Brave Heart
But for Dancing Brave, who took the world of racing by storm in 1986, he has a simple accolade.
“He was the best,” says Eddery, without hesitation. High praise from a man who partnered Grundy, El Gran Senor and Zafonic, en route to over 4,600 wins.
“He had a lovely quality about him, really laid-back,” says Eddery. “Well balanced, with a great turn of foot off any pace.”
Two decades have passed since Dancing Brave’s defining run in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. Eddery says it feels like yesterday.
James Delahooke, who had bought the horse for Prince Khalid Abdullah, couldn’t get to Longchamp. Kept busy with the autumn sales, Delahooke was stuck at his farm in Buckinghamshire, nervously watching the television.
The race’s closing stages remain fresh in Delahooke’s mind. Entering the final furlong, Dancing Brave found himself looking at the back of a wall made up of nine of Europe’s best horses. For Eddery, it was now or never, and he took his horse so far to the outside that he disappeared from the television screen.
“I remember it clearly,” Delahooke says. “Because he challenged wide, he was out of shot, and the heart started to sink ... ”
Delahooke had first laid eyes on Dancing Brave two years earlier at Fasig-Tipton’s sales in Lexington, Kentucky.
“He wasn’t a perfect specimen, but there was something very athletic and imposing about him,” he recalls. “His front legs were far from perfect, but I felt that he could live with his deficiencies.
Delahooke took Dancing Brave, and paid $200,000 — in hindsight, the kind of bargain you dream about.
“You have to remember, this was the Crazy 80s,” he says. “This was at a time when Sheikh Mohammed was paying $10 million for a single horse.”
Money was no guarantee of success. Sheikh Mohammed al Makhtoum’s rivalry with the Coolmore Group saw the former pay a record $10.2 million in 1983 for a yearling. Snaafi Dancer did not become a household name. In fact, he never raced, and was infamously summed up by trainer John Dunlop as “quite a nice little horse, actually, but unfortunately no bloody good.”
Delahooke was cautiously optimistic. “Whenever you make a purchase, you have a dream for every one of those yearlings,” he says. “Maybe — hopefully — this one is going to be something really special.”
His feeling about Dancing Brave was not shared by Prince Khalid Abdullah’s principal trainer.
“Jeremy Tree had first pick of what he wanted from the horses I had bought,” says Delahooke. “He missed Dancing Brave. It was a big mistake.”
Waiting in the wings was Guy Harwood.
“I got my first look at him as a yearling, when he came over to England before they were allocated out to the trainers,” Harwood now says. “This was one of the horses I wanted to train from what Mr Tree didn’t take.”
Delahooke believes it was a stroke of luck for horse and trainer alike, saying Harwood’s patience allowed Dancing Brave’s potential to develop.
“He was very keen to train the horse, and he was a very good and patient trainer,” he says. “Because of the deficiencies in his front legs, he had to be a mature horse, to race on those limbs. Guy was professional enough to know this and to be patient enough to wait.”
Harwood is less inclined to take all the credit.
“He was a late-May foal, so he was quite backward,” he says. “He was very much what I’d call a bottom-yard horse at first. It was fortunate at the time we had 60-odd yearlings in training, and therefore the backward horses weren’t hard trained in the early days.”
It wasn’t long, though, before the trainer’s interest was piqued.
“He first really caught my eye around the middle of July, coming up the gallops one day. I said to the man who was looking after the backward horses ‘What’s that?’ He said ‘That’s Dancing Brave’, and I said ‘You can drop him off at the top yard on your way home’.
Dancing Brave raced only twice as a two-year-old, but the first of those two victories, the Dorking Stakes at Sandown Park, was enough to convince Harwood’s stable jockey Greville Starkey that this was something special.
Harwood remembers: “Greville got off him and said ‘That’s my Derby ride’.”
The association was to bring Starkey the lowest moment of his career.
Dancing Brave opened 1986 with a one-miler, the Craven Stakes, at Newmarket. With Starkey again in the saddle, he blitzed the field. A convincing win in the 2,000 Guineas followed, and an assault on the Epsom Derby seemed the next logical step. But some had their doubts, as Eddery remembers.
“There was a lot of press, because he was a good Guineas winner, showing a lot of speed, about whether he would stay the mile and a half,” he says. “It was unknown territory. The furthest he’d been was a mile.”
Starkey settled Dancing Brave into his usual spot near the back of the field, preparing for the late burst that had been so successful up to that point. That burst, however, came a fraction too late; all connected with Dancing Brave watched in dismay as he finished at astonishing speed only to lose by a neck to the Aga Khan-owned Shahrastani.
Starkey was pilloried for, as most saw it, leaving the best horse in the race with far too much to do. Harwood believes ill-fortune had as much to do with the mishap as pilot error.
