its credit, if also displaying commercial acumen, has agreed that the race will now be the Cazoo Derby (In Memory of Lester Piggott), thus honouring the greatest flat-race jockey anyone now living ever saw. Piggott won the Derby nine times, the first when he was only eighteen on Never Say Die in 1954, the last on Teenoso in 1983.

Epsom is a difficult course to ride. This is one reason why the race is so fascinating. Actually, it’s a crazy course. Lester told his biographer, Dick Francis, that “whoever thought of putting that racecourse where it is must have been an idiot. If it wasn’t for the Derby, nobody would run a good horse there. A lot of it is downhill. Horses aren’t supposed to gallop downhill. It’s not so bad if the going is good or soft.” But it is, of course, the difficulties of Epsom which make the race so fascinating as a supreme test of the horse and of the jockey’s skill and judgement.

Never Say Die was unfancied, starting at 33/1 — my mother, who bet only on the Derby and the Grand National, had half-a-crown on him. Back then a winning half-a-crown — 12 ½ P — bet at 33/1 could buy you five bottles of good NV champagne. Lester’s Derby horses never started at such generous odds again. His best three winners were probably Crepello (1957), Sir Ivor (1968) and Nijinsky (1970). Sir Ivor was his favourite among them. There’s a lovely film, The Year of Sir Ivor, easily available.

There were hopes that the Queen would have a runner this Jubilee year. Sadly her well-fancied colt, Reach for the Moon, had a setback in training, though with luck he may win for her at Royal Ascot. The Derby is the only classic her horses haven’t won. The closest she has come was in Coronation Year when Aureole finished second to Pinza, the only winner for the many times champion jockey Gordon Richards.

There have been Derby winners for George IV when Prince of Wales, Edward VII as both Prince and King, and George VI though that was a wartime Derby run at Newmarket. Only one Prime Minister has owned a Derby winner: Lord Rosebery who led in the winner three times, once when he was in office. I suppose many would take a very dim view of a race-horse owning Prime Minister these days. I think Churchill was the last, though he never had a runner in the Derby.

In some respects, The Derby is no longer what it was. It remains a great racing occasion, but it has lost some of its wider public appeal. The same may be said of course for the FA Cup. There is more competition for our interest. 

Moreover, racing used to be the great betting sport, and indeed, continued to be that even after betting shops became legal in the late 1950s. Now there are all sorts of gambling outlets; racing is only one among many, and not perhaps the chief one.

The Derby used to be one of the great popular festivals, commemorated in Frith’s painting The Derby Day. Londoners flocked to Epsom, by train, carriage or horse-drawn bus. The race was run in mid-week, first Wednesday and later Thursday. Its national significance was clear. Parliament did not sit on Derby Day. It was falling attendances that led the switch to Saturday, but imagine the fuss if the race was still run on the Thursday and Parliament took the day off to allow MPs to be at Epsom.  

Even the quality of the race is not always what it used to be, simply because there are now more big races, rich in prestige and prize money, than there were when Lester Piggott was a boy.

Still, for those of us who follow racing it remains one of the biggest days of the year. There is as usual a strong entry from Ireland. Aidan O’Brien, almost as dominating a trainer as Lester was a jockey, saddles four, and any could win. His 23-year-old son Donnacha, now too tall to be a jockey, enters Piz Badile who will be ridden by Frankie Dettori, probably the only jockey today to be almost as much a household name as Lester was.

Still, there could be no more suitable winner in a race in memory of Lester than Desert Crown. The winner of the Dante Stakes at York, he is trained by Sir Michael Stoute, already the trainer of five Derby winners. Sir Michael is now in his seventies. More to the point he trained the last of Lester’s twenty-nine English classic winners: Shadeed in the 1985 Two Thousand Guineas, The Dante Stakes by the way, is named after Dante, the winner of the last wartime Derby in 1945, rather than after the greatest of Italian poets, though the horse, a son of Nearco, was indeed Italian bred.