Native Trail and the resurgence of Charlie Appleby and Godolphin

Charlie Appleby saddled his third winner from the last four editions of the Craven Stakes when last season’s unbeaten champion two-year-old Native Trail convincingly landed very short odds to strengthen his position as ante-post favourite for the 2000 Guineas.

Earlier the same day, promising stablemate Coroebus was put through his paces in a gallop before he too heads for the Guineas, giving their trainer two leading chances of winning a Newmarket classic for the first time.

Appleby’s 2021 Craven winner Master of The Seas – who also made a successful reappearance last week, in the Earl of Sefton Stakes – went down by a short head in the 2000 Guineas, while his first Craven winner, Masar, who started favourite for the 2018 2000 Guineas after bolting up by nine lengths over the Rowley Mile weeks earlier, finished only third behind Saxon Warrior. But Masar, it turned out, was a mile and a half horse, not a miler, as he proved when turning the tables on Saxon Warrior to win the Derby instead.

Masar’s Derby victory was the highlight of a year which not only signaled a revival of Godolphin’s overall fortunes but had huge significance personally for both the colt’s owner and trainer. Sheikh Mohammed had never won the Derby in his own colours and Masar was a first winner of the race in the royal blue of Godolphin.

It was one of Sheikh Mohammed’s nephews, Saeed Maktoum Al Maktoum, who owned the 1995 Derby winner Lammtarra (later also to win the King George and Arc), trained by Godolphin’s long-standing handler Saeed bin Suroor. In a ten-year period between 1995 and 2004 which marked Godolphin’s most successful period before rivals Coolmore/Ballydoyle began to get the upper hand, bin Suroor and Godolphin won all the other English classics at least once, along with five editions of the King George and three Arcs.

But having started out as a small but select team of older horses, the expanding Godolphin string soon required a second Newmarket-based trainer which resulted in Mahmood Al Zarooni being installed at Moulton Paddocks from 2010. Al Zarooni quickly established himself as the apparent rising star of Sheikh Mohammed’s operation, winning the following year’s 1000 Guineas with Blue Bunting and in 2012 was successful with the likes of Monterosso in the Dubai World Cup and Encke in the St Leger.

Encke, who denied Coolmore’s Camelot from completing the triple crown, had been Godolphin’s last classic winner trained by one or other of their two private trainers until Masar ended a six-year drought. But Encke never raced again for Al Zarooni because it wasn’t long before the trainer fell from grace in spectacular, and self-inflicted, fashion, embroiling Godolphin in the most shocking doping scandal ever uncovered in British racing.

Found by the BHA to have used banned anabolic steroids on some of the horses in his care, Al Zarooni was quickly dealt with an eight-year ban from racing which took effect from the spring of 2013. The BHA were satisfied that he alone was responsible for the doping, while for their part, Godolphin, through their then racing manager Simon Crisford, expressed shock and outrage at their trainer’s actions.

Appleby steps up at Moulton Paddocks

It was therefore against the backdrop of this low point in Godolphin’s existence that Al Zarooni’s former assistant Appleby unexpectedly had to take over the licence at Moulton Paddocks just months later. Having completed a course at the British Racing School, Appleby’s first job in racing was as travelling head lad to Susan Piggott in Newmarket at the same time as having eight unsuccessful rides as an amateur on the Flat.

When Piggott retired in 1995, Appleby joined David Loder and within a few years became part of the Godolphin two-year-old set-up when Loder was briefly installed in France as trainer of the operation’s juveniles. When that experiment ended and Loder became a public trainer again, Appleby then joined the bin Suroor arm of the Godolphin operation.

Appleby wasted no time making his mark with his first runners at the end of July 2013, with two-year-old filly Expressly his first winner in a maiden at Ascot soon followed by a first pattern success when Cap O’Rushes won the Gordon Stakes at Goodwood. Outstrip was touched off in the Vintage Stakes at the same meeting but went on to win the Champagne Stakes at Doncaster and then gave his trainer a first top-level success in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf.

A first domestic Group 1 winner for Appleby came the following autumn when Charming Thought (a son of Oasis Dream, like Native Trail) won the Middle Park Stakes under William Buick, also a first top-level winner for the trainer-jockey combination.

Frankie Dettori had been synonymous with Godolphin’s golden period for bin Suroor around the millennium referred to earlier, but following his split from Godolphin in 2013 – shortly after Silvestre de Sousa and Mickael Barzalona were taken on as additional retained jockeys – Godolphin had struggled for continuity with its riding arrangements.

However, the appointment of Buick and James Doyle (originally attached to Appleby and bin Suroor respectively) since 2015 has given more stability and both jockeys have been an integral part of Godolphin’s revival.

Struggles continue for bin Suroor

Appleby sent out 151 winners in Britain in 2015, which remains his best domestic season numerically, but with quality rather than quantity the priority, more worrying was the ongoing lack of top-level winners – Charming Thought’s Middle Park was the only European Group One for either Appleby or bin Suroor in two years.

In 2015, Appleby finished above bin Suroor in the trainers’ championship for the first time – they finished eighth and ninth respectively – and it’s fair to say that Appleby has been the main driver of Godolphin’s revival ever since.

