Mick On Monday: Godolphin’s remarkable worldwide week

Sovereignty and Junior Alvarado ploughed through the mud to win the 151st Kentucky Derby. Photo / AFP

Sovereignty capped one of the more extraordinary weeks for any racing organisation in the history of the sport by winning the 151st Kentucky Derby on Sunday.

The third-favourite came from near last at the 800m to win the mudbath Derby over favourite Journalism in a survival-of-the-fittest affair after a searching early pace at Churchill Downs.

The winner provided jockey Junior Alvarado with his first Kentucky Derby victory and trainer Bill Mott with his second – but first actual on-the-track success as his 2019 winner Country House was a promoted winner after an inquiry.

It was also the first victory in the United States’ glamour race for Godolphin, the Dubai-based global racing organisation owned by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

Just hours earlier, Godolphin-owned Ruling Court, the super-expensive graduate of a European ready-to-run sale last year, won the English 2000 Guineas at Newmarket in the hands of William Buick.

And a day before that, Godolphin’s famous blue colours were also worn to victory in the Kentucky Oaks by Good Cheer, giving them a quite remarkable three-classics treble for the weekend.

Godolphin also had Desert Flower, the favourite for the English 1000 Guineas, to be run overnight on Sunday, attempting to give the stable one of the greatest weekends of racehorse ownership ever.

The Northern Hemisphere heroics come just 48 hours after Godolphin announced an enormous change to its Australian racing operation by parting ways with retained trainer James Cummings, their army of horses now to be spread around selected trainers.

The move, which will see Cummings become a public trainer but retain a far smaller number of Godolphin-owned horses, was widely rumoured but is still a seismic shift on the Australian training landscape.

It has been an interesting few years for Godolphin, with some industry insiders questioning a number of its major strategic decisions and even the scale of its operation.

But when you win three of the world’s great races in 24 hours and are owned by a Sheikh who rules Dubai, you don’t really need to explain your decisions to anybody else.

MARSH’S REMAINING GOAL

The last fortnight may be a blur for Stephen Marsh but the Cambridge trainer has returned home with a clear goal in mind.

Marsh spent a week in Hong Kong with stable star El Vencedor before coming home for a few days last week then heading to Adelaide, where he had Roctave in Saturday’s South Australia Derby.

Roctave finished near the rear of the field after racing outside the leader while stable rep Tardelli was a solid midfield finish in the Queensland Guineas at Eagle Farm as Marsh spread his resources far and wide, racing in three countries in just a few days.

“Both the 3-year-olds were coming to the end of their campaigns so I am not disappointed in them at all and they will come back lovely horses next season,” says Marsh.

“I really think Tardelli will be a Group 1 horse, probably at 1600m.”

While looking forward to some routine, and some sleep, Marsh says last season’s juvenile of the year Velocious could be his next traveller, with a Queensland trip possible if she performs well at Ellerslie on May 17.

But Marsh has a more ongoing challenge in the next three months as he now sits equal with the Walker/Bergerson partnership on top of the national trainer’s black-type premiership.

Both stables have won 17 black-type races in New Zealand this season, Walker/Bergerson levelling back up when Towering Vision won the Waikato Equine Veterinary Centre Stakes at Te Rapa on Saturday.

There are two black-type races at Rotorua this Saturday and one each at Ellerslie and Trentham the Saturday after, but then they start to dry up.

So while the trainers’ premiership could be out of Marsh’s reach as he sits 19 wins behind the leaders, the black-type title looks a flip of the coin with so few races remaining.

Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald‘s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.