Hannon quite unstoppable

By Ian Carnaby

Richard Hannon is so affable and easy-going that it is hard to imagine him making his point in anything but the politest way. But he was very keen indeed for Paco Boy to go for the Prix de la Foret at Longchamp rather than the Breeders Cup, and it may have taken quite a few polite glasses of wine to bring the owners around to his way of thinking.

“I’m very, very pleased with Paco Boy”, he told me recently. “He’s come on a lot and really KNOWS he’s good. He wants to work over the top of all the others at home and will be a tremendous horse next year. He’s better at seven furlongs than a mile and the Foret the day before the Arc is the perfect race for him. I admit I’m dead against a trip to the Breeders’ Cup but we’ll see”.

Hannon has no particular antipathy towards the American extravaganza although it brings back painful memories.

“Well, we lost Mr Brooks with a broken leg at Gulfstream Park”, he said. “It was Lester’s idea, you know, and he ended up in hospital with serious injuries. It’s just different over there with this emphasis on sheer speed out of the gate, especially in the Sprint. Dick Hern did everything possible before Dayjur went over and even had this loud bell rigged up at home. And this American guy said to him: ‘Mr Hern, if he hears the bell, he’s left!’”.

Hannon’s success with two-year olds is such that people sometimes forget his record with older horses. He has won the 2000 Guineas three times, countless top seven-furlong and mile races, an Ebor, a Doncaster Cup and a November Handicap. The winners just keep rolling off the production line and it is rare indeed to hear of any setbacks or sickness. Working out of two yards, with Herridge added to the original one at East Everleigh several years ago, is the key factor because a virus affecting one may not reach the other.

Sales races have become meat and drink to him

Where the juveniles are concerned, the trainer has simply blitzed the opposition this year. To send out more than sixty individual winners is truly extraordinary and it is not as if he has been picking up maiden auction events at Bath and Brighton. The very valuable sales races have become meat and drink to him and a recent outing to the Curragh netted two enormous prizes as Soul City made all in the Goffs Million and Minor Vamp followed up in the Goffs Fillies’ version, beating stable-companion Baileys Cacao for good measure.

Sales races can be won by bargain basement purchases running off a very low weight. But Hannon’s contenders often have high-class form to their name, with Soul City, for example, having won the Group Three Prix La Rochette at Longchamp following a Listed triumph at Deauville. At 88,000 euros he was a veritable ‘steal’ and there are value buys wherever you look in the two stables. Between them, Peter Doyle and his son Ross and Richard and his son Richard junior have bought very well indeed. When the winners of sales races are included in the bookmakers’ ante-post lists on the following year’s Classics, quite a few people must be doing something right.

The trainers’ championship is decided on prize-money, of course, so there is no realistic chance that Hannon can overtake Aidan O’Brien, though he is very close to Sir Michael Stoute. Numerically he would win by a country mile, his 154 winners as of October 1 putting him more than fifty ahead of Mark Johnston - not bad for someone who started out as a drummer with the Troggs and now includes The Queen among his list of owners.

Close friends will tell you he has changed not a jot. He grins and tells you that the music business was a hard game anyway, with the Troggs lead singer John Bates ending up as a bookmaker in Andover. And there have been enough family worries, including his daughter Fanny’s serious illness and his wife Jo’s kidney transplant, to leave him pretty sure of life’s priorities. If you asked him point blank how many Group winners he’s had this year, he’d ask for a bit more time to work it out. He might even need to switch off the mobile phone and pour himself a small glass of dry white.

To save time, the answer is ten. Well, it was as October dawned, anyway. But the Prix de la Foret is a Group 1, of course...