This is about horses and racing and Christmas, but I want to start with football.
I know nothing about football. I do know, however, that it is a thing of profound passion. I sometimes wonder how people can follow their teams, week in, week out, and stand all the heartbreak. (I have a friend who is a Queen's Park Rangers supporter.)
However, this week I somehow stumbled upon a truly magnificent documentary called Welcome to Wrexham. It's about a down-on-its-luck football club which was suddenly and apparently randomly bought by a Canadian film star and an American television star.
And it made me cry.
It made me cry like the gallant racing horses can make me cry, and that's why I want to connect the two.
Everyone could have been – and I think some were – tremendously cynical about Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney buying what looked from the outside like some rusting tinpot of a football club. (The rails in the stands were literally rusting; weeds were pushing through the steps where fans once roared on their side; the Kop had collapsed and been condemned.) The cynics might think the two men, who hardly even knew where Wales was, were doing it for publicity or for some millionaire whim or because they wanted a plaything. They couldn't possibly care about the club, or its history, or the people of the town.
It turns out that they could. I'm not sure I ever saw two men who were so sincere and so ridiculously good-hearted.
Here's what they understood – and it's at the core of all great sport: they understood that the football club was the beating heart of the community and the thread that pulled it together. It was the thread too that pulled the past and the present together. People would remember their fathers and grandfathers taking them to their first match, or look at black and white photographs on the wall and be transported back to a different era, a time when the club was a source of pride, a time when the town was thriving.
What happened to Wrexham happened all over Wales. The mines closed and the heavy industry moved out and the working men were left with no work. High streets became forlorn places of charity shops and bookies and dim pubs. These were tight communities, and the stuffing was knocked out of them.
They needed something to cheer for.
That's what Welcome to Wrexham is about. It had all the elements of great drama: two enthusiastic, faintly naive outsiders coming in to a small town and learning the ways of triumph and tragedy, toughing it out, joining with the locals in a great endeavour which was about far, far more than a sporting occasion. All human life was there. The characters in the documentary were philosophers: they were the Stoics, they were the Marcus Aureliuses of Wales. They doggedly faced down the existential slings and arrows and held on to what really mattered, which are the things that lift the heart: community, shared passions, belief, those glittering, improbable moments which take human beings out of the workaday, the quotidian, the relentlessly ordinary.
That's my Christmas story, I thought. Because that's what racing can do, too.
For a particular set of racing fans, Christmas does not take place on the 25th December, but on Boxing Day. That's the present we can't wait to unwrap, because it's the day of the King George.
The King George rings Christmas bells in the minds of those who love British National Hunt racing. It's not an internationally renowned contest. I very much doubt that devotees will be tuning in from Melbourne or Saratoga. Kempton Park, where it takes place, is not one of the great, storied courses of the game. It does not have the natural beauty of Cheltenham, nor the famous railway fences of Sandown, nor the regal history of Ascot. It's a flat, galloping track, and it's set in the suburbs, and it was used as a prisoner-of-war camp during the war. It does not, in other words, reek of glamour. The King George isn't even a particularly old race, only invented in 1937 and named after George VI. Yet, for all that, Kempton on Boxing Day is what sets the spine tingling. People who love jumping horses start dreaming of that three-mile chase in early December, like children waiting breathlessly for Santa Claus to come.
For a particular set of racing fans, Christmas does not take place on the 25th December, but on Boxing Day
There is something about the winter game. Like the most touching parts of Welcome to Wrexham, jump racing has a very particular sense of community. There's the shared knowledge of freezing dawns, waking the great, dozing equine athletes before the light, seeing their breath plume out into the frigid air on morning exercise. There are the wry, knowing smiles which contain memories of wet Wednesdays at Huntingdon, or battling through the sleet at Uttoxeter, or watching a finish in a snowstorm at Ayr. It's all a world away from the summer festivals at York or Newmarket, or the fashion parade of the Royal Meeting in June.
There are the pulling threads of memory too. The King George has a habit of throwing up great champions. It was in this race that Desert Orchid laid down his first calling card of greatness, when he romped home at 16-1. He'd never gone anywhere near as far as three miles before, and he was so enthusiastic in his two mile races that nobody thought he could possibly stay the distance. (Kempton may be a flat track, with none of the demanding undulations of Cheltenham, but it fairly sorts them out. It requires surprising amounts of stamina. As the great John Francome once said, 'They'll be strung out from here to Sunbury.' And they often are.)
