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Golden Winter Has Connor Beasley In The UAE Title Hunt

Almost 10 years after a horror fall threatened to end his burgeoning career, Connor Beasley could be heading to the bigger stage thanks to Golden Vekoma and a lot of hard work.

Golden Winter Has Connor Beasley In The UAE Title Hunt

Almost 10 years after a horror fall threatened to end his burgeoning career, Connor Beasley could be heading to the bigger stage thanks to Golden Vekoma and a lot of hard work.

CONNOR BEASLEY has a tough fight on his hands if he wants to be the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) champion jockey this season, but he’s already proved that winning difficult battles is in his wheelhouse. Reigning champion Tadhg O’Shea overhauled Beasley’s long-held lead as January gave way to February, but you wouldn’t count out the challenger, not when you know where he has come from.

If we’re talking geographically, Beasley is from an old hotbed of racing talent, a grounded working-class corner of northeast England oft-overlooked nowadays, but a place that has produced iconic horsemen, champion jumps horses, winners of Grand Nationals and Gold Cups, as well as its share of smart flat racers. But beyond that, Beasley is one of the lucky ones that somehow faced down his own mortality in a terrible racetrack fall and came back strong.

And he is enjoying a limelight campaign in the UAE thanks to Golden Vekoma, a horse he rode to victory in the G3 UAE 2,000 Guineas at Meydan in January, and on which he might yet gain even greater exposure in the G2 Saudi Derby in Riyadh and the G2 UAE Derby back at Meydan in April.

“He’s a lovely big horse, well-bought by the boss in America, and he’s always shown us good signs,” Beasley says of the colt that his Dubai ‘boss’ Ahmad bin Harmash picked out for US$90,000 at the 2024 Ocala Bloodstock Sales (OBS) Spring Two-Year-Old in Training auction.

“They all have to trial over here in Dubai and he trialled really well,” he continues. “Although it was only over 800 metres he did it nicely. We ran him at Meydan first time and he was drawn low, he just got a little bit of kickback and there was a bit of greenness to him that day and he was third. But the time after he went and won impressively over 1400 metres and he went and won the Guineas, which was very good.”

Connor Beasley looks on during the Dubai Racing Carnival at Meydan
CONNOR BEASLEY / Meydan // 2025 /// Photo by Francois Nel

Beasley, 30, is well-known on the northern circuit in Britain, with occasional hit and run forays to the big southern meetings. But he has made his presence felt in the UAE in the last couple of seasons and that is down to the support he has received as first jockey to Bin Harmash on the thoroughbred side of things and the Omani handler Ibrahim Al Hadhrami on the Purebred Arabian side.

“Ahmad bin Harmash is a great boss and he’s got a good bunch of horses and seems to be getting better quality each season,” he says. “I ride all of Ibrahim Al Hadhrami’s and I won the Group 1 The President’s Cup at Abu Dhabi in January for him (on Heros De Lagarde).”

A lucrative winter then, given that his horses’ earnings already stand at about AED8.7 million (US$2.3 million), some AED2 million (US$544,000) more than the entirety of last season.

Beasley was to the fore in the UAE jockey standings last term, pressing for the title with 42 wins to O’Shea’s eventual title-winning tally of 50. It might have been closer had Beasley not missed four late-season meetings to get back to County Durham in time to help the Michael Dods team prepare for the start of the British turf season.

“I went home to get going before Doncaster, before the season started at home,” he says.

That sentence alone emphasises his loyalty to those who have supported him throughout his career, particularly the team at Dods’ Denton Hall Stables in his native county, where he first turned up as a fresh-out-of-school 16-year-old.

“He’s got a good job there in Dubai,” says Dods, best known for training the star sprinting mares Mecca’s Angel and Mab’s Cross to Group 1 glory. “He wants to succeed but going out there and doing well in Dubai hasn’t changed him at all. He’ll come back and he’ll want to graft when he comes back over here. He’s a worker and a big asset to the yard.

“I remember when Covid was going on, he didn’t have anything to do because there was no racing and he was coming in and strimming the grass round the gallops, and he’ll never sit down and not be doing something. He has to be working all the time, and I think that’s why he’s having success, because he wants to be successful and is such a hard worker to make it happen.”

Dods has played a big role in Beasley’s development, not least after the rider suffered the terrible fall that could so easily have ended his promising career as a jockey just as it was getting off the ground.

“Things were going well,” Beasley recalls of that time in his life when he was transitioning from eye-catching ‘northern’ apprentice to fully-fledged jockey on the up. “It only took me two seasons to get through my claim so I went through that pretty quickly. I lost my claim in the December and went professional, then the following July – 7th of July, 2015 – I had that fall.”

He says the date in its specific fulness, as if it’s seared into his mind that way. Well, why wouldn’t it be? The awful fall from the Bryan Smart-trained Cumbrianna that afternoon left him with a brain haemorrhage, a fractured skull that required the insertion of six plates to fix, and fractured vertebrae. He was airlifted to hospital from Wolverhampton racecourse and was in surgery for 10 hours.

