comparatively few flat horses get a book written about them.

​I am discounting books about American racehorses in the title to this piece. I am sure the books on Secretariat and Sea Biscuit were worth the effort, though as I have read neither of them, I do not have the authority to say either way. On my bookshelf I have books on Brown Jack, Eclipse, Persian Punch, Brigadier Gerard and Frankel, and one that has as its main character Running Rein, though that book is more about the scandal that surrounds his ‘Derby Triumph’. I have seventeen books on National Hunt horses.
I suspect someone is presently in the process of writing a book about Enable, and like the rest of us living on tenterhooks in hope she will be kept in training to give the writer a few more races to her life that might ultimately lead to a preface and final chapter that is the story of her third Arc success.
The reason so few flat horses are honoured by a book about their lives is that so few are truly deserving of one. Think about it, rather than boo and hiss at my prejudice, and compare the longevity of Kauto Star and Cue Card with the here today and gone tomorrow careers of the majority of top-class flat horses. There is a book about Nijinsky, one of the great three-year-olds of my lifetime, but like so many others his stay in the public eye can be measured in months, not years. Sea The Stars and Dancing Brave were the same. Golden Horn and El Gran Senor, too. Best of their generation by a long chalk but little more. Not in the same league as Enable, that’s for sure as they were not around long enough to become the ‘apple of the eye’ of the public, for people to become sentimentally attached to them.
Over the long years of my invisible love affair with this great sport, I have seen on the flat a large number of ‘second-comings’, two-year-olds that as three-year-olds were predicted by experts to become the ‘horse of a generation’, the sort of horse that Frankel became. Virtually every one fell by the wayside, many of them coming out of Ballydoyle, trained by the first O’Brien genius or his predecessor. I have witnessed various t.v. pundits eulogising over a young horse, telling viewers that we have been privileged to see first-hand the creation of a bright new star only for reality to spoil the pretty vision of the future come April, May or June.
So, romantics, brave-hearts and ante-post backers, temper your adoration of Pinatubo as the odds are stacked against you.
In a piece based on the Racing Post’s Sunday Q & A with famous racing folk, I answered the final question ‘Give us a horse to follow for the rest of the season’, Pinatubo, as I was really impressed by the manner of his win in the Woodcote at Epsom. Obviously, I could not have predicted he would finish the season with a (silly) rating of 128 but I had recognised his potential. So, I am in no way dissing him. It’s just that history suggests that the really great flat horses are barely noticed until they begin their three-year-old careers.
What happens year on year is that the best two-year-olds have arrived at their peak precociously early, while others take longer to strengthen and mature, bursting into bloom and vigour as three-year-olds. It is fact. Thoroughbreds are not fully mature until they are five, which is why it is imprudent and detrimental to the breed to retire colts to the stallion yards after their three or even their four-year-old careers.
Go through the historical record, which I haven’t done, relying on memory and my unreliable sense of instinct, and I am pretty sure that most Derby winners rarely feature anywhere near the top of the previous seasons two-year-old ratings. Pinatubo is a lovely horse and no one deserves a true superstar more than Sheikh Mohammed but we must not be surprised if his present rating is as high as he achieves before he is packed off to stud at the end of next season. Like me, you must hope I am wrong in my prediction.
We will not know if 128 is a true representation of his ability until the horses he beat in the National Stakes at the Curragh prove their own true ability as any one of them might improve leaps and bounds next season. Or each and every one of the horses who finished in his wake that day might fail to win another race. That is, I suppose, the fascination of this sport, that form interpretation is an inexact science and that every race and every horse is subject to individual opinion, opinion that might, and often will, change from race-to-race.
Is Pinatubo a great horse. No, at least not yet. Will he become a great horse. Perhaps, though history and the odds are against him. Will he run in the Epsom Derby? That will depend on whether it might knock a swathe off his stud value if he should suffer humiliating defeat. Would I advise anyone to back him ante-post for the 2,000 Guineas? No. Back Military March at long odds for both Newmarket and Epsom.