rivals

At the start of each season the late Sir Henry Cecil would buy a large notebook and divide its final pages into squares, "like a crossword puzzle," to be filled in, one by one, when he trained a winner. Group wins were inked-in in colour. Each victory would send him to the trainers' championship table in the Racing Post, to see whether he had moved up, or further "in front of Michael Stoute, or any nearer to John Gosden." With Sir Michael Stoute's last turf runner, at Nottingham last week,...