Weekend preview: Talismanic - a horse you can't miss

8/1 about North America winning the Dubai World Cup? Those looked remarkably generous odds given that US-trained horses have won exactly half of the twenty-two runnings of what I was about to call the world’s richest race (we’ll come on to that). Further investigation, however, reveals that North America is, in fact, one of the runners in Saturday’s race but he won’t be representing the continent he’s named after. Far from it. Instead, there’ll be dancing in the streets of Grozny if he’s successful as his owner is Ramzan Kadyrov, the crocodile-wrestling Head of the Chechen Republic, and, by all accounts, a very good friend of Vladimir Putin.

North America is trained locally by Satish Seemar these days which, by the way, makes him a stablemate of Dubai’s very own answer to Cue Card, the extraordinary twelve-year-old Reynaldothewizard, who’ll be running in the six-furlong Golden Shaheen earlier on the card for the fifth time. He won the same race in 2013 and has been competing at his eighth successive Carnival this year, having gained the first of his ten wins at Meydan right back in November 2010.

North America is a mere six-year-old himself, but he too is building a fine record on the dirt at Meydan, recently notching his fifth win from just eight starts there and breaking the track record (previously held by 2016 World Cup winner California Chrome) in the process. This is the same North America who failed to win any of his six starts in Britain in his younger days and was let go by Godolphin after a couple of defeats in handicaps off marks in the seventies had seemingly exposed his limitations. The switch from turf to dirt has clearly made a huge difference to North America, and while Sheikh Mohammed may have cause to regret that he won’t be running in the royal blue on Saturday, he can at least console himself with the thought that North America is another fine advert for his sire Dubawi.

Dubawi raced only on turf - unlike his sire Dubai Millennium whose career-defining performance was a spectacular success in the Dubai World Cup in 2000. He was the first of Godolphin’s six winners to date in the race, and while an early death at stud cut short his own much anticipated stallion career, Dubawi has kept his sire’s flame burning and has already supplied a couple of those Godolphin-owned World Cup winners, Prince Bishop and Monterosso.

Like North America, those two World Cup winners were no world-beaters on turf, though both had at least shown smart form on grass. But perhaps the best example of a horse who was transformed by changing surfaces was the ‘unconquerable, invincible, unbeatable’ Cigar who had been none of those things on turf. He was a different beast on dirt, though, that description of him coming from Tom Durkin’s memorable commentary on the 1995 Breeders’ Cup Classic in which Cigar completed an unbeaten season of ten races. Durkin said afterwards that he’d consulted a thesaurus in his preparation for calling the race as he felt that ‘undefeated’ was too mundane a description of Cigar’s record that year. Cigar’s Timeform rating of 138 wouldn’t be equalled by a North American horse until triple crown winner American Pharoah came along in 2015, or bettered until Arrogate a year later.

What more did Cigar have to prove? Not much at home, perhaps, but Sheikh Mohammed had just thrown down the gauntlet of staging the world’s richest race. So it was that the following March Cigar was tempted away from his own shores, a rare event for an American horse at the time, to become the first winner of the Dubai World Cup, then worth four million dollars. Sheikh Mohammed drew another line in the sand, or rather tapeta, when Meydan was built to replace Dubai’s original track Nad Al Sheba, raising the race’s value to ten million dollars in keeping with its shiny new home.

Ten million dollars remains the prize that will be shared out this Saturday, though the Dubai World Cup has since lost its status as the world’s richest race, as well as its claim to being racing’s only World Cup. The first running of the Pegasus World Cup, at Gulfstream Park in Florida in 2017, was worth twelve million dollars, a sum which quickly rose to sixteen million this year. While upping the value of his own race must be giving Sheikh Mohammed food for thought, unlike the Pegasus (yet to capture imaginations overseas, bar Toast of New York’s attempt) the Meydan contest at least remains a ‘World’ Cup in the international sense.

