EPSOM, UK — This is what vindication looks like: a usually composed superstar trainer with a hint of tears in his eyes, his chest heaving, the emotion a bit too much. City Of Troy was Aidan O'Brien's 10th Derby winner – but this one felt different. It would be ludicrous to say his credibility was [...]

The common man or woman rarely owns a Derby winner but they are peppered across the 244-year history of what Disraeli called 'the Blue Riband of the Turf.' The race tends to be exclusive, but the urge to win it was always universal. The finest challenges in sport go beyond financial incentive to the Corinthian [...]

On Wednesday May 8, 2024, as on all days, there were many things to be upset about: the conflagration in Gaza, the news from Ukraine, or a splash in The Guardian that said climate change is accelerating wildly. Into the bad news cycle too dropped the death of a beautiful horse, Hidden Law, who won [...]

The phrase “we'll never see his or her like again” is poignant, heartfelt, and often not true. To say the all-time greatest in sport has already been and gone traps us in the past. When Frankel won the 2011 2,000 Guineas with radiant ease I called the sports desk of The Observer from the football [...]

Newmarket's Craven meeting could just as well be called Anticipation Week. Anticipation is climbing the steps of a venerated football stadium for a night game to find the floodlights blazing and the grass slick and lush. It's the bounce of the England cricket team down the pavilion steps to start an Ashes series. It's checking [...]

The rider who streaked home in the £4.7m Sheema Classic in Dubai at the weekend is also odds-on to win something rather more quaint. The title of champion Flat race jockey was once contested with fierce pride by men who thrashed car engines dashing up and down the land to ride a winner at Redcar [...]

When I started covering the Cheltenham Festival in the late 1980s it was still a place of myth and legend: whiskey priests, all-night card schools, hopeful (but not expectant) Irish pilgrimages, farmers with chances of winning a race and wince-inducing whip-use up the hill. It was a place chiefly for aficionados – the county set and [...]

A passion that was held against him by some, 20 years ago, has given Sir Alex Ferguson a new universe of pleasure. They say there are no second acts in the lives of the famous – but you would have disputed that after seeing the former Manchester United manager's Spirit Dancer (GB) win the Howden [...]

The growing supremacy of the Willie Mullins stable in National Hunt racing begs the question: is it damaging anybody or anything? Dominance is the raison d'etre of elite sport. When Rafa Nadal was winning 14 French Open tennis titles it never entered his head that what he was doing might be harmful to the game. [...]

One test of a visit to a racing yard is whether you come away wishing you owned a horse to send there. David Menuisier's set-up is one such place. If you like patient trainers with strong opinions who pride themselves on being self-made while displaying a virtuoso's touch, Dancing Brave's old home near Pulborough in [...]

The first thing you pick up on at David Menuisier's yard in Pulborough, West Sussex, is a feeling of calm or harmony. Veterans of training ground visits will recall stepping into authoritarian mini states, ruled by fear, or at the very least by hierarchy. A lifetime in sport teaches you one thing above all: teamwork, [...]

Anfield or Old Trafford it isn't, but that didn't stop Premierisation coming to Plumpton, a National Hunt track at the foot of the South Downs more easily associated with farmers, pensioners and Brighton sharps on country forays than marketing resets. The second track to stage a Premier fixture in a two-year trial of 170 meetings [...]