Remembering the Epic Juvenile Seasons of Spindrifter, Provideo and Timeless Times

[Wandering Eyes]

One regrettable development of the last few years has been the discontinuation of Timeform's Racehorses annuals, which are as vital and as vivid a history lesson one could find on this sport.

Geoff Greetham, who died last week at the age of 79, had an enormous influence on the annuals, both for the Flat and National Hunt. There can be no finer tribute to this much revered writer and editor than the fact that his words will remain in print on the shelves of  many racing fans for years to come, and will continue to inform us of the traits and achievements of the best – and the worst – horses in training during the course of the 97 editions over which he presided.

In the few days before Greetham died, the essays on Spindrifter, Provideo and Timeless Times had provided invaluable research for an interview with those horses' trainers, Sir Mark Prescott and Bill O'Gorman. While objective in its appraisal, the writing deftly brought to life the results of these marvellous two-year-olds, evoking a sense of the enjoyment they had brought to the racegoers of the day. 

“Spindrifter's versatility knows few bounds,” wrote the essayist of the son of Sandford Lad, who was bred by famed Irish trainer Joe Crowley and raced for Grahame Waters, who made a point of attending every one of his horse's 16 races during 1980. 

We'll let that great raconteur Sir Mark Prescott take up the story from here. 

“Mr Waters had a caravan park in Jaywick Lane, which is regularly voted the worst place in Britain to live,” he says. “He'd been in the Coldstream Guards and he'd started with nothing, and he worked like hell and he built this car park and then he built a golf course, and so on.

“The thrill of owning Spindrifter never left him. Mrs Waters said that years later she'd find him in the morning watching his 14 wins. He went everywhere the horse ran. He never missed a race, and it was just the most wonderful journey he had.

“At the beginning he said, 'Oh, it mustn't run on October, whenever it is, my daughter's getting married.' And that was the key day it had to run, so they put the wedding back and watched the horse.”

Spindrifter's racing career began at Hamilton, just weeks after the start of the 1980 turf season. As he notched win after win – his first 10 victories being consecutive – Prescott started to plot his course towards taking the juvenile record of Nagwa, who, in 1975, had won 13 races for Barry Hills.

He says, “One of the extraordinary things about Spindrifter was that his mother and Nagwa's mother, when he was trying to beat Nagwa's record, they were in the same field in Kilkenny together. And they were both bred by Joe Crowley, who became Aidan O'Brien's father-in-law, and who was a genius in his own right. Fantastic.

“Joe's breeding policy was absolutely a dash of this and a dash of that. Any new stallion that was struggling, he'd ask [their owners], and he'd say, 'I've got 10 mares. I'll send you all 10. What price do I get?' And that was it. There was absolutely no research into anything. And he bred all those good horses.”

Spindrifter's latent talent became apparent to his trainer even before he'd been put through any searching gallops at home.

“We had a very large German girl called Gabrielle,” he recalls. “She was very gingery and of ample proportion, and she used to ride him. He was a very good ride and we went a bit quicker one day up Warren Hill and he just glided up there with her.

“You'd have been a blind man not to work out that he must not be too bad to lug Gabrielle up there with such elan. He'd never worked, but I did begin to think he must be a fair horse.”

Spindrifter's record-equalling feat – which was prevented from being record-breaking when he was denied victory in his final juvenile start at Stockton by a member of Bill O'Gorman's stable – was secure only for four years. O'Gorman again played the villain – certainly from Prescott's perspective – when unleashing Provideo to equal The Bard's 19th Century record of 16 wins during the season of 1984. Timeform had something to say about this, however, as one of The Bard's wins 99 years earlier had been a walkover. 

“All things considered we believe Provideo did more to enrich the season than any other horse and for this reason we gave him our vote in the poll for the Horse of the Year which he won comfortably with seventeen votes from Teenoso with six and El Gran Senor with five,” stated the essay on O'Gorman's stable star. High praise indeed. 

