Racing's history is not as well preserved as it might be - but one writer is on a mission to put that right

You know L’Escargot, of course you do. He won back-to-back Gold Cups half a century ago and then won a Grand National at the end of his career; no horse since has managed to win both races. 

He was also “the horse that foiled Red Rum” and this is the billing he gets on the cover of David Owen’s new book, an impressively detailed recounting of L’Escargot’s life. 

Owen is not the kind of biographer to produce entire conversations from bygone decades as if he’d been scribbling shorthand in a corner but he has such a firm grasp of time and place he makes you feel he was there to see the two-year-old chestnut arriving at Jimmy Brogan’s place with the bright red barn in the spring of 1965.

Owen is also not the former leader of the Social Democratic Party, in case you were wondering. If you know his work, it’s probably because you read Foinavon, his much-praised book about the pile-up in the 1967 National and the unbelievably lucky connections who found the prize falling in their laps. 

You and I may think we know all about that race because we can recite Michael O’Hehir’s exceptional bit of commentary, listing the leaders as they were stopped, Kirtle Lad and The Fossa and the others, rising to just the right note of incredulity for: “And now in all this mayhem, Foinavon has gone off on his own...” But Owen, with great care and deftness, gave colour to the black and white and turned it into a marvellous tale of a bygone era.

He’s covered a range of sports but the success of Foinavon has brought him back to racing a decade later and lucky us because I can’t imagine many others could have done such a fine job of parading L’Escargot in front of us, or could have got such a book published once they had put it together.

Thanks to Owen, we get to find out how well we know the story of Dan Moore’s chaser with the big, floppy ears, so expressive of mood. The answer, in my case, turned out to be hardly at all.

Of course we remember that horses were campaigned differently in those days, more aggressively. Still, it stunned me to learn that, at the height of his career, L’Escargot was repeatedly sent across the Atlantic to race in the US. He even won there, at Belmont in the summer of 1969, fully three months after lining up in the Champion Hurdle.

The following year, as the reigning Gold Cup hero, he began his autumn campaign in the Irish Cesarewitch, ran again on the Flat a fortnight later and then returned to the US to take part in the Colonial Cup, a new venture aimed at fostering international competition.

What a horse he was, having been vigorously campaigned all his career, to hold his form to the age of 12 and finally get the better of the best Aintree horse there ever was, hacking up by 15 lengths in the National of 1975. 

If L’Escargot had been even a soupcon less resilient, Red Rum would have won three Nationals in a row and then Rummy’s own eye-moistening triumph at the age of 12 in 1977 would have given him four wins, twice as many as any other horse since the race was invented in the 1830s.

Owen establishes at an early stage that Aintree was, for decades, a frustrating place for Moore and owner Raymond Guest, so that their star’s valedictory triumph may be imagined to have had a healing quality. 

As it turned out, there was a final contretemps which led to L’Escargot crossing the Atlantic one more time to spend his retirement in Virginia. The key detail, as Owen notes, is that he spent his final decade “in extreme luxury”.

Racing’s history is not as well preserved as a fan might wish. Let’s hope Owen continues his painstaking labours in this field, immortalising one equine great at a time.

No Snail by David Owen, £20, published by Fairfield Books
Chris Cook

A comprehensive resource for Flat devotees

Few can legitimately claim to be a racing academic but Sieglinde McGee's credentials are as authentic as they come and her studious approach is evident throughout this mammoth 782-page slab of a compendium.

McGee has been writing for many of the major industry outlets on racing and bloodstock for over 30 years. A graduate of Dublin City University and the Irish National Stud's breeding course, she was conferred with a doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin for a thesis entitled Behavioural Reactivity and Ensuing Temperamental Traits in Young Thoroughbred Racehorses.

Her pedigree credentials are of the blue-chip variety and she calls on all of her scholarly diligence to produce the deeply comprehensive Best Racehorses of 2022.

This is the third year of the series in its current format and anoraks will be able to spend hours delving into over 200 considered essays on Europe's top Flat performers and an exhaustive wealth of tables and indexes. Each individual profile includes a potted biography of form, trainer, breeder and so on, along with three generations of breeding.

McGee certainly stamps her musings and Desert Crown's analysis begins with the writer drawing on her psychology background. She discusses related phenomena called primacy effect and regency effect, deploying the concept to illustrate how Sir Michael Stoute's Epsom hero falls into the "saggy middle". She continues: "If asked to name the best three-year-old colts of the year, he would not instantly come to mind for many. Horses who peak in June but either don't appear again or fail to produce further high-class performances in the remaining months of the season are easy to forget, and so we have a situation whereby Desert Crown would not instantly come to the mind or lips of some despite being an impressive winner of the Derby."

From there McGee examines how the Derby panned out, analyses the winner's pedigree and documents his travails before finishing up by expressing a wish that his name comes more readily to mind at the end of his four-year-old campaign.

Such an account is very readable and, while she obviously utilises ratings and figures, that light touch diffuses the aesthetic impression of the book being an intimidatingly dense resource for mere anoraks.

And, for a casual reader at least, there is a hint of overkill about the indexes. A multitude of tables, stats and copy are compiled under a mind-boggling variety of headings turning on sires, dams, trainers, owners, breeders, auction prices, sales companies, month of birth – the range is endless.

It makes for a profound rabbit hole of information that has clearly taken an enormous amount of time to collate and produce. If you can find which aspect you are into, there is probably something for everyone, but you'd wonder if refining the parameters might make for a more malleable end product.

The complete lack of images would be another slight gripe, notwithstanding that is often the nature of such textual works.

That, though, is not to take from what is clearly a professional vocation, but also a project of personal passion. The finished work serves as an utterly comprehensive, one-stop resource for devotees of the Flat game.

Best Racehorses of 2022 by Dr Sieglinde McGee, €34/£30, published by Sleipnir Press
Richard Forristal

Get your head around the biggest week of the summer

It is that special time of the year. The weather has finally started to take a turn for the better, the Flat season is in full swing ahead of a busy summer and we can once again look forward to trying to find some winners during five days of the very best action at Royal Ascot, the first since King Charles's coronation.

With the usual mix of Group 1 races and handicaps, sprints and staying contests, as well as international formlines, there is plenty to get your head around before the historic meeting begins on June 20 but, have no fear, the Racing Post Royal Ascot Guide handily collates all the information you need in one place, packed into 192 pages. 

A host of leading horses – and trust me, there will be plenty of those taking part – are put under the microscope, as are the top trainers and jockeys, headlined by Frankie Dettori, who will ride for the final time before his retirement at the end of the season at a meeting and racecourse he has made his own.

The guide also offers a race-by-race breakdown of the five days, various betting pointers from the Racing Post's tipsters, analysts and handicappers, plus detailed sections on the main international challengers and the top two-year-olds to watch.

Racing Post Royal Ascot Guide 2023, edited by Nick Pulford, £16.99, published by Pitch Publishing. Click here to buy it now.
Jonathan Harding

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The Front Runner is our unmissable email newsletter available exclusively to Members' Club Ultimate subscribers. Chris Cook, a four-time Racing Reporter of the Year award winner, provides his take on the day's biggest stories and tips for the upcoming racing every morning from Monday to Friday. Not a Members' Club Ultimate subscriber? Click here to join today and also receive our Ultimate Daily emails plus our full range of fantastic website and newspaper content.