Ronaldo all set to score?

By Ian Carnaby

Some races stay in the memory for years and years.

There was a spell when I could do little wrong in the Ebor at York, while the Stewards’ Cup was kind to me at around the same time. Tintagel II winning on the Knavesmire in 1970 looks pretty straightforward now. Not only did Lester Piggott decide to stay on board after a ‘disappointing’ run at Brighton, but the great man actually got down to 8st 5lb before winning easily.

That was his minimum weight and woe betide any trainer who evinced unwarranted optimism. Richmond Sturdy, Tintagel’s handler, never sounded optimistic about anything, nor unduly pessimistic. In fact, he said hardly anything at all. I like to think he and Piggott understood each other perfectly without recourse to words.

Sky Diver won the Stewards’ Cup at Goodwood in 1967 and 1968. Dandy Nicholls would have approved of Colonel Peter Payne-Gallwey, because it takes a special kind of talent to get a horse into one of the hottest handicaps of the year with 7st 5lb one year and 7st 6lb the next. Payne-Gallwey, who succumbed to cancer in 1971, was a fascinating character who won the Grand Military Cup on Backsight before a fall terminated his career. He also saddled winners in Cairo and Alexandria while serving in Egypt.

For all the York and Goodwood memories, the handicap which still excites me most is Newbury’s Totesport Trophy Handicap Hurdle, still referred to by people of my generation as the Schweppes. The drinks firm finally tired of abandonments but it must have been very hard to give up an event which generated so much publicity.

The key figure was, of course, Captain H Ryan Price, who won four of the first five runnings with Rosyth (twice), Le Vermentois and Hill House. Horses from the stable which seemed to have lost their way miraculously found their best form again in the nick of time. When Hill House finished a modest fourth on his final outing before the big race, the stewards took the unusual step of announcing that there would definitely be an official inquiry if he happened to win. He hacked up for Josh Gifford and there were stormy scenes around the unsaddling enclosure afterwards

Anyone with six and a half years’ service with the Commando unit of the North Staffordshire Regiment was unlikely to be fazed by any of this. Price, his trilby tilted at the usual rakish angle, took it all in his stride and said little to the press as the inquiry duly went ahead. In the end, the vets found that Hill House ‘manufactured his own cortisol’ in the course of a race. Someone should have bottled it, because it never enabled him to win again.

Years later I went to see Josh, who’d taken over at Findon, for BBC Radio and asked him whether the Captain had ever been worried about the threat of an inquiry. He found the idea of this very amusing.

“Worried? Not at all. It just made him even more determined to win it!” he laughed.

Price has been gone these many years and so, too, has Ken Allday, the former Jockey Club Controller of Programmes, with whom I worked in 1970.

“The problem we have with Ryan Price”, Ken said, “is that he isn’t necessarily trying to pull off a gamble. He just does things for the hell of it, or to poke us in the eye”. He said it entirely without rancour and I have no doubt that he was right.

One day, in a 42-runner maiden at the start of a new Flat season, the Captain had Lester on the stable’s fancied runner and a certain D Coleman on the 33/1 outsider Mustwyn. Apart from the fact that it certainly wasn’t David, no one had the vaguest idea who D Coleman was, but he didn’t claim an allowance. Needless to say, Mustwyn won easily and D Coleman turned out to be the Australian Des Coleman, who’d stopped off on his way to Ireland, where he was due to take up a retainer. Price did it simply because he could, and I’m pleased and relieved to say that I eventually cottoned on in time for a tiny race at Brighton, where stable-jockey Brian Taylor rode the favourite and Shaun Salmon popped up on the yard’s 16/1 winner.

As I say, the Schweppes generated huge publicity but the occasional surprise sometimes left the crowd looking on in disbelief. I distinctly remember the thunderclap of approval that greeted Persian War in 1968 contrasting sharply with Cala Mesquida’s triumph three years later, when you could have heard a pin drop. As 33/1 shots go, Cala Mesquida was pretty unfindable.

As for this year, I just wondered at Wincanton the other day whether a good front-running performance by Benfleet Boy in a modest handicap hurdle might hold the key. He carried 11st 11lb in very testing ground but held on gamely, thus paying a compliment to Paul Nicholls’ Qozak, who’d beaten him easily at Taunton and, more particularly, to David Pipe’s Ronaldo Des Mottes, who had him back in fifth when winning a Kempton handicap hurdle rather easily last time.

The interesting thing about Ronaldo des Mottes is that far shrewder observers than I had him marked down for the Greatwood Hurdle at Cheltenham, where he ran no race. I think you will see a very different Ronaldo this time and my hunch is that, were he still with us, Captain H R Price’s might have thought him the pick of the weights. There is no doubt whatever that he’d approve of Pipe running stable-companion Mamlook, as well.

“Keep ’em guessing”, he’d have said, tipping his hat slightly further down over one eye. Let’s hope we’ve guessed correctly.