Big, beautiful and ripe for a third tilt at Glorious Goodwood

It is only when Big Orange is led from his box at Fitzroy House Stables that you recognise the sheer implausibility of his story. His heroic deeds on the racecourse conjure images of an equine gladiator with an indestructible physique. The reality is quite different. It is scarcely credible that he can raise a gallop at all.

A first, intimate encounter with the horse who bewitched galleries at Royal Ascot lays it bare. There’s nothing much wrong with his head save that it is overtly large. His ears are extravagantly long, which many judges like to see in a racehorse. Yet lower your eye to the rest of his frame and it soon becomes clear why he should more likely break down than break opponents’ hearts.

On that score his trainer, Michael Bell, makes no attempt to mitigate. “Basically, to look at him, he’s a very old fashioned National Hunt type of horse,” says the 56-year-old. “He stands 17 hands, he has very high withers and a jumper’s bump on his hind quarters. He's slightly back at the knee, and to top it all he was a box-walker when he was younger.”

He is also a little straight through his hocks, which can inhibit forward propulsion, and very upright on his pasterns, but it’s the box-walking that would ring the loudest alarm bell. Box-walking is an undesirable trait, redolent of a nervy disposition, and constant pacing around a box means the horse will invariably lose condition. In simple terms, you can’t train a horse who lacks condition.

Being back at the knee is another unwelcome accident of birth. The bone descending from the knee joint extends out in front of the horse, rather than pointing plumb-line down. This means that when a horse gallops, the force generated when it hits the ground is not absorbed evenly throughout the length of its front leg. It 'jars' at the knee. Again, any potential buyer who sees this in a young horse will dismiss it out of hand.

“If I’d come across him as a yearling at Tattersalls he would have been a raw, slab-sided young horse,” Bell speculates. “He would have been very tall and backward; I’d say he’d have made five grand max. Little more than a round of drinks. The likeliest outcome was that someone might have bought him as a store.”

Yet here he stands, the winner of nine races worth more than £1 million, and who bids for an unprecedented third consecutive victory in the Qatar Goodwood Cup on Tuesday. He comes into it on the back of his Gold Cup triumph at Ascot. In Hollywood it would be cast as The Miracle of Big Orange.

Big Orange leads first lot off the Heath alongside trainer Michael Bell on his hack MillerCredit: Edward Whitaker

Other, equally implausible chapters have punctuated his six years on earth. He might never have seen a racecourse had Bell not encountered him by chance at Ed Peate’s breaking establishment just outside Newmarket. Then a two-year-old, Big Orange was ambling up the gallops, following another of Bill Gredley’s homebreds whom Bell had been summoned to cast his eye over.

“At that stage I think Bill was definitely thinking of not putting him in training,” Bell reflects. “He was thinking of pointing him towards another equine discipline.”

Perhaps Gredley’s son Tim, an accomplished showjumper who has represented Britain, might have taken him down that road. Big Orange certainly had the size and scope for it – except that Bell noticed something in particular as the horse cantered past.

“He just floated by us,” the trainer recalls. “I was immediately struck by how well he moved. I mentioned this to Bill and he agreed to send me the horse when he was ready to go into training.”

There was nothing precipitous about having Big Orange gelded soon after he arrived at Fitzroy House. His size alone rendered it as necessary as laying the foundations of a house, but that too became a blessing in disguise.

He had fleshed out his giant frame by the start of his four-year-old campaign, during which he won the Princess of Wales’s Stakes and his first Goodwood Cup. And then, of course, there were those two trips to the Melbourne Cup. Offers were resisted from plenty of Australian suitors and the horse encountered serious health hazards on his travels.

Big Orange enjoys a post-work rollCredit: Edward Whitaker

“He got travel sickness on the way home from his first trip and was very ill,” Bell reflects. “He went straight to the vets when he landed at Stansted and spent ten days in hospital. Outwardly he looked fine but had we not jumped straight on it he could have gone downhill rapidly. He also had a brutal time of it when he travelled again last year. He won’t be going back a third time.”

Any one of those trip-wires might have brought Big Orange’s career to a sorry end. Instead he went from strength to strength until he vaulted into the domain of public adulation previously occupied by cherished stayers like Double Trigger, Persian Punch and Yeats.

Understandably, during that transition Bell no longer sees those physical flaws when he looks at Big Orange. His eyes linger instead on those periscope ears, together with Big Orange’s kind, placid eye. And when the horse gallops Bell is instantly transported back to the day when he first saw him.

“He has always been the most beautiful mover,” the trainer says. “He’s a great sight when he works on the peat moss gallop. He fills the eye; he powers past you as he starts to unwind at the end of it.”

And of course, now that Big Orange has become the most popular horse in training Bell sees things in him that correspond with his new-found status. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to Bell Big Orange has become something of a beast.

He resists the oft-spun line that horses know when they are good. “I’m not sure about that,” he says. “but certainly, saddling him at Ascot before the Gold Cup, I thought he looked imperious.

“He won’t go into the saddling boxes there so we saddled him under the trees. He had his head up. He was surveying the scene and I thought: ‘You’re up for it, you know exactly what you’re about to do.’

“Now that could have been wishful thinking on my part,” he continues, “but my wife Clare filmed me saddling him up and when we looked back at it, that’s exactly how it was. He stood there on the grass not batting an eyelid, not fidgeting, staring into the distance as though he was about to go into battle. There wasn’t a bead of sweat on him.”