“The seventh or the eighth furlong was run in 17 seconds, four seconds over the average for the Derby,” he says. “The whole field had concertina-ed up, and when it opened up, those at the back had a job to get a run. I don’t think Greville rode the horse the wrong way.
He perhaps gave him too much to do as the race was run.”
Twenty years on, Delahooke’s disappointment is still palpable.
“It was the worst day of my life,” he admits. “I haven’t won a Derby. Guy hasn’t. And for everyone involved in horse racing, the Derby is something you really want.”
Starkey and Dancing Brave bounced back with a convincing win over a strong field in the Eclipse Stakes at Sandown. But fate intervened, placing the horse in the hands of Eddery for his next race, the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Stakes at Ascot.
“Greville had a fall,” says Eddery. “He hurt his neck badly, and I was available. I was very excited. I knew he was a good horse when I saw him just get beaten in the Derby. You knew that he was special.”
Dancing Brave again left the field for dead.
Starkey recovered and rode to victory in the Goodwood Stakes, Dancing Brave’s trial for the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. But any hopes of staying in the saddle for Paris were in vain. The horse’s owner decreed that Eddery, whom he was to retain full-time from the following year, should take over.
“By that time, Khalid Abdullah had made up his mind that he was going to employ Pat as his stable jockey, and so it was automatic,” says Harwood.
SPIRITS were high as the party travelled to Longchamp. Facing Dancing Brave would be the strongest field the race had ever seen. German Derby winner Acatenango, unbeaten in his previous 12 races, was fancied, as were Triptych, Shardari, Darara and, once again, Shahrastani. The latter, seemingly out of sorts when he was vanquished in the King George, was back to his best.
The biggest challenge, however, was expected to come from French “super horse” Bering, who had won the French Derby in record time. Jockey Gary Moore believed Bering was unbeatable, as did most of France. But Dancing Brave was ready.
“The horse was in super condition that day,” says Harwood. “He was absolutely at his best and I was really confident that he would win.”
Eddery was in similarly buoyant mood, with only one worry as he again planned to strike from the back of the field.
“I couldn’t wait for it,” he says. “My only doubt was getting there too soon, because I’d ridden him in the King George and when he got to the front, he used to pull up and take things easy, so my intentions were to be the last one to challenge.”
With Dancing Brave cruising along near the back, Eddery waited for his moment, watching his main rival.
“I always had Bering in my sights,” he says. “He was always only just in front of me the whole way around.”
With a furlong and a half to go, Shardari moved up. Bering responded and suddenly the field was spread out across the track. The continent’s best were set for a winner-take-all dash to the post.
Harwood felt a pang of doubt as the spectre of Epsom reared its head. Dancing Brave was behind the pack.
“It’s one you’ll never forget,” he says. “There was a moment where I was saying ‘What the hell’s going on?’”
Eddery responded by taking Dancing Brave right to the outside. A roar of acclaim for Bering died in the throats of the French crowd as Eddery’s mount went thundering past 100 yards from the finish to be crowned the indisputable King of Europe.
At Adstock Manor Stud, James Delahooke was ecstatic. “I burst into tears,” he says. “It was a wonderful moment. The horse deserved it, Guy deserved it, after the Derby, it set the seal on his year, and proved to everybody that he really was a good horse.”
In the euphoria that followed, it was decided that Dancing Brave would make an assault on the Breeders’ Cup Turf in California. It was, as Harwood concedes, one too many.
“After the Arc, the horse didn’t recover as quickly as we would have liked,” he says. “I could never quite get him back to the weight I wanted him to be when we got to the Breeders’ Cup, and he was always just a bit dehydrated.”
Eddery quickly felt all was not well.
“I knew as soon as he jumped off in the race,” he says. “He was very flat. He was unfortunate that he had to travel all that way in the heat. The climate here was cold at the time. The quarantined horses weren’t let out until 9 o’clock. By that time it was boiling hot.”
An exhausted Dancing Brave trailed home in fourth as Manila won, a result that still grates with Delahooke.
Dancing Brave was retired to stud after the Breeders’ Cup. After battling a serious illness, he went on to produce many winners, 1993 proving a bumper season. White Muzzle won the Italian Derby and Wemyss Bight took the Irish Oaks. And on a June day at Epsom, Commander in Chief swept home three-and-a-half lengths clear to erase memories of his father’s defeat.
Harwood never got that coveted Derby win — in 1996, his daughter Amanda Perrett took over the training licence at Coombelands — but he remembers Dancing Brave with great fondness.
“He could have won at six furlongs in Group One, he did win Group Ones at a mile, he won Group Ones at a mile-and-a-quarter and a mile-and-a-half, and that’s the real test,” he say. Your Nijinskys, your Mill Reefs, your Sir Ivors, he was easily on a par.
“He was the best I ever trained, without a shadow of a doubt.”