Prince Bishop gave bin Suroor another Dubai World Cup winner in 2015 – and Thunder Snow’s two wins in 2018 and 2019 have taken his record total of wins to nine in the highlight of the Dubai season – but you have to go back to Mastery in the St Leger of 2009 for bin Suroor’s last classic winner and 2013 for his last Group One successes in Britain when Farhh won the Lockinge and Champion Stakes.

The former four-time champion trainer’s frustration with his intake of two-year-olds in 2017 was vented publicly when describing them as ‘a disaster’, whereas Appleby had the lion’s share of the Godolphin youngsters, including most of the more expensive purchases and Dubawi home-breds.

Meanwhile, rivals Coolmore were proving more dominant than ever, with Aidan O’Brien champion trainer for the second year running (and seventh time in all) in 2017 whilst saddling no fewer than 28 Group/Grade One winners worldwide. But there were signs of Godolphin’s imminent revival, initiated perhaps by the appointment of new chief executive John Ferguson (who resigned after bin Suroor’s outburst), Sheikh Mohammed’s former bloodstock adviser, who was charged with giving Godolphin ‘a kick in the belly’ to try to restore some of its past glories.

Steady growth ends with champion trainer title

Godolphin had four winners at Royal Ascot in 2016, and one of those, Hawkbill, went on to win the Eclipse later that summer, while in 2017, Wild Illusion became a second consecutive Godolphin filly to win the Prix Marcel Boussac; Wuheida, successful in that race the year before, became another Breeders’ Cup winner for Appleby in the Filly & Mare Turf.

But as mentioned earlier, 2018 can probably be considered the year in which Godolphin’s resurgence was most evident. The year began well with four Group One wins – shared two apiece between Appleby and bin Suroor – on the Dubai World Cup card where Hawkbill won the Dubai Sheema Classic. Masar’s Derby victory was Appleby’s first classic winner and was soon followed by Blue Point winning the King’s Stand Stakes to give his trainer a first Group One win at Royal Ascot.

Like the Derby, the Melbourne Cup was another major race Sheikh Mohammed had been trying in vain to win for many years, but that too was ticked off when three-year-old Cross Counter was successful at Flemington. Between them, Appleby and bin Suroor won 21 Group/Grade One contests in 2018, Appleby winning a dozen of them.

Blue Point went on to complete the Group One sprint double of the King’s Stand and Diamond Jubilee at Royal Ascot in 2019, a year in which Pinatubo proved himself a top-class champion two-year-old, while 2020 belonged to five-year-old Ghaiyyath after a summer treble in the Coronation Cup, Eclipse and Juddmonte International.

That brings us to last season, another hugely successful one for Appleby both at home – where he was champion trainer for the first time (17 years after bin Suroor’s last title) – and abroad. Adayar’s wins in the Derby and King George went a long way to securing his trainer’s first title, while Derby third Hurricane Lane was a classic winner too, landing the Irish Derby and St Leger in addition to the Dante and Grand Prix de Paris. Native Trail ended his two-year-old campaign by completing the same double in the National Stakes and Dewhurst Stakes as Pinatubo two years earlier.

Appleby also had a remarkable 50% strike rate with his runners across the Atlantic in 2021; nine of his 18 runners in North America were successful, yielding eight Grade One wins, including a treble at the Breeders’ Cup from Modern Games (Juvenile Turf), Space Blues (Mile) and Yibir (Turf).

Dubawi the driving force behind recent success

Those three winners at Del Mar had more in common than just their trainer, owner and jockey (Buick rode all three). Another vital element in Godolphin’s revival in recent seasons has been the emergence of Dubawi as a top-class stallion, a supplier of much of the raw material for Godolphin’s success in much the same way that Coolmore’s dominance for much of the last decade or so has been built on Galileo.

In principle, there was nothing to stop Godolphin availing themselves of Galileo too, but in practice a period of frosty relations between the two superpowers and a boycott of each other’s stallions ruled out any such access. However, there was a thaw once John Ferguson took up his post with the result that Appleby won the 2018 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf with Line of Duty, a son of Galileo Godolphin had bought for 400,000 guineas as a yearling. That colt’s Dubawi half-brother Secret State made a highly promising debut when runner-up in the Wood Ditton earlier this week, incidentally.

While Galileo himself might have been off limits for Godolphin until recently, they were able to secure his Jim Bolger-trained sons New Approach (a Derby winner in the colours of Sheikh Mohammed’s wife Princess Haya) and Teofilo to stand as Darley stallions and it was this pair who were responsible for Masar and Cross Counter respectively.

But Dubawi, whose covering fee at Dalham Hall has stood at £250,000 since 2017, is very much Godolphin’s flagship stallion, not the least of his strengths being that he can get horses over a range of distances and on different surfaces. From the only crop of the best horse to race for Godolphin, the 2000 Dubai World Cup winner Dubai Millennium, Dubawi has sired two winners of the same race himself, Monterosso and Prince Bishop.

In addition to those three winners at last year’s Breeders’ Cup, Dubawi was also responsible for last year’s British Champions Sprint winner Creative Force, while Ghaiyyath heads a list of Dubawi’s winners by Timeform rating. Dubawi will have Coroebus running for him in the 2000 Guineas, while another Dubawi-sired classic hope for Godolphin emerged at the Craven meeting when New London booked his place in a Derby trial after taking his record to two out of two.

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