The Times - UK (2022-03-18)

8 Friday March 18 2022

the times

CHELTENHAM

2022

There was an air of eccentricity

about the couple too, the former

biology teacher and jockey and

their practical magic laced with

superstition, a mix of clutched

pearls and pearls of wisdom.

The second win was the easiest

and took Best Mate and his jockey,

Jim Culloty, to the cusp of a rare

hat-trick. Only Golden Miller,

Cottage Rake and Arkle had won

at least three Gold Cups. The

pressure mounted. Hope was

supplanted by expectation.

“Everyone thought they owned

him,” Knight says. Technically,

Jim Lewis did and he was there in

his lucky Aston Villa scarf.

Knight was too angst-ridden to

touch her lunch. And then Best

Mate hung on to see off Sir

Rembrandt and Harbour Pilot, rising

to a level that would earn him his place

on the pedestal by the winners’

enclosure.

Al Boum Photo could win a third

today but is yet to become that crossover

star. Back in Lockinge, Oxfordshire,

Knight recalls seeing the postman labour

up the street with bulging bags of mail.

“I went on holiday to Connemara,

my favourite place, and packed a

suitcase of letters and cards and

tried to reply to them.” In the

social media age they sound

E

very day this week the well-

dressed and half-cut have

stopped to pose for

photographs with a bronze

horse. This horse is Best Mate,

frozen in his pomp 20 years after the

start of his Gold Cup triptych, and a

permanent reminder of how some

animals can leap the last into the public

consciousness.

“He was front page news of The Times

when he won his third Gold Cup,”

Henrietta Knight says of the horse she

trained to his 2002 to 2004 hegemony

with her late husband, Terry

Biddlecombe. “And sadly he was on the

front page again when he died in 2005.

An important person had passed away

that day. I can’t remember who.”

Look on social media this week and

the anti-racing legion has been a strident

voice of dissent as the Festival has had

its fun. Knight, now 75, is an interesting

counterpoint, damning the overuse of

the whip but defending Sir Mark Todd,

the Olympic champion horseman

banned after a video was circulated of

him using a branch of a tree to make a

horse move. After Gordon Elliott’s sit-

down protests, this was more fuel to the

ire of the animal rights lobby. “A stupid

moment which he bitterly regrets,”

Knight says of Elliott. “But I think what

they have done to Mark Todd is far

worse. So many people would pick up a

stick and say to a horse, ‘Get through

there’. There’s no damage to the horse

from waving a few leaves at it. It’s crazy

he was stopped from training, but it’s the

perception.”

Knight is still involved in

working with horses for

various trainers but is not

afraid to ruffle feathers. Her

recent remarks about the

respective merits of Irish and

British trainers caused a

ruckus in yards near and far.

“Racing over here does need

changing,” she says.

“Individual trainers have

wonderful set-ups, but the

programme book does not

suit a lot of horses coming

through. Ireland has places

like Tipperary with two days

of schooling-bumpers and

hurdles with 600 horses.

People say the Irish have got

more money, but they find it

easier to make them into

champions because they have

the facilities to make it happen.

The way we run bumpers in

England is not to the advantage of the

horses in them.” She advocates using

courses that sit dormant through the

winter to bring on the next generation.

“When I’m dead it might happen,” she

adds bluntly.

It was in Cork, Ireland, that Knight

and Biddlecombe, the Gold Cup-winning

jockey from 1967, first saw Best Mate. It

was a wet day and he was pulled up in a

point-to-point race, but it was just one of

those educating rides she thinks are

missing over here. “There was an air

about him,” she says. “Go to a good race

meeting and the top horses have that

‘look-at-me’ stance. The ones with their

heads down don’t tend to win the big

races. You need a showman and he had

star quality.”

The first Gold Cup win was emotional.

Knight’s mother had recently died and

she was beset by pessimism as she sat in

the press tent and watched the race on

television. “I was flabbergasted,” she

recalls. She ran out of the tent and

wished her mother were there to share

the moment. She and Biddlecombe

celebrated with a Chinese takeaway.

Immortalised in bronze, ‘showman’

Best Mate retains ‘look-at-me stance’

like love letters to a bygone past. “The

structure of racing has changed and

everything happened at a slower pace

then. We relied on the fax machine.

Terry couldn’t use the telephone.”

It ended tragically. Best Mate died of

heart failure at Exeter racecourse in

November, 2005, although The Times

suggested he had “died of generosity”.

He was one of those horses that make

people ascribe human characteristics to

an animal. A best mate, a film star, a

show off.

Some felt Knight was cold in the

immediate aftermath, which shows

perception issues are nothing new in

racing. “In a competitive sport like

racing, a horse can die in battle, so to

speak, or he could have died in a field or

crossing the road. I had to take a grip on

myself. I believe in fate and fate took its

toll. The horse was in fantastic form and

looked magnificent that day. When I got

home I cried my eyes out but you can’t

do that in public. I had to be strong.

“There are so many rules and

regulations about where you can bury an

animal. You could bury your dog in the

back garden and no one would know, but

he could not be buried at Exeter.” In the

end his ashes were scattered by the

winning post at Cheltenham. Ashes to

ashes, gold dust to dust.

Is this stuff cruel? Plenty think so and

if the emotional bonds between human

and horse go beyond gongs and bank

balances, the whip remains an issue. “I

think they are very bad in Ireland, worse

than they are over here,” she says. “A lot

of jockeys have been suspended in Irish

point-to-point meetings because of the

use of the whip. At Cheltenham some

jockeys go way over the top. I am very

sensitive about how horses should be

treated and it’s not thrashing them,

which is what some jockeys do.”

Biddlecombe died in 2014 and Knight

had already faded from the racing world

to care for him. “My role was to look

after him, not care for other people’s

horses. I could not do this without Terry

because he was my other half and had so

much knowledge and put so much into

it. One of the keys is not getting too

upset when things go wrong. Terry was

good at that.” An empty yard is a

“terrible” place, though, and she drifted

back in, visited yards, talked to everyone.

She says she knows more about horses

now than she ever did, but only one

“changed my life”.

She still does not think Best Mate gets

the recognition he deserves, which may

have come from the lack of a great

rival and running him sparingly.

“Today we would have got daily

abuse,” she says. “They said we

wrapped him in cotton wool. And we

did. I didn’t realise that was unfair

to the public. Quite

honestly, I was thinking

about the horse.”

Twenty years on

from the start of

something special,

she won’t be alone.

Henrietta Knight speaks

to Rick Broadbent about

the ‘star’ horse she

trained to a stirring

Gold Cup hat-trick

Culloty rides Best Mate in

2002 to the first of three

Gold Cups. Inset left, the

horse’s owner Lewis, on

the left of the photo, and

Culloty kiss trainer Knight,

below, who is now 75 and

who says that after Best

Mate’s first Gold Cup win

she was “flabbergasted”

but by the time he landed

the hat-trick, hope had

turned to expectation

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BARRY BATCHELOR/PA

“

British racing does not

suit a lot of young horses.

Ireland, however, has

schooling-bumpers and

hurdles to help progress

fthe

T a b t s p a J h C a p s “ h J h K t

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3

Best Mate was the first

three-times Gold Cup

winner since Arkle, from

1964 to 1966. Only Golden

Miller (five, from 1932 to

1936) has won more

in a row

*