How Celestial Cloud signalled new dawn for Henry Cecil's glorious career

Bill O'Gorman, the jockey on Celestial Cloud in 1969, recalls the humble beginning that heralded great days for a racing knight

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• a few false dawns before it took off. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
  It is one of racing's great fascinations that its stories can start anywhere. A low-key meeting at a minor track might have a future Group One horse or even a Classic winner lurking somewhere on the card or an apprentice jockey looking for his first winner who will be a champion in a few years' time.

  The meeting at Ripon on 17 May 1969 was just such a card. It was a Saturday, always a big draw at the Yorkshire course, and perhaps 10,000 or more spectators were there to see a horse called Celestial Cloud scrape home in a tight finish. After a few false dawns the training career of Sir Henry Cecil was up and running.

  The jockey on Celestial Cloud was Bill O'Gorman, who went on to become a successful Newmarket trainer himself. "The thing that struck me at the time was that they were getting quite nervous that they hadn't had a winner," O'Gorman said this week. "The other thing I can remember about it is that I went and rode it work. I was even more full of myself then than I am now and I said, 'This wants blinkers on.'

  "He didn't have blinkers on and he managed to prevail but he only just won, because he was only just the best horse. [Celestial Cloud's connections] didn't think he'd won but at Ripon you can never tell because it's a very bad angle. It was probably a bad race. He was an ordinary horse, he just won and that's the story."

  Cecil had only recently taken over the licence at Freemason Lodge in Newmarket from his stepfather, Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, and his first wife Julie, the daughter of another leading trainer, Noel Murless, was also an important part of the team.

  "I can't even remember Henry being there," O'Gorman says. "I think it was Julie, she owned it, I think. He was the sort of person that wouldn't be wanting to appear and have a horse not fulfil an expectation."

  Less than two months later Cecil sent out Wolver Hollow to win the Eclipse, his first success in what would now be called a Group One race. His subsequent career, despite a lean decade which started in the late 1990s, included 25 English Classic winners, 75 successes at Royal Ascot and 10 trainers' championships.

  "When everything went wrong, I think there was something in the yard," O'Gorman says. "I remember saying to him, Henry, do you notice anything different with the horses and he said no, I just haven't got the horses. But I think there was something there and that would affect someone like him a lot more than many others, who just keep blundering on."

  Cecil persevered through the difficult times and eventually guided Frankel through a perfect 14-race career despite fighting the constant battle against stomach cancer which he finally lost on Tuesday morning.

  "I've always said to anyone who asked me who was the best trainer that it was probably Henry because he got more horses fit than anybody else," O'Gorman says.

  "Gallop days do not win races, cantering days wins races and Henry's horses, on their second canter every day, went up Long Hill, probably 13 and a half seconds a furlong, and that's what wins the races, not what they've done on their two gallop days.

  "It was nice to inherit a horse like Wolver Hollow, an Eclipse winner, and he would have had some good staff. There were a lot of old boys from Boyd-Rochfort's like Tommy Lowrey, who rode Airborne to win the Derby. He used to ride all the work and probably some people came from Noel Murless with Julie. So they had good staff and they had good horses and they won good races."

  
  

  http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2013/jun/15/celestial-cloud-henry-cecil-bill-ogorman
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• • Greg Wood