Blast From The Past: Celebration Mile

Goodwood’s Celebration Mile may not itself be a Group 1 contest but it’s been won by plenty of Group 1 milers over the years. In 2010, for example, it went to the subsequent Queen Elizabeth II Stakes winner Poet’s Voice, ridden by Frankie Dettori and trained by Saeed bin Suroor.

Fourteen years earlier, the Godolphin team won the Celebration Mile with another future ‘QE II’ winner, Mark of Esteem. With a rating of 137 that season, Mark of Esteem was Timeform’s Horse of the Year in 1996, as well as Best Three-Year-Old Colt and Best Miler. Besides going on to put up the best performance of the season when winning the Queen Elizabeth II impressively from the 1000 Guineas winner Bosra Sham, that was also the day when Dettori went through the Ascot card to complete his famous ‘Magnificent Seven’.

Mark of Esteem was a Guineas winner himself, returning from a winter in Dubai to win at Newmarket in a thrilling finish with Even Top and Bijou d’Inde. Looking back now at his overall record, Mark of Esteem was clearly a ‘good thing’ at Goodwood, but that certainly wasn’t how things looked at the time. He started favourite, but only at 11/4 in a field of seven where all bar one of the runners started at 6/1 or shorter.

The Celebration Mile was Mark of Esteem’s first race for over two months and he had something to prove after beating only one home in the St James’s Palace Stakes at Royal Ascot (won by Bijou d’Inde) when giving the impression that he wasn’t right. He only ran at Ascot after missing an intended run in the Derby because of a high temperature, while it was also suggested that his hard race in the 2000 Guineas might have left a long-term mark.

Despite that, and carrying a 6 lb penalty for his Guineas win, Mark of Esteem was well backed at Goodwood and proved any doubters wrong with what Racehorses of 1996 described as ‘a cracking performance…showing a fine turn of foot after having to be switched to get a clear run and trouncing Bishop of Cashel by three and a half lengths, with Alhaarth three quarters of a length back in third. In our book, this represented the best performance of the season up to that time by a three-year-old miler.’

The runner-up, four-year-old Bishop of Cashel, won the Park Stakes at Doncaster next time out, while Alhaarth was also successful next time in Group 2 company in France. This was the third meeting between Mark of Esteem and Alhaarth who had been the previous season’s top two-year-old and had been sent off favourite when only fourth behind Mark of Esteem in the Guineas. They had first met on their respective debuts in a Newmarket maiden the previous summer in which Alhaarth had beaten the then Henry Cecil-trained Mark of Esteem by a neck.