Earlier this month and 52 years after the first of more than 4,000 winners, the greatest Flat trainer of the last half century, 10-time champion Sir Michael Stoute, retired in his own inimitable way; without fanfare, ceremony or interview.
In other sports you can be cooked by the time you are 50. It inevitably gets harder as your old core owners die off and new younger owners seem to prefer a trainer from the same generation, so it is remarkable that Stoute, 79, has got to within touching distance of 80 at the helm of such a successful stable.
He has been a part of the racing establishment so long that it is easy to forget that the son of the chief of police in Barbados only made his first visit to this country aged 19. By that stage, having been brought up beside the racetrack in Barbados, he was already hooked on racing but he was, essentially, a stranger in a strange land and he was certainly not familiar with British racing.
He joined Pat Rohan in Yorkshire where, for three years, he was given a thorough grounding. At that stage he could easily have been lost to the training ranks. At home in Barbados he had done some racing commentary and he applied to the BBC for a vacant commentary position.
“I went for a trial at Newbury,” he recalled once, “with five others. But it was steeplechasing and I’d never seen jump racing before so my effort was abysmal.” The job went to Julian Wilson, who became a close friend in Newmarket.
In 1968 he joined Doug Smith and, following the death of Jack Jarvis, was given his first taste of real responsibility by being put in charge of Lord Roseberry’s horses at Park Lodge until 1970 when he joined Tom Jones for a year.
At the start of the 1972 season he branched out on his own and within a month, Sandal – a horse owned by his father – won a handicap at Newmarket with Lester Piggott up. Pat Rohan’s runner was second. That season he went on to saddle 13 winners from 13 horses.
The following year he moved into a Beech Hurst, then a small yard on the Bury Road with 20 horses, but he started building more boxes and eventually added Freemason Lodge on the other side of the road. If he needed a break he got it with Alphadamus, a horse he had bought on spec for £1,200 in 1971, who won the Stewards Cup in 1973. He was up and running.
Shergar, his first of six Derby winners, in 1981, is probably the horse for which he will be best remembered though that is as much for what happened to the horse after he had left Stoute when he was kidnapped from the Aga Khan’s stud in Ireland and killed in 1983.
His 10 length Derby victory under a teenage Walter Swinburn remains a record margin. Another of his Derby winners, Workforce, who went on to be his only Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe winner, also holds the record for the fastest Derby time.
The one Classic that eluded him for years was the St Leger. Year after year the Stoute trained favourite would contrive a way to get beat but Conduit, ridden by Frankie Dettori, finally did it in 2008 famously earning the trainer a huge post race smacker from the ebullient jockey.
It is not like he has not been a force in the 21st Century either. His 82 Royal Ascot winners included the nations’ favourite Ascot winner Estimate who, in winning the meeting’s most prestigious race in 2013, meant the Queen became the first reigning monarch to win the race in 300 years. And his handling of the inexperienced but ultimately fragile Desert Crown to win the 2022 Derby on just his third start two years ago proved he still had it 50 years after Sandal. Ironically his roll of honour on the Flat which also includes two Japan Cups, a Dubai World Cup and eight Breeders’ Cups is so extensive, his Champion Hurdle win with Kribensis in 1990 hardly warrants a mention.
He crossed the Armytage path a couple of times. I can date one of our Guernsey house cows to 1978 because she was called Salinia, born on the day Stoute’s Fair Salinia won his first Oaks. In 2006 I asked him to bring his black and tan terrier dog, Rocky, to the David Nicholson’s memorial service in Stow-on-the-Wold because my black and tan bitch was in season. We shut them in the boot of my car during the service and one of the offspring, ‘Duke’, went back to Freemason Lodge. But he was quite a character and it resulted in the postman not delivering the mail to the door for the next 10 years.
There is no formula for setting one trainer apart from another but according to his former assistants, nearly all of whom went on to become successful trainers, Stoute had a number of things going for him. He had an obsessive attention to detail, a desire to always do better and get the absolute best out of each horse. There was bespoke training for each horse so that a string of 50 could be doing 25 marginally different routines on a morning. He had an ability to get his staff to work to a level which was more than the sum of its parts, imbue enormous confidence in his jockeys as much through loyalty as anything else and, setting him apart from the rest, a genuine photographic memory.
“I remember,” says John Ferguson, “we had eight runners and five winners one day. He asked me and James Fanshawe (his other assistant) round for a celebration and we spent two hours talking about the three horses which got beat. That’s him – proud of his achievements but never dwelling on them.”
“Patience was one of the key things,” recalls Fanshawe. “Back when I was there (late 80s) there wasn’t the rush and first lot might spend two hours going round the Heath. If he wanted to retain things he would write things on his hand with his finger as an imaginary pen – he had photographic memory. He ensured the yard was a relaxed environment for the horses.”
His small eccentricities included humming, whistling and go ‘bumpity boum’ as he made his way across the Heath to meet his string. His passion outside racing was cricket. For a long time he captained Newmarket’s racing team and Michael Holding, the West Indian fast bowler nicknamed Whispering Death by English, became a great friend. He took a house nearby Newmarket and virtually lived in the yard in the summers.
‘Genius’ is probably an overused accolade in sport but Sir Michael Stoute was one of them.
