Racing's best fairytale endings, including Honeysuckle
"You dream of a fairytale ending and it doesn’t normally happen, but it has here and she’s read the script."
None of the winners at this year’s Festival returned to quite the same rapturous reception that Honeysuckle did after winning the Mares’ Hurdle for owner Kenny Alexander, trainer Henry de Bromhead, quoted above, and jockey Rachael Blackmore whose own career owes such a lot to Honeysuckle and who will doubtless miss her the most, having partnered her in all 19 of her races, 17 of them yielding victories.
What made Honeysuckle’s final victory all the sweeter was that she came into the race after suffering the only two defeats of her career following some slightly below-par performances, putting her in the rare position for her of having a bit to prove. But she gave the Festival crowd one more memorable win as she signed off a brilliant career in trademark fashion, typically responding well in the closing stages to win going away to repeat her victory in the same race three years earlier, her two wins in the Mares’ Hurdle coming either side of her two wins in the Champion Hurdle.
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It’s certainly true, as her trainer said, that fairytale endings such as Honeysuckle’s are rare events. It was only 12 months earlier that the career of another hugely popular jumper and multiple Festival winner, Tiger Roll, drew to a close at Cheltenham but the dual Grand National winner was narrowly denied a sixth Festival success on his final start by his own stablemate Delta Work. The likes of Istabraq, Kauto Star and Big Buck’s each established legendary reputations with their Festival exploits and made the final appearances of their glittering careers at the meeting, though in each case it was a below-par effort there which hastened their retirement.
On the other hand, other top jumpers of the recent past Sprinter Sacre and Annie Power did go out on a winning note; their final starts came within weeks of each other in April 2016, Annie Power’s in the Aintree Hurdle and Sprinter Sacre’s in the Celebration Chase at Sandown, though neither of them got a Honeysuckle-style send-off as in both cases nobody knew at the time that that was to be their final appearance on a racecourse.
Although a top-class chaser for Paul Nicholls in his own right and the winner of three Grade 1 races, Neptune Collonges was unfortunate to be a contemporary and stable-companion of two even better chasers in Kauto Star and Denman and finished in the frame behind them in both the 2008 and 2009 Gold Cups. However, at the age of 11 and with the decision having been taken before the race to retire him afterwards whatever the outcome, Neptune Collonges secured the biggest prize of all over fences when gaining a dramatic win in the 2012 Grand National, getting up on the line to pip Sunnyhillboy by a nose at odds of 33/1.
Talking of the Grand National, last year’s race ensured a fairytale ending to the career of amateur jockey Sam Waley-Cohen who capped a brilliant record over the Grand National course when successful on an even longer-priced outsider, Noble Yeats. The 50/1 winner gave Waley-Cohen his seventh success over the big fences, with his win in the big one coming on his tenth ride in the Grand National. Echoing De Bromhead’s words regarding Honeysuckle’s final race, speaking before the Grand National Waley-Cohen said "I would love to come back into the winners’ enclosure to say goodbye. Fairytales don’t usually happen though so I would love to just have a great run round with him."
While Waley-Cohen had already stated beforehand that his ride on Noble Yeats in the Grand National would be his last, at first only 12-times Irish champion Ruby Walsh knew that he’d ridden his final winner when getting Kemboy home in front of Cheltenham Gold Cup-winning stablemate Al Boum Photo in a thrilling Punchestown Gold Cup in 2019. It was certainly news to Kemboy’s trainer Willie Mullins. "He got off and asked if I could find someone for Livelovelaugh later, I just looked at him and he said 'I’m out of here' and that’s when the penny dropped."
Of course, jockeys can create their own fairytale endings to some extent by choosing the right moment to bow out if they’re lucky, though few have retired on such a high as Walsh who said he’d been thinking about retirement ever since breaking his right leg for the fifth time at the 2018 Cheltenham Festival. A month or so before Walsh, Noel Fehily also managed to retire from the saddle on a winner when successful in a bumper at Newbury on the 1/3 favourite Get In The Queue.
On the Flat, the fairytale ending to a career which comes most readily to mind has to be that of American gelding Da Hoss who made what NBC racecaller Tom Durkin called in commentary "the greatest comeback since Lazarus" to win the 1998 Breeders’ Cup Mile. Trained by Michael Dickinson, Da Hoss had been sold cheaply as a yearling and then overcome physical problems early in his career to win the Breeders’ Cup Mile for the first time in 1996. But his problems persisted and it was the best part of two years before Dickinson could get him back on the track.
When he was finally able to get another race into him, the 1998 Breeders’ Cup was less than a month away but Da Hoss won on his comeback in a specially programmed allowance race at Colonial Downs. That enabled Da Hoss to take his chance at Churchill Downs against, among others, the reigning Horse of the Year Favorite Trick and a European contingent headed by David Loder’s Irish 2000 Guineas and Queen Elizabeth II Stakes winner Desert Prince. Run at a good pace, it proved a stern test of his fitness but having taken the lead over a furlong out and then been headed narrowly by Hawksley Hill, Da Hoss fought back under John Velasquez to get the verdict by a head.
That was the final start for Da Hoss who won 12 of his 20 career starts. Dickinson knows better than most what it means to return to the sort of reception which greeted Honeysuckle and her connections in the Cheltenham winners’ enclosure.
It was 40 years ago this week at Cheltenham that he accomplished the greatest achievement in his ‘former life’ training jumpers in Yorkshire, but in an interview with The OwnerBreeder shortly after Da Hoss had died early last year, he said: "His second win in the Breeders’ Cup Mile at Churchill Downs in 1998, having had just one race in two years, sits right at the top of everything I’ve done. It was harder to train Da Hoss than to have the first five in the Gold Cup, but we all loved him."
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