AROUND THE WORLD
Volume 1 | Week 4
🏆 TOMMY’S REPORT
Three great stories from around the racing world, gathered by our young globe-trotter Finn and retold by Tommy.
🇬🇧 ASCOT
When Racing Puts On Its Team Colours
Racing has never been frightened of a little colour.
For one day at Ascot, the jockeys stop being individuals and start barracking for each other.
There’s something wonderfully strange about the Shergar Cup.
For most of the racing year, jockeys walk into the mounting yard with one job: beat everybody else.
Then along comes one Saturday at Ascot when somebody hands them matching jackets, puts them into teams and says, Righto, now you’re playing together.
Suddenly racing looks a little more like a footy match.
The jockeys are divided into teams, points are awarded throughout the meeting, and those bright colours make it unusually easy to follow. The 2026 competition brought together Great Britain & Ireland, Europe, Hong Kong and the Ladies.
And judging by the colour splashed across Ascot, nobody was trying to be subtle about it.
The format changes the atmosphere too. Jockeys who would normally disappear after their own ride suddenly have a reason to watch the next race closely. A teammate crossing the line means points for everybody.
This year there was another reason to watch.
Ryan Moore was back.
One of the world’s most accomplished jockeys returned to the Shergar Cup for the first time in 20 years, joining Saffie Osborne and Dylan Browne McMonagle in the Great Britain & Ireland team.
And apparently twenty years hadn’t made him particularly rusty.
Moore rode two winners, including Asgard’s Captain and Archers Bay, collected 47 points, won the Silver Saddle as the day’s leading rider and helped Great Britain & Ireland take home the Shergar Cup.
But perhaps the scoreboard isn’t really why the Shergar Cup survives.
It’s because for one summer afternoon, racing loosens its collar.
Different colours. Different loyalties. Jockeys cheering jockeys.
And an Ascot crowd discovering that racing can occasionally behave like a team sport.
Who would have thought
🎂 NEIGH BOTHER
Apparently, It’s Everybody’s Birthday
There are birthdays… and then there are stable birthdays. 🎂
No birth certificate required. If you’re a horse in Australia, congratulations. You just got older.
There must be some confused horses around Australia every August 1.
You wander into the stable looking for breakfast and discover that overnight you’ve apparently had a birthday.
Not just you, either.
Every horse in the Southern Hemisphere has.
Well, officially at least.
The tradition exists because racing needs a simple way of grouping horses by age. Instead of a two-year-old suddenly becoming three halfway through a racing season because its actual birthday has arrived, horses from the same breeding season all advance together.
In Australia and the Southern Hemisphere, that date is August 1. In the Northern Hemisphere, it’s January 1.
It makes perfect sense administratively.
From the horse’s point of view, however, the whole arrangement must look suspicious.
I distinctly remember being born in October.
Doesn’t matter. Happy birthday.
The date also sits neatly with the Southern Hemisphere breeding calendar. Foaling generally begins around this part of the year, with the new breeding season following as spring approaches.
Naturally, humans being humans, we’ve taken an administrative convenience and introduced cake.
Over the years there have been carrots, apples, special treats and stable birthday celebrations. Australia’s Olympic eventing horses have even celebrated August 1 overseas with carrot cakes and favourite treats.
Whether the horses appreciate the significance is another matter entirely.
One Australian breeder once summed that up beautifully: for the horses themselves, every day is pretty much the same.
Which is probably true.
But if somebody arrives at your stable carrying a cake made from carrots and apples, there’s really no point arguing about the date.
Happy Birthday, you lot. 🎂🐴
And try not to eat the candles.
🇫🇷 DEAUVILLE - A Mile Beside the Sea
Blue Bolt and Precise gave us the excuse. Deauville gave us the story.
Across to France, where racing comes with a rather magnificent backdrop.
There are racecourses built beside cities, racecourses tucked into countryside and racecourses surrounded by suburbia.
Then there is Deauville.
Normandy’s famous seaside town has been drawing holidaymakers to the French coast for generations, and every northern summer another rather elegant crowd arrives as well.
The thoroughbreds.
August is one of Deauville’s great racing months, and among its highlights is the Prix Rothschild, a Group 1 contest over 1600 metres for fillies and mares.
This year’s running brought together two particularly interesting visitors from across the Channel.
Blue Bolt, the powerful four-year-old trained by Andrew Balding, arrived after an outstanding season.
Waiting for her was Precise, Aidan O’Brien’s three-year-old star.
They already knew one another.
Blue Bolt had beaten Precise in the Group 1 Falmouth Stakes at Newmarket in July, so their trip to France carried the delicious possibility of round two.
Deauville got it.
Precise looked ready to make her challenge, but Colin Keane timed his run aboard Blue Bolt beautifully and the older mare prevailed again, continuing a remarkable season and giving herself another Group 1 prize.
But this particular mile carries ghosts of some very good horses.
The race began life in 1929 as the Prix d’Astarté, before becoming the Prix Rothschild in 2008.
And one name towers over its modern history.
Goldikova.
The extraordinary French mare won the race not once, not twice, but four consecutive times from 2008 to 2011.
Four summers.
Same mare.
Same Deauville mile.
There’s something rather lovely about that.
Nearly a century after the race began, another generation of fillies and mares still comes rolling into Normandy each summer to test itself down that famous straight.
This year it was Blue Bolt and Precise.
Next August, somebody else will arrive.
And Deauville will still be there, beside the sea, waiting.
