Jamie Lynch: Blitz and Glamour in Paris

Call it a turning point or a tipping point, but every top horse has one. Subtle or stark, mind or body, trip or tactics, a win or a loss, whatever the catalyst there’s always a pivotal point, a make-or-break moment, as much heard as seen with a gentle click of a key in a lock to the door of an epiphany, for the horse themselves or its management team.

It happens to the greatest. It happened to the greatest. For Frankel, or pointedly for Sir Henry Cecil and, moreover, Tom Queally, the game-changer to correct the course of an unsinkable ship came the race after the Guineas, at Royal Ascot, where Frankel was frankly asked the impossible in chasing down his pacemaker so far out and so quickly, a valuable lesson learnt, as from that point forth the pacemakers and horse-makers acted in perfect harmony, to make the perfect horse.

For his brother, the turning point was even more tactical, even more tangible and even more transformative, Noble Mission turning from Cringer into Battle Cat for the focus of front running. In Timeform terms, Noble Mission improved around a stone for the positive tactics, engendering a positive new attitude and bringing a positive string of results, all the way to an all-the-way win in the 2014 Champion Stakes.

But what about the horse this year who, with the same strategic switch in style, has improved not one stone, not two stone, but three stone, almost under the radar, and rides into Paris this weekend in hope and glory, on a mission to plant a British flag in Group 1 French territory.

Ask who the leading three-year-old sprinter is in Britain and only one hand goes up, a manicured, Northern hand, Quiet Reflection out on her own with a conspicuous CV including the Commonwealth Cup and Sprint Cup. But who’s the second best?

While Shalaa has been away, Quiet Reflection hasn’t been the only meteoric mouse at play, and though Quiet Reflection is the most glamorous, there’s a boy who’s becoming just as glamorous, named Just Glamorous, and it’s a Jamie Vardy-style story of a long-time lower-leaguer who has used his burst to burst into the big time.

By the end of June 2016, only three months ago, Just Glamorous hadn’t even won a race, and it’s not as if he was sat on his hands, either, running eleven times over the period of a full year. But there was at least a clue in the second of those, when he was taken to Royal Ascot no less, for the Windsor Castle Stakes, in which his trainer Ron Harris had saddled the runner-up, at 100/1, the year before.

‘I really thought before we’d ever run him that Just Glamorous was absolutely a proper horse,’ said Harris. ‘I know the family well because of Glamorous Spirit, his half-sister, who won the Sapphire Stakes in Ireland for us, and I also had Go Glamorous who got injured, but this horse looked a different specimen altogether, even from his early days.’

Glamorous Spirit was clue number two, from whom Just Glamorous would eventually take a lead, figuratively and literally, but his two-year-old season was like a faulty lighter: highly tried, shaken up, teasing with flickering sparks, but never catching fire.

Patience was tested, and the patient was tested, as the trainer explored all avenues for the reason Just Glamorous was just ordinary on the track, when everything about him had convinced Harris he was out of the ordinary. ‘In the winter I had someone come and scope him, we found a problem, operated on him, brought him back as a three-year-old and thought okay, now we’ve got him right, let’s go.’

But it was much the same story through four placed runs, all stalk but no reaction, the cheap champagne that fizzed but didn’t pop, culminating with a 0-70 on the polytrack at Lingfield. ‘That day I was convinced he was thrown-in, but we were left disappointed when he got beat again; he was held up again and got beat again.’

In such a systematic sport, usually in horse racing the answer to the future is found in the past, via form lines or family lines, and after an eleventh straight defeat Harris asked a different question of Just Glamorous: Who Do You Think You Are?  Rather than the physiology he looked into the genealogy, to see what made the family tick, with a direct reference point.

‘I said to the owner: I think we ought to run this horse the same way we rode Glamorous Spirit, because, by holding him up, we could be taking the speed out of him.’

Nobody then could guess at the effect, the Eureka effect. 

It looked as if the best-laid plan had gone to waste when the rain poured down at Haydock on the 2^nd of July. ‘It was terrible ground,’ recalls Harris. ‘We got Shane Kelly to ride him, and what I was going to ask him to do was, in theory, a crazy idea. I said to Shane “go and make it”. Shane said “are you sure we’ll get home on this ground, Ron?” “There’s only one way to find out,” I said, “let him rip.”

‘He pinged out the gate, and that was that – he never stopped the whole way.’

A breakthrough was made, but the mystery remained as to what prompted it, and, at first, Harris wondered whether the weather was the key, and that, being by Arcano, some soft ground was what the horse had been wanting all along.

