When Clive Cox won the Darley July Cup in 2017 with the brilliant Harry Angel, he positively glowed with pride when speaking of a “once in a lifetime” horse; three years on, the odds are not at all big that he is returning to Newmarket with a similarly significant contender.
Cox’s Golden Horde has dominated the picture for the high-summer sprinting feature since confirming the promise of his two-year-old career with success in Royal Ascot’s Commonwealth Cup.
Despite no prep-race, the chestnut colt and his jockey Adam Kirby, riding in the red and white silks of Bahrain’s Al Mohamediya Racing, saw off well-touted rivals in striking style.
The result was the first part of a lucrative Ascot double for the ever- formidable Cox-Kirby axis which also claimed the Coventry Stakes with Nando Parrado, at 150-1 the longest-priced winner ever at the meeting.
After the Commonwealth Cup, I thought that the trainer displayed as much contented pleasure as on Harry Angel’s big day at Newmarket.
“It was very special,” he told me. “We live and breathe this game and the appreciation I felt that it had gone right and the dreams had been realised – especially first time out – was enormous.
“We always trained Golden Horde last year thinking he was such a big-framed horse that he’d strengthen and get better so it was fantastic.”
The July Cup, staged over the same, six-furlong distance was quickly identified as the next target by Cox who looks for a third win in the race as Harry Angel, then like Golden Horde aged three, was himself following on from the four-year-old Lethal Force in 2013.
And Lethal Force was also a Royal meeting winner en route – in the Diamond Jubilee Stakes – and, neatly, he just happens to be Golden Horde’s sire.
Adding to the symmetry, Kirby was all of the trio’s regular partner, and all three have been housed in the same ‘lucky’ box at Cox HQ, located high above Lambourn in stables owned by John Francome.
Just in from brushing Golden Horde – “the best therapy of my day” – the trainer went on:
“Everything’s good; he didn’t have a particularly hard race at Ascot – he only lost three kilos which is astonishing for a horse like him – and one would like to hope that he will have progressed.
“There’s been a lot of rain at Newmarket which is a shame for a class race, but it was very soft when he was third in the Prix Morny last year – he’s definitely more flexible than his dad who was ‘out of bounds’ on soft.
“I’m hoping that Ascot was just the start so I’m really looking forward to it.”
Prior to training, Clive Cox was a jump jockey, missing out with 33 successes to Eamon Murphy’s 37 when reeled in late in the 1985/86 season’s conditional riders’ championship.
In 1991 at Newton Abbot, he pulled off that rarity of riding a winner which he also trained, his first, a horse called Good For The Roses – oh, the fun that punters used to have with that name – but at that time Cox was perhaps best known for being on board the heavily- supported favourite Sacred Path when, dramatically, it fell at the first in the 1988 Grand National, won by Rhyme ‘N’ Reason.
How times have changed.
He said: “It was like a bad dream – you think of everything that could go wrong but hadn’t really thought of that. I’m much happier to be remembered now for training the longest priced Royal Ascot winner.”
And quite possibly for a ‘golden hoard’ of three July Cups in just eight years.