That was the case right from the start when Cigar led home an American one-two-three in the inaugural running from a field which also included runners trained in Britain, Japan and Australia, besides Dubai. The short-lived use of the synthetic tapeta surface at Meydan made the race more accessible, and winnable, to an even more cosmopolitan cast of international characters – it was won in that period by the Brazilian-bred and French-trained Gloria de Campeao and the Japanese horse Victoire Pisa, for example – but the return to dirt has brought back some big-name American winners of late with claims to being among the world’s best horses.

There may not be a California Chrome or Arrogate in this year’s field, but the latter’s trainer Bob Baffert is back with West Coast, America’s top three-year-old of last year. He’s been placed behind Gun Runner in the Breeders’ Cup Classic and Pegasus World Cup on his last two starts, but with Gun Runner (runner-up to Arrogate in Dubai twelve months ago) following Arrogate to stud, West Coast gets his first clear shot at a mammoth prize. Gunnevera’s connections, on the other hand, must be thinking ‘not him again’, as their colt has finished behind West Coast in each of his last three races.

Sheikh Mohammed’s bid to keep the prize at home this year rests with the Godolphin pair Thunder Snow and Talismanic. Thunder Snow seems equally effective on turf and dirt, won the UAE Derby on the World Cup card last year and had twice finished in front of North America at this year’s Carnival before the tables were turned on him last time out.

Talismanic is a horse I’ve been following for a while and it will be fascinating to see how he handles dirt for the first time. He first came to my attention in the Prix du Jockey Club two years ago – not that he’s a difficult horse to miss. Belying his looks of one who’d escaped from the local circus, the unmistakable Talismanic, with his big white face and stockings to match, was up with the pace all the way and briefly held a winning chance before eventually finishing fourth to Almanzor.

Flying to Dubai tonight. Can’t wait to photograph this unmistakable face again! #talismanic #dubaiworldcup #dwc18 pic.twitter.com/VlE0WFXS0o

— Alex Cairns (@ACHorseRacing) 27 March 2018

However eye-catching, there’s a traditional prejudice regarding horses with markings like Talismanic’s summed up in this rhyme: One white - buy him. Two whites – try him. Three white feet – look well about him. Four white feet – you can do without him. Not that his trainer Andre Fabre was ever likely to be bothered by such preconceptions. Indeed, it was a measure of how highly he was regarded that Fabre let him take his chance in the Arc later on at three. Talismanic finished down the field, much as his form to that point suggested he would. But that faith in him was ultimately rewarded last year when Talismanic, much more the finished article by then, enjoyed his biggest success to date when giving his trainer a third win in the Breeders’ Cup Turf.

Fabre’s first Breeders’ Cup Turf winner, the Sheikh Mohammed-owned In The Wings, went on to sire Singspiel who won the second running of the Dubai World Cup, also in the Sheikh’s colours, on what was his dirt debut. Talismanic faces the same challenge, but his breeding gives him every chance of being up to the task. You could even argue he’s bred to be suited by dirt. His sire Medaglia d’Oro himself finished second in a Dubai World Cup and his best offspring have been the top US mares Rachel Alexandra and Songbird. Talismanic’s smart dam Magic Mission, whom Fabre also trained early in her career, raced only turf, but her sire Machiavellian has been responsible for two Dubai World Cup winners, Almutawakel (another successful dirt debutant) and Street Cry.

Talismanic out on the track this morning...👌#DubaiWorldCup pic.twitter.com/2FC7exYGCd

— Godolphin (@godolphin) 28 March 2018

Talismanic would also be a fitting winner for his trainer who has never won the Dubai World Cup but did train the recent winners African Story and Prince Bishop early in their careers before they had their big days in the desert for Saeed bin Suroor. It’s also worth remembering that Fabre is no stranger to winning a big race on dirt with a ‘turf horse’. Arcangues was unraced on dirt before pulling off the biggest upset in Breeders’ Cup history in the 1993 Breeders’ Cup Classic at odds of 133/1. Just don’t expect Talismanic to be starting at anything like those odds.