Shergar, Shahrastani and three more Derby winners have passed through Sir Michael Stoute’s stable over the last 50 years, as well as the winners of more than 100 Group One races. But he takes scarcely a moment to consider the options when asked to name his most memorable success. “Blue Cashmere in the [1973] Ayr Gold Cup,” he said at his Newmarket stable last week. “He paid some bills.”
It is a typically Stoutian response, one that would be familiar to any reporter on the racing beat over the past five decades. As would his standard reaction to a group of journalists pointing microphones in his direction, which is akin to the way Bear Grylls might treat an angry rattlesnake: edge backwards ever-so-slowly for a minute or two, and then make a run for it.
But then he is, after all, the sport’s greatest survivor, a fixed point on Newmarket’s Bury Road since the early 1970s as the careers of dozens of trainers in Flat racing’s capital city have waxed and waned. Punters who turned 18 and placed their first legal bets in 1972, when Stoute scraped together enough horses to take out a trainer’s licence, are now pensioners. And since his first Classic success, when Fair Salinia took the Oaks in 1978, just seven seasons have passed without at least one win for the stable in one of the handful of races with Group One status.
Victory for Stoute’s colt Desert Crown, the favourite, in the Cazoo Derby at Epsom on Saturday, would extend that record for another season. His fifth Derby victory would also arrive 41 years after the first, with Shergar in 1981, and eclipse the achievement of Mathew Dawson, one of the greatest trainers of the 19th century, who saddled Derby winners 35 years apart in 1860 and 1895.
Dawson was 75 years old when Sir Visto won in 1895. Stoute will be 77 in October, but retains all the enthusiasm of the horse-mad teenager who left home in Barbados, where his father was chief of police, in 1964 and found a job at Pat Rohan’s stable in Yorkshire. “Fortunately, it was August,” he says, “but that first winter was tough.”
He moved to Newmarket three years later, and after another four years of determined networking around town, reached what was then the 12-horse minimum for a British trainer’s licence.
“Alphadamus won the [1973] Stewards’ Cup in my second season,” he says, “then Blue Cashmere won the Northumberland Sprint Trophy and the Ayr Gold Cup, and the Trafalgar Handicap at Ascot the week after the Ayr Gold Cup. Those were the two that got me moving a bit. Thank God I hit the ground running, as you can get buried quickly.”
Stoute’s first, and most famous, Derby winner arrived in the yard as a yearling late in 1979. Having set what remains the record winning distance for the Epsom Classic with a 10-length annihilation of 17 opponents, he won the Irish Derby and the King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot before finishing fourth on his final in the St Leger, a race that Stoute still regrets running him in.
Shergar’s romp through the summer of ’81 set Stoute on the way to the first of his 10 trainers’ championships, joint second in the all-time list alongside the late Sir Henry Cecil, his perennial rival for the title in the 80s and early 90s.
Shergar once ended up outside Cecil’s Warren Place stable after dumping his work rider and bolting on the gallops a fortnight after his Derby win. “We used to go into Moulton and up the hill to Warren Place and on his own, that was the route he went,” Stoute says. “He stopped and was picking one of the hedges outside of Warren Place so he obviously wanted to go in.”
Shergar, he recalls, was “a machine, bombproof and had a wonderful temperament,” but “Henry did a better job with Frankel than I did with Shergar as I shouldn’t have run him in the St Leger.”
At this stage of his career, Desert Crown may have more in common with Workforce, Stoute’s fifth and most recent Derby winner in 2010, as he will arrive at Epsom with just two runs in the book and made his most recent start in the Dante Stakes at York.
“I would have liked to have two or even three two-year-old races and two this year,” Stoute says, “but this fellow has a very good mind and he’s very relaxed. You couldn’t fault the Dante performance [and] if you win the Dante, you don’t have to improve very much to win the Derby.”
Stoute bats away all inquiries of the “what will it mean to you if you win?” variety, but concedes that the emergence of Desert Crown has been a big boost to the stable, above all after the death of his long-term partner, Coral Pritchard-Gordon, in September 2020.
“I miss her greatly and she was a great contributor,” he says. “Coral is greatly missed by many.
“All good horses are important and it is nice to have them and it has given the yard a great lift.”