“Mr Foustok bred him and he was pivotal to the horse's success because when we had the odd hiccup, he just used to say, 'Do you think the horse is all right?' And you'd carry on, which most people wouldn't have done; they'd start panicking,” O'Gorman says.

Six years later, the master horseman O'Gorman did it again with Timeless Times, a son of Timeless Moment who had been bought inexpensively at the Keeneland September Yearling Sale. The colt took well to his new surroundings in Newmarket to win 16 times as a juvenile, that feat achieved by September 4 of 1990.

The star two-year-olds had differing personalities, as O'Gorman recalls. “Timeless Times was just like a dog but Provideo was a horrible horse, and he was very coarse in his wind. He only ever got one day off after a race and if he went a week without doing a bit [of work], you could hear him.”

Neither Timeless Times nor Provideo added to their records at three. The former stood at Norton Grove Stud in Yorkshire, while Provideo was exported to stand in Tasmania. Spindrifter won early the next season and Prescott says that he found him to be as willing in his training as had been the previous year before fate intervened.

“Spindrifter broke his leg the next year,” he says. “He got kicked setting off on the Summer Gallop by a horse called Carpet General.

“I was waiting for them at the Links Gap and, as Bill knows, you can't quite see them set off. And they never came, and they never came, and they never came.

“This is an awful thing to say, but I remember thinking, I hope it's Spindrifter that comes. Because you knew something had gone wrong, they took so long. And it was Carpet General who came on his own. And there were no mobile phones or all of that, so I trudged across the Heath and when I got to that corner by the Summer Canter, I could see Spindrifter standing there. Poor Mr Waters.”

Prescott continued, “Spindrifter won first time up as a three-year-old. Then he was third at York in a big handicap, carrying a huge weight. And then he broke his leg, that was it. But he was as good at three as he was at two.”

Both trainers rue the changes to the modern-day racing programme, in which fewer conditions races make it nigh-on impossible for such a feat to be repeated.

“Bill messed it up by doing it twice,” says Prescott with a grin. “We were going along jolly nicely until Bill came along.”

O'Gorman concurs. “That's what happened. There were peevish voices behind the scenes. I still think it was a mistake for the programme because now, those big races at this time of year, the form is all hearsay. And he says this is the best horse he's ever had, blah blah blah, but if the horse has won six races and runs in there and gets beaten, then we can assume it isn't a mistake, but that doesn't happen now.”

Forty-five years on from Spindrifter's annus mirabilis, it is plain that his exploits still mean an awful lot to his trainer despite some major wins for Prescott's Heath House Stables since those days. 

“I think it was the most exciting few months I've had as a trainer until Alpinista, I suppose,” he says. “And it did me so much good because I'd trained 10 years without ever doing very well or anything unusual happening, and you're sort of plodding along and then this horse came and suddenly you were doing something unusual, and I'm very grateful. 

“And of course having the excitement of a pretty substantial bet in those days, from which I was able to break out from being, financially, every day worrying about it, suddenly I wasn't worried. So the debt I owed him and Mr Waters. 

“And what's quite interesting about Spindrifter is that eventually Mr Waters bought a half-sister from Joe Crowley and she had a daughter that produced Masafi, and he won seven races at six different courses in 17 days, which is staggering.”

Such feats of training from both men should indeed be commemorated and celebrated. In 1990, Timeform went as far as suggesting that, if British racing had a Hall of Fame, Bill O'Gorman would be an automatic qualifier as an inductee. It does now have a Hall of Fame and that sentence still holds true, for O'Gorman, as well as for Prescott. 

Their three representatives may not be remembered as champions but they each played their part in producing a significant amount of fun, both for their owners and for the race-going public. And that, as much as anything, it what horseracing is all about. 

 

 

 

For the full interview with Bill O'Gorman and Sir Mark Prescott, please click here to listen to the TDN Conversations podcast, presented by Saracen Horse Feeds.  

 

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