Cercene's shock Ascot win fulfils lifetime ambition for trainer Murphy
They don't know where the winning post is. Zarigana swept through the Coronation Stakes in the Ascot straight to lead as a favourite should. She had done her bit. She didn't know there were 100 yards still to run. Her head came up, her ears went back. Beside her little Cercene, a 33-1 outsider, stuck her neck out and took back the lead.
Some horses, like humans, are mentally harder than others. Zarigana is quite wonderfully bred, having Frankel and the unbeaten Arc winner Zarkava as her maternal grandparents. But two inched-out, top-level defeats before this further half-length reverse suggest that she is not prepared to run regardless.
Cercene is no peasant, being by the dual Derby winner Australia, and despite being third in the Irish Guineas, her six races gave her an official rating a full 10lb behind Zarigana. That her long-serving Tipperary trainer, Joe Murphy, had never trained an Ascot winner, and but one in Britain, didn't shorten her price any more than the presence of the rider Gary Carroll, known over here for one Royal Ascot success two years ago.
But 33-1 is a huge price to offer on only six pieces of public form and a team who are anything but beginners. Murphy is a much respected figure in Tipperary, where he has been training for 30 years, and if he has only had six winners in Ireland this season they have come from a mere 47 runners.
'This is 50 years of work, that's what it is, of love and care, and all for the owners we have, all our people, it's just a whole group of people together. This is heaven on earth,' this ageing underdog from Fethard, Co Tipperary, said with heartwarming emotion. 'It's a lifetime's ambition to have a group one winner. Cercene's by Australia — a sire I love — and her half-brother [Perotto] won the Britannia so the pedigree was there and if she was an inch bigger I wouldn't have her!
'She travelled well, Gary gave her a great ride, and we were thinking that, being by Australia, she'd stay as well. She was headed and came back again. She waited for something to head her, but she's very tough and a dream to train. The plan was today so now we'll draw new plans.'
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Ascot is inevitably dominated by the O'Briens and Gosdens, the Buicks and Moores, but it is not all Formula 1. Ryan Moore may have chalked up his sixth winner of the meeting on Ethical Diamond for Ireland's mostly jump-training colossus Willie Mullins in the Duke of Edinburgh Stakes but the place felt better for hearing Cercene's rider give a testimony to match that of her trainer.
'It's unbelievable. I've been riding a long time now and I've been placed in plenty of group ones but this is my first one,' Carroll, 35, said. 'If I was ever to ride a group one winner it was to be for Joe Murphy. I've been riding for him since I was a 7lb claimer. He's been very, very good to me. I'm delighted to repay him. Good horses are very hard to come by. To do this at Royal Ascot is magic.'
Cercene's 33-1 success was a long way from being the only relief for the bookies after the bloodbath of the first days of the meeting. Despite the legendarily astute Tony Bloom striking substantially on his filly Venetian Sun in the first, she still started at 7-1 and the second and third, Awaken and Balantina were returned at 66-1 and 40-1 respectively.
Better still for the bookies, and all of us who live in hope of a decent return for our money, the first three in the group one Commonwealth Cup came in at 25-1, 28-1 and 20-1. Not that this was a total surprise to Harry Eustace, the 36-year-old trainer of the winner, Time For Sandals, who took over his father's Newmarket stable in 2021 and had his first group one winner when Docklands won the Queen Anne Stakes on Tuesday.
'It's hard to be very confident with Ascot and if you get ahead of yourself you can be cut down very quickly,' he said with smiling understatement. 'What we knew was that we had horses coming in here in great form and we just needed the racing luck.'
There is always a lot of pride in the winner's enclosure and the jockey Richard Kingscote, the groom Becky Curtis and the owners David and Lorrie Bevan duly had smiles so deep that their faces would hurt in the morning. But no face quite matched that of 65-year-old James Eustace. For he has not just fathered one group one-winning trainer but two, Harry's younger brother, David, having already won the Melbourne Cup.
James trained in Newmarket for 30 years and won the Hunt Cup here with Refuse To Lose in 1998 but this beats everything. 'It's hard to say how much it means to [wife] Gay and me,' he said, 'but the great thing is that they did this on their own bat. Maybe it was the little New Forest pony we had which allowed them to whizz around on the Heath but they were always in the tack room.'
Yes, those boys always knew where their winning post would be.
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