Godolphin’s Lifetime Care Enables Horses To Be Off-Track Heroes
Papineau’s legacy is a lot more than that of an Ascot Gold Cup winner and Godolphin’s Lifetime Care and Rehoming programmes show that retired racehorses have much to offer individuals and communities.
DUBAWI looks out from his stable door to see who has come to pay tribute. The brilliant racehorse turned champion sire is not only the ‘king’ around Dalham Hall Stud but also peerless among all horses under Godolphin’s global banner.
The Godolphin legend is looked after like a king, too. His box is as big as some common folks’ living rooms; all richly-hued wood of dark brown and reddish tones that seem to enhance the gleam of the late morning sunrays bouncing off his dappled bay neck and flank.
“He can be a bit sharp,” Godolphin’s Diana Cooper warns and sure enough a swift yet somehow nonchalant nip is narrowly avoided, the old stallion tastes no more than a flinching shoulder of waxed cotton.
Dubawi’s legacy is strong to say the least, his record on the track is etched into the sport’s annals, and his genes will live on in his multiplicity of descendants. It’s easy to care for an old racehorse when he’s also producing lucrative income and brand prestige in ‘retirement’ as a champion stallion, a sire of sires, standing at £350,000 per cover.
But Godolphin has a keen awareness of its responsibilities to the horses it breeds and races, and of the importance of honouring the sport’s ‘social licence’ in a time when horse racing’s welfare and aftercare responsibilities are under greater scrutiny.
Through its ‘Lifetime Care’ and ‘Rehoming’ programmes in Britain, Australia, the United States, and Japan, Godolphin is committed to trying to ensure that the hundreds of horses it has at any given time have a suitable and well-loved life, including after their racing careers are over.
A short drive from Dalham Hall Stud through the winding back lanes of east Cambridgeshire is Woodditton Stud with its quiet paddocks and smart stable and retraining facilities. There you’ll find perhaps 40 to 50 horses that raced for Godolphin (one or two from its close affiliates), and among those is a quartet of famous ex-racers: if Dubawi is the king of the Godolphin realm, then these four heroes are its old warrior knights.
They are standing about 100 yards beyond the fence of Woodditton’s most spacious paddock: three with noses down, nibbling grass; one with his neck straight, head high, ears to the sky, looking with mild curiosity as Cooper calls out to them.
“They’re not interested in us,” she says, amused. “They’ll come across for Geraldine, though.”
Cooper turns towards a vehicle pulling to a stop beside the fence: stud groom Geraldine Jones steps out and begins unloading something tasty. At once, all four are moving, two-by-two, towards the person they know best: the feisty Cross Counter and Prince Bishop eager in the vanguard, African Story and Colour Vision following at a trot behind.
That makes a Melbourne Cup winner, two Dubai World Cup winners and an Ascot Gold Cup hero: geldings all, so no stallion value, no progeny to carry on their legacy, but they too have earned indelible mention in horse racing history, and they have a home for life, just as their old paddock mate Papineau had before he passed away in February 2024 at the age of 24.
Everyone talks about Papineau around here, his name comes up time and again. There’s a grey stone memorialising him on the verge by the lane not far from the paddock.
“I could talk about him all day, he’s just one of those boys,” says Jones.
Papineau won the Ascot Gold Cup in the Godolphin blue, but his legend lies in his remarkable later life, after the racing, after the retraining and the show-jumping, after leading the yearlings, and after his days in old-timer parades. His legacy rests in what he did for the children and the terminally ill patients he connected with, and whose lives he enriched.
“Papineau was incredible,” says Hannah Forbester of East Anglia’s Children’s Hospices (EACH), when contacted by phone.
The charity cares for children and young people with life-threatening conditions and provides support to their families.
“EACH is about making memories and making the most of short lives, so we love any memory-making like this,” Forbester says as she recalls the ‘magical’ first time Papineau met the EACH children, 14 of them plus 23 of their family members, at its Norfolk hospice. That was in June 2023.
“He was so intuitive with the children: he acted almost differently around the children to how he was when we first met him; he was really kind and curious with them as well.”
Forbester relates that EACH cares for children and young people with complex needs and they went outside to meet Papineau in wheelchairs, one in a medical bed; Papineau bowed, unprompted, and rested his head on the children’s hands.
“Sometimes it’s quite hard to get smiles out of these children and we have a lot of non-verbal children as well, and they were just delighted,” Forbester adds. “They were making quite high-pitched noises, which means they’re happy and excited.”
Godolphin is one of EACH’s corporate partners and Papineau’s visit came about after a conversation between Forbester and Godolphin’s UK Charities Manager Penny Taylor. Papineau had already visited Newmarket Academy to meet pupils and was a massive hit, and Newmarket Hospital where he had been just as ‘incredible’ with the patients.
It had been a similar scene there: Papineau bowing his head to be patted, patients, some in wheelchairs, feeding him carrots and apples; one patient being brought out in a bed to meet the remarkable horse.
“There was one man who couldn’t come out of bed at all and he was literally right beside where we were and Papineau stuck his head into the window to this patient. That’s how good he was,” Jones recalls.
“He would lead me. I was just a passenger going with him. Whatever it was, he just knew; whatever the situation he just adapted to that. I was blown away. I know him and that even blew me away, it was incredible.”
With Papineau gone, there is hope that another might step into the role: the G1 Jebel Hatta winner Blair House is being brought along to see if he might one day be able to do something similar to what Papineau was able to do.
