The debut of a two-year-old Cameot colt at Leopardstown over the weekend got our correspondent thinking – all the way back to the legendary Northern Dancer
This is a tale about two horses you have almost certainly never heard of, which is not the grabbiest opening line in the business but we have to start somewhere.
Actually, we need to start a little further back than that, but at least in this instance it’s a horse with whom you’re assuredly familiar.
Northern Dancer, the little horse who became the biggest name in the bloodstock industry, was the irresistible force behind the unstoppable rise of the immovable object that is Coolmore Stud. His second-crop son Nijinsky hit the ground at Ballydoyle like chain blue lightning, a champion two-year-old who went on to win the Triple Crown (British version) in 1970 for trainer Vincent O’Brien.
After him the deluge, a rain that never stopped, with Northern Dancer’s stock championed by O’Brien as the pair dominated the next two decades in European racing. The names rise from the page like the melody of an old, half-remembered but never-forgotten song, The Minstrel, Try My Best, Be My Guest, Storm Bird, Danzatore, Lomond, El Gran Senor and the almost incomparable Sadler’s Wells, whose only comparison as a stallion is with his own sire and his epochal sire son Galileo.
But you know all this as well as anyone. You don’t know about Il Corsaro, though.
He is the first of those two horses you have never heard of, unless you own a copy of the book Horsetrader, by Patrick Robinson and Nick Robinson (unrelated), described by those who know best as the “seminal text on the modern breeding industry”.
Redrawing the map
It is the story of owner-breeder Robert Sangster’s life in horse racing, dealing primarily with the way his alliance with John Magnier and Vincent O’Brien redrew the map of the bloodstock world during the 1970s and early 1980s.
Your correspondent has a mint-ish hardback edition of this magnum opus, out of print now, highly prized and surely of significant value as a blue-chip bartering token for when, inevitably, the end times come.
On page 289 there is an account of the day in 1989 when the last two colts from the final crop of Northern Dancer went through the ring at the Keeneland July sale.
[He] sold for $700,000 to Irish trainer Tommy Stack. Whoever had bought him had almost certainly done so for sentimental reasons, in memory of a thousand battles and a thousand dreams. The colt did not even look as if he might make a racehorse, but when his name, Il Corsaro, was registered with the Irish Turf Club, the principal owner was listed as … Robert Sangster, backed up by the name of John Magnier.
Robert and John enjoyed the reputation of being the toughest dealers in the game, but to listen to Robert on the subject of that colt you would not have thought so. “We just thought we should have the colt brought home to Ireland. We’ll never sell him, whether he can run or not. But one day, he’ll be in a field, and we may be able to say: æThere he is, the last son of Northern Dancer in all of the world!”
Il Corsaro, the pirate, the last of the Northern Dancers, out of a mare named Gleaming Smile, foaled March 25, 1988, almost exactly 11 months after Northern Dancer had been pensioned from stud duty, the last drop in the bottle. And Sangster was prescient in his prognosis, because Il Corsaro couldn’t run.
He never ran at all, unless you count running blithely around in that field, a horse but not a racehorse, a symbol but never a starter, while Sangster and Magnier leaned rustically against the field-gate like a couple of country squires and took turns to say to each other “there he is, the last son of Northern Dancer in all of the world”, possibly suffixed by the words “the useless *******”.
To the outside world, he only ever existed on page 289 of Horsetrader, just a name in a book, but a name that somehow stuck in the furthest recesses of the mind for its nobility or its poignancy, or simply because some things stay while others are lost.
And then, last week, in true Proustian fashion, the remembrance of things past rattled noisily across the synapses like a runaway train. Leopardstown, a mile maiden for two-year-olds, a list of names to scroll idly through before stopping short, stunned.
Back to the future
Here is the second of those two horses you have never heard of, although at least the name will be familiar now. Here is another Il Corsaro, trained in the green heart of Tipperary by a man called O’Brien (Aidan, of course), owned by a man named Magnier (the very same), the far-off blood of Northern Dancer still surging restlessly through his veins. The past has, somehow, delightfully, become the present.
Sue Magnier, wife of John, daughter of the sainted Vincent O’Brien, has the enviable role of naming the horses who run for the Ballydoyle/Coolmore set, which at the right time of year has to be a full-time job. She names them well, frequently taking inspiration from great artists, great composers, great men and women of history, the atlas of the world, and occasionally, when presumably the flood of anonymous two-year-olds threatens to overwhelm, simply opening a dictionary and jabbing her finger at a page (Was, Found, Maybe, Up, Whirl).
She likes some names so much that she reuses them after a decent interval, and so we have a Darwin and a Charles Darwin (far right in human form), a Bonnard and a Pierre Bonnard (right), a Mozart and an Amadeus Mozart, a Brahms and a Johannes Brahms, a Landseer and a Sir Edwin Landseer, two Acapulcos and an Acapulco Bay (many happy memories, evidently, of a trip down Mexico way).
Magnier reputedly also has a list of particularly appropriate names reserved for horses who show particular promise, so that the risk of giving the next Triple Crown winner a nothing name like Say, Though or How (all clearly dictionary-day horses) instead of something suitably noble and inspiring is minimised. Was Il Corsaro on that list?
It’s certain that Magnier has a working knowledge of Horsetrader – according to Martin Stevens of the Racing Post, at one point her husband had 29 copies of the book beside his bed, which must have made getting in and out tricky – and would be aware of the tale of the last son of Northern Dancer.
So perhaps it was some nostalgic twist of wistfulness that led her to give Il Corsaro his name, a sentimental tying up of timeworn ends, a knowing nod in the direction of her own history, rather than merely the desire to have a horse named after an obscure Giuseppe Verdi opera (or a generic Italian pirate).
The former would be so much more satisfying than the latter, for this incarnation of Il Corsaro can run, at least a little bit.
Freighted with potential
He finished fifth on that debut at Leopardstown, carrying the purple and white silks of Derrick Smith as part of the usual Magnier-Smith-Tabor-Westerberg partnership, beaten by four horses with greater experience and by only three lengths and just losing third place on the line. It was a start freighted with potential, and at least it was a start, unlike the Il Corsaro of yesteryear.
Our new Il Corsaro is a son of Camelot, who is by Montjeu, who is by Sadler’s Wells, who is by – whaddaya know? – Northern Dancer, which is both apt and utterly unremarkable as that horse, through his myriad sons and daughters, has become the most recent common ancestor of practically every Thoroughbred alive. Indeed, all four of Il Corsaro’s ‘grandparents’ have Northern Dancer in their lineage.
Thirty-five years after the first, this second coming of Il Corsaro is a prospect, a project, bred to stay the Derby distance, liable to develop through the winter and come out the other side into spring as one of Aidan O’Brien’s manifold Classic contenders, ready to live up to the promise his namesake once had but somewhere surrendered.
Maybe one day he’ll have a book devoted to him instead of just a few paragraphs on page 289. Perhaps the name of Il Corsaro will gain a much wider audience than the odd racing writer with an arbitrary memory for semi-useless trivia.
Maybe, by this time next year, this will be a tale about a horse everyone has heard of.
• Visit the Coolmore website
• Read previous articles in the View From The Rail series
‘He’s a special horse’ – Ka Ying Rising confirms world #1 status with brilliant Everest win
‘Does the Shergar Cup have a whip problem?’ – Steve Dennis with a radical suggestion
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