What was the point at Haydock? High point, turning point, or point of take off?

Monkman himself couldn’t have answered the question any more spectacularly than Just Glamorous did at Sandown eleven days later. Again, the red-herring rain arrived, but above that Just Glamorous had arrived, the shackles off, the game on, the new game of follow the leader, and he left his rivals toiling…by ten lengths.

‘The clerk of the course said “I’ve never had a horse win a sprint race here by ten lengths. It must be quick.” “Oh he’s quick alright,” I said.’

Too fast, two fast became three when Just Glamorous completed the hat-trick in the same way, his way, at York later in July. Even the outside lane of the motorway has its roadworks, and Just Glamorous was subsequently slowed up by his, at Goodwood and back at York, where different factors broke his rhythm, the transitory calm before the Storming of the Bastille, part 1.

In the sprint division, in the space of a month, he’d been promoted to the Championship, but the Group 3 Prix du Petit Couvert at Chantilly was qualification for the Champions League. Brave: yes. Foolish: no, not when there’s method behind the mountain-climbing madness.

‘What this horse has got is blitzing speed,’ explained Harris, ’and he travels over the first three furlongs so easily. My idea was that the French jockeys, who tend to wait then sprint for the last furlong and a half or so, will think our fella would fall in a heap, but I knew he’d take some pegging back.’

A simple plan, a patriotic plan, but a plan all the same, and all that was required to execute it was a cunning British-based jockey to outmanoeuvre his sleepy French counterparts…

It was the day of the Arc trials, and Ted Durcan was booked for Sir Michael Stoute’s Midterm in the Prix Niel, so Ted Durcan was the man primed and prepped by Harris for Project Glamorous. However, the record books confirm that it was Vincent Cheminaud, and not Ted Durcan, who pushed Midterm who pushed Makahiki all the way. Durcan and his plane never left the ground due to technical difficulties.

Harris picks up the story within the story: ‘Ted rang and told me what the problem was, had done everything he could, and wasn’t going to get there. And I was thinking Luke Morris and Martin Harley [engaged riders of Marsha and Goldream in Just Glamorous’ race] would be on the same plane, but it turns out there were two planes at the same time and they got away fine, not that I knew, I just thought we’d better get in first and get this lad quick [whose agent had already rung up in the week for the ride] – so we got Pierre-Charles Boudot, and that’s how it all came about.

‘But then I thought: how do we explain what we want and what the horse needs? It’s fair to say my French isn’t very good. But his English was better than my French, and between us we managed to make it clear what the plan was. And the rest is history.’

In a little over 56 seconds, a Pierre-powered Just Glamorous ran the legs off the Group 3 field, on foreign land but from familiar foes, because the pair that chased him home were likewise British, which brings us to his rating, the culmination of that three-stone gain.

To beat the listed-winning and upwardly-mobile Marsha by three lengths, with a further length and a half back to last year’s Abbaye winner Goldream, means we’re definitely now in Group 1 territory with Just Glamorous, whose Timeform rating of 124 puts him just 2 lb behind Quiet Reflection. Okay, so the rating may be conditional, but the Abbaye takes place under the exact same conditions, save for the unknown of the draw and the known of Mecca’s Angel, one of the few horses around able to sneer at a figure of 124, needing a bulky baggage allowance of 132 lb for her trip to Paris.

It’s the same again for Just Glamorous. Same course. Same distance. Same game plan. How about same jockey?

‘Before he even got off the horse, the agent said to me: “keep the ride for the Abbaye?” And it wasn’t a hard question for the owner when he’s just won in that way.’

And what, if anything, did Pierre-Charles Boudot himself communicate? ‘I’ll never forget,’ said Harris. ‘This horse - go fast enough - and go faster. Those were his words, which I understood perfectly, knowing the horse and watching the race. He was never, ever under any pressure, and it made me wonder how fast he could have gone if pushed.

‘I’ve always had great faith in this horse, but in my wildest dreams I didn’t think he was that good.’

The Just Glamorous story is one of faith, of belief, of perseverance. It’s the story of every racehorse, Just Glamorous or just average. Most trundle around, few fly like him, but all bring excitement to those involved in them.

‘I’m excited for the future,’ says Harris. ‘Whatever happens on Sunday, we know we’ve got a proper horse. And it’s an amazing story for the owners who’ve been so loyal and unbelievable in their support of me. He’s the horse of our lifetime.’

Call it a turning point or a tipping point, but every top horse has one. But for no other top horse has the turning point come so belatedly, then so dramatically, and so pointedly, as for Just Glamorous, who has made his point, and whose point made him: point and shoot.