Godolphin’s Classic Joy Ends An Uneasy Week Globally
Sheikh Mohammed’s global breeding and racing team delivered big-time at Newmarket and Churchill Downs while in Australia uncertainty remained about what that branch will look like in the future.
IT’S A RARE THING in sport to have everything come together as it did for Godolphin last weekend. Winning North America’s biggest race, the Kentucky Derby – for the first time – a day after bagging a Kentucky Oaks, then taking both the 2,000 Guineas and 1,000 Guineas in Britain was all mighty reward for Sheikh Mohammed’s long-time investment in his globe-spanning operation.
“It’s been an amazing weekend for everybody, it’s what dreams are made of,” said jockey William Buick after Desert Flower had completed the Classic haul with a powerful front-running win in Sunday’s 1,000 Guineas.
It was a soaring end to a week in which Godolphin hit the headlines in Australia after it was announced that it would move to a ‘public trainer’ model and its retained trainer James Cummings would go out on his own after eight years. That in turn raised speculation around the future employment of Godolphin’s Australian staff who make up the team at its Crown Lodge and Osborne Park stables in Sydney and Carbine Lodge in Melbourne. It has also raised questions about the future of those properties.
But in England and Kentucky, all was aglow in the Godolphin realm: Desert Flower and Ruling Court were triumphant at Newmarket, Sovereignty and Good Cheer at Churchill Downs, and to add to the northern hemisphere feelgood, the ‘boys in blue’ also had Europe’s champion juvenile colt of last year Shadow Of Light place second in the 2,000 Guineas, with the three-race rookie Tornado Alert fourth.
Four majors in three days, plus highly-promising runs in defeat placed Godolphin’s three-year-olds at the forefront of their generation in Europe and North America. Not only that, in Ruling Court they now have a classic-winning son of big rival Coolmore’s latest star sire Justify to potentially bolster a key part of Godolphin’s breeding arm, the Darley stallion roster.
“We never saw that coming but it’s wonderful that it has: I was at Newmarket both days and it was just a feeling of elation,” Darley’s director of studs, stallions and breeding Liam O’Rourke told Idol Horse. That feeling of elation at a great team effort and joy for the “principal” who enables it all to happen, Sheikh Mohammed, was a dominant theme coming out of Godolphin’s HQ at Dalham Hall Stud, just outside Newmarket.
O’Rourke said the Godolphin team went into the weekend thinking “realistically” and being “hopeful,” but “not overconfident” about the chances of trainers Charlie Appleby, Brad Cox, and Bill Mott all achieving success with their talented contenders. “They are Classics, after all,” he continued, adding that Godolphin and its people have been “doing it long enough to know” how difficult it is to achieve victory in just one of those races.
“We had hoped, probably at the back of our minds, that one day all that hard work would be rewarded in that way, and at the same time the vision of our principal would be rewarded in equal measure,” he said.
Sheikh Mohammed’s vision has taken Godolphin from an elite yet small racing team with a selective make-up at its inception in the mid-1990s to a worldwide force with branches of its racing and breeding operations in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Japan and Australia.
Dubai’s ruler has enjoyed major wins around the world thanks to the likes of Dubai Millennium, Fantastic Light, Swain, Sakhee, Daylami, Rebel’s Romance, and many more heroes of the royal blue brigade.
Sheikh Mohammed’s set-up is a major employer in the industry and he has invested significantly in a Godolphin charities arm that provides racehorse aftercare and post-racing retraining, as well as sponsoring educational and vocational programmes, and community engagement, notably through schools.
On the racing front, the weekend Godolphin heroics – a first Kentucky Derby win, second Kentucky Oaks, sixth 2,000 Guineas and fifth 1,000 Guineas – displayed a picture of the Sheikh’s British and U.S. operations being strong and settled.
In Britain, Godolphin’s number one trainer Appleby has a powerhouse stable in Newmarket, close to Godolphin’s other nominated British-based handler, Saeed bin Suroor, while ‘public’ trainers John and Thady Gosden have a handful more. It was Appleby who prepared Ruling Court and Desert Flower, as well as Shadow Of Light; Suroor who saddled up Tornado Alert.