Meanwhile, the four heroes now residing in what Jones refers to as “the million-dollar paddock” are the current poster boys of Godolphin’s Lifetime Care programme. But the ‘home for life’ ethos is not only for the Group 1 heroes and the process starts before they leave the racing stables.
“We see those horses there at Woodditton and it’s great how they’re looked after and prepared,” says Godolphin trainer Charlie Appleby when asked about the programme during the Breeders’ Cup build-up at Del Mar. “What we’ll do, from the racing side, is we’ll look at certain horses during the latter stage of their career and we’ll say, ‘Well, he’s going to be a nice riding horse or he’s maybe not’.
“You want them all to find nice homes but certain horses will never adapt to going into a riding home, for example, so from our point of view, what we try to help the rehoming team with is trying to pinpoint certain horses that we know it’s going to suit in their life after racing, helping them understand the individual that they’re going to be working with.”
Back at Woodditton around ten horses are at the stage of going through the retraining programme led by Godolphin’s rehoming manager Cilla Leonard who liaises on-site with Jones.
“All the re-homers come into me first,” says Jones. “They have their downtime and then they get buddied-up with people and horses. We get them all sorted and they might have six months to nearly a year off, but it all depends on what they need. When I think they’re ready to go on and start the programme, they go to Cilla. The Godolphin lifetime care horses, like these four, they’ll stay with me forever.”
Leonard’s role is to prepare the retired racehorses to go to a new home: as a riding horse, perhaps to participate in show classes, dressage, showjumping or eventing, or compete as polo ponies. She talks firmly about understanding that each horse is an individual and emphasises that when a horse goes through her hands and is rehomed, that is not the end of it as far as Godolphin is concerned.
“We want these horses to have forever homes, somewhere they can be loved and cared for, for the rest of their lives, that’s what they deserve. And they deserve a chance at a second career if that’s what’s right for them,” says Leonard as she watches the multiple Group 1 winner Addeyyb alongside his paddock mate Manobo in their temporary Woodditton home.
The pair will go through the usual process: in the field for some down time; walked for two weeks to two months; then put under tack, lunged, driven, and then ridden for a month; after that, jump some poles to see if jumping is their thing.
Manobo, a high-class stayer when trained by Appleby, has since joined Louise Robson of Thoroughbred Dressage, who took on the late Queen Elizabeth II’s Quadrille, Listed-placed at Royal Ascot for trainer Richard Hannon, and guided him to become Retraining of Racehorses’ (RoR) Horse of the Year in 2019 and 2020.
“People apply to us for a horse, they’ll come and visit, and if we feel it’s not the right fit for the horse – maybe they don’t have the right experience for that horse – we’ll tell them that and we’ll find a home that’s the right fit,” Leonard says.
“If everything looks good, the horse goes there and we stay in contact with them, I make regular visits, and if ever circumstances change and someone can no longer care for the horse, we will always take them back.”
The new owner enters an ownership contract with Godolphin and pays £500 plus VAT. The contract includes provisions for the horse’s long-term welfare, including a non-racing agreement and the option for Godolphin to buy back the horse if necessary.
One of the things Cooper, Leonard and Jones are all keen to get across is the message that thoroughbreds are versatile, that the old stigma of all racehorses being difficult to handle and unsuitable for other pursuits is not the reality. Papineau exemplified that. Also that each horse is an individual and must be assessed and cared for as such.
“Once you take some horses out of that competitive environment they do change,” was Appleby’s observation. “My children ride now so we go to some of the big events and we see some of the classes going on with the ex-racehorses and it’s fantastic: it’ll make me stand and watch the class, anyway.”
The massive Godolphin setup as it is today is down to Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, known the racing world over as Sheikh Mohammed. He established Godolphin 30 years ago as something of a boutique racing stable, taking the best of his horses and putting them into one elite world-conquering team.
That was all to help advance Dubai’s global profile. It succeeded, and it gave the world Dubawi’s exceptional sire Dubai Millennium, the champions Fantastic Light, Daylami, Swain, Sakhee and many other popular heroes. And it evolved, it grew, eventually encompassing the Sheikh’s broad international horse racing interests, including his Darley breeding operation at Dalham Hall Stud where Godolphin’s nerve centre is based.
But while racing and breeding occupy Godolphin’s centre and are the catalysts for everything it is, the organisation is committed, via its Godolphin Charities arm, to a raft of endeavours and projects dedicated to horses and people.
There is the Newmarket Academy Godolphin Beacon Project, and the Newmarket Pony Academy, which engages children local to Newmarket, and those models are being adopted much further afield; it supports the Together for Racing International (TfRI) alliance, promoting education, community engagement and career paths worldwide; then there’s its well-known Godolphin Flying Start programme and more.
Its aim of providing lifetime care for its horses is the basic requirement the whole thoroughbred racing industry, globally, should be committed to. Godolphin invests in lifetime care and rehoming for its horses, whether they be stallions and broodmares producing the next generations, retired Group 1 stars, or old geldings that never came close to reaching those heights.
As Dubawi relaxes in his regal Dalham Hall box, Addeyyb and Manobo disagree over whose mouth should have ownership of a leafy branch, and Cross Counter, at 10 years of age the young man of the four old warriors, lords it around that “million-dollar paddock”, Jones sums up the sentiments of just about anyone who has ever connected with a thoroughbred, be they a Group 1 champion or a selling-plater.
“I’m privileged to be working with these horses really, they’ve given us so much joy watching them on the racecourse,” she says.
“It’s our time to give back to them.” ∎