That extraordinary debut in the race is carved in the minds of everyone who was lucky enough to see it. There are horses who just seem to adore this particular contest, and they'll come back year after year, so they are standing dishes, the most reliable of Christmas presents. Desert Orchid went on to win it four times, a record later bettered by Kauto Star, whose fifth King George victory made for one of the most rousing receptions that Kempton – or any other racecourse – has ever known.
Just as the Welsh football fans reminisced about their dads and grandads taking them to their first match, people will recall when their parents or grandparents took them to see Mandarin or Mill House or Wayward Lad or Best Mate. I'm not old enough to remember Arkle, who won it in 1965, but my mum was there, and she told me the stories.
And the threads of history pull tight as well. If you go and look at the roll call of honour for this perfect plum pudding of a race, you'll see all the greats of the jumps. There is Vincent O'Brien and Fulke Walwyn and Fred Winter, who won it as a jockey and as a trainer. Michael Scudamore is there, who founded a National Hunt dynasty, his son and grandsons still vivid participants. There is Pat Taafe, and Richard Pitman, who won it twice, and John Francome, who had an almost poetic style of riding, and François Doumen, the most elegant of the French raiders. These might not be household names, but even the mention of them will, to people who love the steeplechasing thoroughbred, bring up happy, misty stories of Christmasses past. For me, they take me back to my childhood in the early seventies, when my dad trained just outside Lambourn, and everyone in every shop and every pub could talk about nothing but horses. In that village, Christmas Day was something to get through as quickly as possible, as the King George beckoned with its promises of true delight.
It's the delight of old friends, as these horses have long careers, and come back year after year, so that you start to know their quirks and their characters and you could recognise them – and sometimes have to – in a blizzard. You know, as you watch them, that you will have them in your heart forever: their great leaps, their impossible comebacks, their dancing, ruthless, rhythmic gallop.
And it is, just like with that football team at the bottom of the league in a town that has taken its knocks, something to cheer for. Those great horses of the 1970s managed to make people forget their troubles for a short, giddy moment, as the country went on strike and the economy staggered and the Cold War was still very, very cold. As I write this, poor old Blighty is facing some of those conditions again, with a cost of living crisis and energy bills going through the roof and a hot war not so far very away in Ukraine. Reality is biting.
But on the 26th December, the real world will be forgotten, just for a little while, as the magnificent thoroughbreds, with their tremendous athletic bodies and their fine minds and their brave hearts come out to strut their stuff.
It's the delight of old friends, as these horses have long careers, and come back year after year, so that you start to know their quirks and their characters
The King George this year is cutting up. It's a small field and it doesn't quite have a stand-out, gold-plated champ in it. It's not a Desert Orchid or a Kauto year, where the crowds arrive to roar on their darling. However, it's got something perhaps just as thrilling – a gaggle of young horses who might be the superstars of the future. One will come soaring out of the pack and we'll have someone dazzling to follow for the years to come. There are only days to go, and I can't wait.
I wanted to tell you the story of this race because it embodies my love of racing. It's not about the money or the fame. If you are reading this in Hong Kong or Kentucky, you might never have even heard of it. The winner gets just over £140,000, which is a lot for a British steeplechase, but is peanuts compared to the big purses of the international Flat races. And there will be no million-dollar babies and huge stud fees to come, because these horses are geldings.
The people who put on their hats and scarves and sensible shoes and travel to Kempton will be there for the joy and excitement of it: for the community spirit; for the visceral thrill of seeing the horses up close; for the sheer magic of leaving behind their everyday concerns and frets, for one short winter afternoon.
I think the magic horses can give us is to take us to another plane of existence. Bill Shankly famously said, “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that.” This immortal line was quoted in the wonderful Welcome to Wrexham documentary. When Wrexham scored a goal, and I saw the faces of small children light up with unquenchable happiness, and grown men cry, and women holler like banshees, I started to understand what he meant, even though it's not my game. Racing is my game, and the mighty chasers, out there on the emerald turf, give me the same feeling. There's a purity to those thoroughbreds, because they are so honest, and so gutsy, and so beautiful, and they lend me, just for a moment, that purity of spirit. They make me want to be a better human, so I can match them, in their boldness and their brilliance. They are my best Christmas dish, and every year they give me the finest present of all.
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