“I can’t remember anything about the fall,” he says. “I was laid flat on my back in intensive care for a week or so and it never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t get back up and get going again, but the people around me looking at me, it was on their minds.

“Once I was up, I had a neck and back brace on for five or six months and once that was off, well, they have amazing facilities at Jack Berry House (run by the Injured Jockeys Fund), which again, if it wasn’t for them and the facilities, there’s not a chance I’d have been back in eight months like I was, no chance at all.

“I had a lot of support from a lot of people, my wife, all my family, and the kids. When I came back it took me a good bit of time to get the ball rolling a little bit, but once things were going, they progressed.”

Connor Beasley partnering Commanche Falls to victory in the Stewards' Cup at Goodwood
CONNOR BEASLEY, COMMANCHE FALLS / Stewards’ Cup // Goodwood /// 2022 //// Photo by Alan Crowhurst

Dods provided him with the bulk of his opportunities. In 2021 and 2022 he won back-to-back editions of one of England’s most prominent and prestigious sprint handicaps, the Stewards’ Cup at Glorious Goodwood, on Dods’ popular sprinter Commanche Falls.

“Connor’s very, very strong,” Dods says. “He can get hold of a horse, all-round he’s just a very good rider who keeps things simple and gets the job done. But he’s got such a work ethic, he’s a proper grafter and so focussed on work and focussed on succeeding.”

Further high-profile success came Beasley’s way in June 2024 when he partnered the Brian Ellison-trained Onesmoothoperator to win the Northumberland Plate at Newcastle, the ‘Pitmen’s Derby’ being a nod to the once vast northeast coal field, and also a connection to Beasley’s family roots in the sport.

His father Shaun worked for Ellison, and for the multiple Grade 1-winning former trainer Howard Johnson who learned under the great, record-setting Arthur Stephenson at Leasingthorne, not far from Beasley’s hometown of Spennymoor. His grandfather Bobby Beasley was Stephenson’s assistant trainer in those legendary days highlighted by The Thinker’s 1987 Cheltenham Gold Cup triumph, but the stable also notched major flat wins: the July Cup, Nunthorpe, Middle Park, Gimcrack, and Challenge Stakes.

Beasley laments that there is nothing left of Stephenson’s once mighty operation, which began winding down after the trainer’s death in late 1992, nor for that matter Johnson’s once impressive string at nearby Crook, or Denys Smith’s Grand National-winning stable just down the road at Bishop Auckland.

“There’s nothing there now,” he says. “Arthur Stephenson and Denys Smith, they were the powerhouses and it’s all gone now.”

His mother Susan, meanwhile, worked for trainers Norman Mason and then Richard Guest who took over the training of the former’s string at Brancepeth Manor Farm – now luxury homes – for a time and sent out Red Marauder to win the 2001 Grand National. By age 14, Beasley was going with his mother to ride out at Guest’s.

“I used to go there and sit on the racehorses, I remember Red Marauder,” he says but reveals he wasn’t necessarily destined to become a jockey, least of all a flat jockey.

“I always had ponies and I was in pony club, I hunted, I did a bit of pony racing, but I was more brought up with jump racing than flat racing, so I never really thought about it,” he continues. “I wanted to be a farrier, to be honest, I was really stuck on doing that, it interested me but I wasn’t the brightest at school. I’m a big believer in what’s meant to be will go by, and things have fallen into place really.”

That is certainly true of his winters in the UAE, and the sense is that his success there should provide more opportunities when the British season kicks in. But given the sharper focus on southern-based jockeys in Britain, he knows that might not be the case no matter how hard he works.

“Back at home people tend to see you as a northern jockey, but that’s where I’m reared and brought up,” he says. “I’ve been with the boss, Mr Dods, since I started out and I still go in there twice a week when I’m back at home. My loyalty stands firmly with Mr Dods and if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have been able to get going and be where I am.”

Where he is now is top two in the UAE premiership, making a name for himself far from his northeast roots, which still run deep and true. Where he will be a couple of months from now is back on the Denton Hall gallops.

And where he will be in the future beyond depends on a multitude of variables, but if Golden Vekoma can take him to the big-time, then the now might just turn out to have been the cusp of a breakout for the hardworking ‘northern’ rider ∎

David Morgan is Chief Journalist at Idol Horse. As a sports mad young lad in County Durham, England, horse racing hooked him at age 10. He has a keen knowledge of Hong Kong and Japanese racing after nine years as senior racing writer and racing editor at the Hong Kong Jockey Club. David has also worked in Dubai and spent several years at the Racenews agency in London. His credits include among others Racing Post, ANZ Bloodstock News, International Thoroughbred, TDN, and Asian Racing Report.

View all articles by David Morgan.

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