Grundy and Bustino, the race of the century
This year’s King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes can claim to be a true clash of the generations.
For the first time in seven years the race has attracted the Derby winner and he will be put to the test by a field that contains some classy older horses. If the markets are right it will come down to a battle between Workforce and his stable companion Harbinger.
Whether it can match Grundy and Bustino is another matter.
Their names alone still invoke memories for all who witnessed their epic battle at Ascot and even a little wonderment for those who have relied on the anecdotal evidence of their forebears and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4KvQ5fxsdE.
Grundy and Bustino, the King George VI of 1975, the race of the century. Each generation claims that theirs has been blessed the greatest talents but even after 35 years have passed this race still holds racing in its thrall. If nothing else it was one of those duels that lived up to its billing.
Grundy came to the race having won the Irish 2000 Guineas, the Derby and the Irish Derby. Bustino had won the St Leger the previous season and, three days after Grundy’s Derby victory, broken the mile-and-a-half track record at Epsom when winning the Coronation Cup in June. They were set on a collision course at Ascot the following month.
As he waited in the starting stalls Pat Eddery did his best to compose himself. He was still just 23, but already champion jockey, and yet he was stifling feelings of tension as he and Grundy were led into stall No.8. “I was just a kid at the time,” he said “and it was a lot of pressure.”
Two boxes to his right Joe Mercer was preparing to break Bustino out behind his pacemakers when the stalls crashed open. Bustino’s trainer, d**k Hern, had devised a plan that was in, its way, as simple as Hern hoped that it would brutally effective. He ran two pacemakers as a hammer of unrelenting speed on which to break the anvil of Grundy’s stamina.
“Originally we were having three pacemakers, but Riboson couldn’t run,” Mercer recalled. “My horse could pull very hard, in fact he came out of the stalls first, then Highest kicked on early and Kinglet followed him and then took over after about four furlongs.”
Like a man who had read the last page of a thriller Eddery knew the plot. “Oh I knew what was going on,” he said. “They didn’t believe that he was a true stayer so they went flat out,” he added, the last words emitted with a gusto to match the speed with which the first three furlongs flashed by with Highest pushed along by Frankie Durr as if his life depended on it.
By now a field that included the Dahlia, the winner of the previous two King Georges, and Star Appeal, the Eclipse Stakes winner who would subsequently win the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, were being fed through a shredder of attritional speed. The halfway mark came and went but the tempo did not drop, although Highest had yielded to the lung-bursting fatigue, leaving Kinglet, ridden by Eric Eldin, in front. Star Appeal was in second, Bustino in third and Grundy hanging on to the searing pace in fourth.
Now Mercer was taking the lead, as much by the machinations of the tactics as his own decision. “The first six furlongs were very fast and I probably got there a little too soon,” Mercer said.
“Kinglet had collapsed and Bustino pulled his way to the front with more than three to go. If we’d had Riboson, he’d have carried me well into the straight, may be even to the two. You don’t think you’ve got it won until you get to the post but I wasn’t concerned about what was behind me – or where they were. All I wanted to do was to get to the winning post.”
Three lengths in Bustino’s wake, pounding the sun-baked turf, Grundy (pictured, right) was tracking coming to the home turn but Eddery was worried. “I was flat out,” he said, almost still gasping at the experience of asking a Derby winner for maximum effort with the winning post still a speck on the horizon.
“They had my horse completely off the bridle. But was such a brave animal that he just kept going. I had to stalk Bustino all the way – I couldn’t let him get away.”
Mercer, in that classical style that relied on rhythmic impulsion from the saddle as much as it did the concussive variety from the whip, was urging Bustino for another effort up the home straight. Bustino answered the call but then Mercer knew he had company. “You could sense a horse is coming at you. It was just about a furlong-and-and-a-half. It could only be Grundy,” he said with a chuckle. “It couldn’t have been anything else. We’d burned those off and I thought we’d burned him off as well.”
Then Mercer could see the white blaze of Grundy’s face from the periphery of his vision and, within 10 strides, Grundy was in front. But only just. “I got to him just inside the furlong marker,” Eddery said “and then Bustino came back at me and I thought ‘oh no’.”
Mercer’s thoughts were only on winning until he felt the slight lurch that told him the race was lost. “My fella just changed his legs a hundred yards off the post. His tongue came out, he came off the fence and I knew he wasn’t going to win. He wasn’t tired; I just knew something had gone. Later it turned out he’d done his tendon and that was that.”
Grundy won by a half-length, with Dahlia five lengths back in third, the time broke the track record by 2.36 seconds but it had broken something else. Bustino was never to race again and his conqueror was to make only one more racecourse appearance himself. Grundy was beaten into fourth place by Dahlia in the Benson and Hedges Gold Cup, at York the following month. Dahlia had never been able to get on terms with Grundy at Ascot but this was as pale an imitation of Grundy as one of the strands from his flaxen mane.
Eddery knew where the race had been lost, on that blistering gallop to the winning post at Ascot. “In the end he gave me too much, he pulled up two strides past the line. He almost couldn’t walk in to the winner’s enclosure afterwards. It just ruined him, but that was the braveness of the horse, and the second.”
The race that had everything had taken everything they had to give.
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