Last year in Britain Godolphin had its lowest number of runners and its lowest number of winners since 2008: 426 runs for 112 wins. That’s noticeably down on its best tally of 287 wins from 1,194 runs in Britain in 2015. But the 2024 strike rate of 26 percent remained high, and Appleby pursued an aggressive offshore strategy, sending high-class horses to race in North America during the peak of the European season.
Meanwhile, 2024 in the U.S. saw Godolphin’s highest yearly total of wins, 104, and the highest number of runners, 460, since its all-time high of 487 runners in 2015. The current horses in training there are spread around the barns of Cox, Mott, Eoin Harty, Michael Stidham and Brendan Walsh. It was Cox who sent out Good Cheer in prime order, and Mott who trained Sovereignty to give Sheikh Mohammed his long-desired Kentucky Derby triumph 26 years after the Suroor-trained Worldly Manner and Jerry Bailey first carried the Godolphin silks to defeat in the great race.
Such results as happened this latest first weekend in May are what Godolphin was created to accomplish.
“I think that’s fair comment,” O’Rourke said. “We’re involved in many racing jurisdictions throughout the world, southern hemisphere as well. We’re so lucky to have had that luck at the weekend following a lot of hard work and input from the various participants.”
That includes all the staff engaged down the years in the large breeding operation that produced three of the weekend’s four G1 winners, as well as the 2,000 Guineas second and fourth. Not forgetting those that put in the preparation before buying young horses at auction to augment the homebreds, such as Ruling Court was when topping last year’s Arqana Breeze-up at €2.3 million.
The Godolphin ‘buying bench’ makes the judgement calls on such purchases, with Sheikh Mohammed having the final say.
The six prominent three-year-olds from Godolphin’s classic weekend are a good snapshot of what has gone into developing the breeding operation which spans farms in Britain, Ireland, the United States, Australia and Japan.
“This didn’t start yesterday or the day before, many of these bloodlines have been in his ownership for many years now going back to the 1980s,” O’Rourke said.
Sovereignty’s granddam Mushka was a Grade 1 winner acquired by Godolphin out of the Keeneland November breeding stock sale in 2016; Desert Flower is out of Godolphin’s multiple Group 2 winner Promising Run whose dam, the Group 1 winner Aviacion, was bought out of Brazil; similarly, Good Cheer is out of Godolphin’s two-time G1 winner Wedding Toast whose dam Golden Sheba was acquired to join the Kentucky broodmare band.
Meanwhile, Shadow Of Light traces back several generations through the Gainsborough Stud lines that Darley/Godolphin incorporated when Sheikh Mohammed’s brother Maktoum Al Maktoum passed away in 2006; and Tornado Alert is from a longstanding Darley family, his fourth dam Kerrera having worn the Sheikh’s old maroon and white silks to finish runner-up to Musical Bliss in the 1989 1,000 Guineas: Sheikh Mohammed owned the first, second and fourth in that race.
“The principal was very keen on acquiring the best female lines around and Kerrera was in a different ownership,” O’Rourke continued. “One of our scouts at the time, Charles Spiller, who was then our pedigree advisor, he had seen her work one morning and was very impressed and hence a private deal followed. There were several transactions of that type over the years.
“We bought Aviacion from Brazil privately, she was a very good race mare indeed and was by a Shirley Heights stallion. That was just part of the innovation of the principal and the foresight that he has had. He was keen to try and introduce some southern hemisphere bloodlines into our broodmare band.
“As for Sovereignty, his dam (Crowned) was bought at Keeneland as a yearling by John Ferguson. She only had three foals, she died young on us, sadly, (in 2024) and has left us this wonderful legacy.”
Godolphin’s first Kentucky Derby would have been reward enough, but the four-race classic haul has added another highpoint to the operation’s already storied legacy of big race triumphs across more than 30 years, right at a time when the Australian structure is encountering significant change. ∎
