I have several secret vices. One of my most secret is that when I am in need of reassurance I get out my old racing videos and watch Desert Orchid beating everything in sight. It makes me wildly happy for some reason. It all happened twenty years ago, and yet it never feels old to me.
I was doing this yesterday, and trying to work out what exactly it was about Desert Orchid. He was not the most beautiful horse in training, ‘this woolly thing’, his jockey Simon Sherwood once called him. He did not win everything; there were days when he got beat out of sight by horses whose names are now forgotten. He never went anywhere near the Grand National. And yet he struck a chord in the heart of the nation; crowds would flock to distant courses to see him run; hats would fly in the air on the days when he roared home; hardened commentators gasped when he stood off two strides too soon over his fences. ‘It’s the courage, the courage of the horse,’ one of his fans (he actually had an actual fan club) once said.
It was many things. It was his bold, front-running style. It was his colour, the bright grey that made him stand out. It was the fact that he ran with his ears pricked, which is rare in racing. It was the way that he would give away lumps of weight to other horses and still win. It was that whatever the odds, or the going, or the competition, he would never bloody give up. Sometimes I swear you could almost see him gritting his teeth with determination in a close finish. It was something about his character – the quality that the racing people call, with easy admiration, ‘genuine’. It was, mundanely, that he was around for a while, six long seasons, from his wild novice days, to his seasoned King George triumphs. It was, more fancifully, that he seemed to know, perhaps more than other horses, that he had won, and what that meant. It was that he leapt over his fences like a stag, while others laboured.
He did not come along in a depression, or after a war, like Seabiscuit or Phar Lap, when a weary public needed lifting. It was not exactly that combination of a complicated time and a simple horse. But it was the eighties. It was an era of the rabid free market, of greed is good, of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. The hard conservative ethos had won the argument. Barrow boys in red braces had taken over the City. Money was everywhere, and conspicuous consumption ruled. The internet age was yet to arrive, and mobile telephones were still the size of bricks, email was hardly dreamt of. Yet there was the suspicion of the globalisation and technology age that was about to dawn; there was the sense of that. Perhaps there was something about the sheer, uncomplicated goodness of this brave white horse that took people back to a simpler time. He was not paid a million pound salary, or troubled by notions of sponsorship, or trammelled by politics. He was what he was; he carried conviction, simplicity and the heart of a lion. He would battle through the mud and the rain to do what he was trained to do, without asking a single question. He held his head high. Perhaps there was something in the zeitgeist that responded to that. The British knew that they could not afford to go back to the dark days of the seventies and the three day week, where bodies lay unburied and rubbish strewed the streets. At the same time, there was a faint sense of contamination in the new age of raw greed and naked free markets; money was growing into a god, and it left a faint aftertaste that no amount of Chardonnay could wash down. Could it have been that this glorious, blazing, grey horse reminded Britons of a simpler, better time? They knew that time only existed in their imaginations, but they craved it still. They needed something to represent it; they needed an icon. Desert Orchid was that icon.
And beyond all that, a truly great horse only comes along once in every three generations. The old racing people, who have seen it all, will usually give you no more than three or four true champions after sixty years watching the game. Almost all of them will say Arkle. They might talk of Mill House. And then they will say Desert Orchid. He was great because he won over hurdles, in a flat gallop; he was great because he won over fences, in a collected canter. He could go over two miles, in the sunshine, and over three and a half miles, in the sleet. The story was that he hated going left-handed, but he battled up the hill at Cheltenham to triumph in atrocious conditions, to take the blue riband of jump racing, the Gold Cup. He made history, by winning the King George Chase four times, even when the doubters said he could not make it. He seemed to delight in proving people wrong. He won 34 races and over £600,000 in prize money. All this counts, and yet that was not quite it.
There was something rare and remarkable in him which set him apart from the herd, and made him such a joy to watch. I remember laughing out loud, when he would put in an extra stride and take off outside the wings, so far away from a fence that you could not believe he would land safely on the other side. I remember yelling my head off when he won his final King George. When he finally, miraculously pulled ahead up that endless Cheltenham hill, I cried like a girl. There was something extra in him, which drew tears from the flintiest of eyes. The x factor, that indefinable thing that put him above the rest, was, I think, in the end, incredibly simple. It was that he loved it.
The good linen, seen here in action. That pretty wallcovering is a Chinese-style fabric, designed by my very own talented sister, if I can say that without sounding too swanky.