The same couldn’t be said of his trainer two days before the Gold Cup, when there was palpable excitement at Fitzroy House. Running in the race had been two years in the planning after Big Orange had been scratched 12 months earlier when the heavens opened. Then Bell heard the news, just before declaration time, that Frankie Dettori stood himself down from the five-day meeting with an injured shoulder.

“We had to decide there and then who was going to take over,” the trainer relates. “It was basically a choice between Pat Smullen and James Doyle, and one of the reasons we went with James was because he’s based in Newmarket and could commit to riding the horse at exercise the following morning.

“I felt that was important,” Bell continues. “Because James had never ridden him before, I wanted him to have a canter on him because the horse is such a different physical shape to most thoroughbreds. He has a much longer stride. And I asked James to ride him from the yard to the gallops. He spent an hour on his back and said the horse moved beautifully.”

He also moved beautifully in the Gold Cup, which he looked like winning with authority until Ryan Moore finally forced a response from Order Of St George. When the latter bore down on Big Orange it looked for all money that he would go sailing by in the shadow of the post. Bell’s heart must have been in his mouth.

“Not really,” he maintains. “Turning for home, my appraisal was that Ryan’s body language wasn’t that of a jockey waiting to release his horse. Then he got a tune out of him in the straight. They were anxious moments but I always thought mine was going to win. That final furlong felt like a long seven seconds, but equally an enjoyable seven seconds.

“In the end it was a titanic battle, a great horserace, which is why people go racing. And for that, you need more than one horse. The two of them put on a real spectacle, and I think that’s why everyone was so excited afterwards. The whole experience was fantastic. To win the feature race at Royal Ascot with a horse we love and is adored in the yard was extra special.”

There was also excitement in the royal box, where one of Bell’s patrons, courtesy of Estimate’s Gold Cup triumph four years earlier, knew exactly what it was like to prevail in a tense finish. “Bill Gredley had a lot of friends in there and I'm one of her trainers,” Bell says of the Queen. “I speak to her regularly; I had a double for her earlier this month and I know she was cheering on a fellow owner-breeder that day.”

Bell has known euphoria, notably when he saddled Motivator to win the 2005 Derby and Sariska to win the fillies’ Classic at Epsom four years later. No further evidence of his mettle was required but he stalled when it came to bridging the divide towards a trainers' championship.

It would have been a proud feather in the cap, although it’s not the sort of thing he dwells on. He is naturally competitive, like all trainers who have spent the best part of three decades plying their trade, yet for him reward comes not in numbers but in the knowledge of a job well done.

Michael Bell briefs Big Orange's groom Twyron Lloyd-Jones in the office before exerciseCredit: Edward Whitaker

In Big Orange’s case it’s a job well done to have unlocked his full potential. The horse will start a warm favourite for Tuesday’s Goodwood highlight, in which he won’t carry a penalty in a race newly elevated to Group 1 status. And reward comes in the form of Bell’s relationship with a horse he has seen every day for four years.

Goodwood Cup card

“Horses become friends when they are around for that long,” Bell says. “You develop an affinity with them, get to understand them – especially a horse like him who has lots of character. They develop that character as they get older, too. They become part of the fixtures and fittings.”

This deeply personal relationship with Big Orange speaks volumes about Bell’s approach to training horses. It is amplified as he hosts a tour of his Newmarket stables. The weighing machine he installed four years ago is broken, so he’s unsure exactly how much of the 15 kilos Big Orange lost in winning the Gold Cup has been regained. He isn’t remotely concerned.

“Weighing horses doesn’t tell me anything I can’t see with my own eye,” he says, “but some owners want that information. I think it's helpful in its way but training horses should mostly be about eye and touch and feel.

“I don’t think you can take the horseman out of the trainer by computerising everything and analysing. For instance, I’m not a huge fan of monitoring heart rates. I don’t think I could adapt, and I don’t have the time to read all the figures anyway. If you over-complicate, you take the horseperson out of the trainer.

“Having said that, I'm gently adapting. You've got to try to stay progressive, move with the times, because there is always someone snapping at your heels. We’re putting in a few gadgets this winter, which is something I have slightly resisted.

"Treadmills are now popular and there’s a vibrating plate that horses stand on to increase blood flow, which aids and quickens the healing process. I’m also looking into a salt chamber.

“Will my results improve as a result? I don’t know. It would be hard to do better statistically than we are doing this year, so in some ways it’s a funny year to be installing new toys. All these things cost a lot of money but you’ve got to do it to keep up with the Joneses."

Not exactly renaissance man, yet proud of his achievements and particularly proud of Big Orange. Very few of the Joneses will train a horse like him in their lifetimes.

Bell on . . .

The Derby or the Gold Cup?
It’s hard to compare levels of elation. Obviously, you get an enormous high when a horse like Motivator wins the Derby but the Gold Cup was such a great race to be involved in. Big Orange had to dig in hard and battle. It was very emotional and so rewarding – personally, professionally, from every angle.

The stayers’ triple crown
I’m not sure whether Big Orange will go for the Doncaster Cup if he wins at Goodwood. Are we meant to lump a penalty in a Group 2 race for fifty grand? It doesn’t make much appeal.

Training racehorses
Flat horses need so little work. A canter up Warren Hill takes just over a minute, they do that twice and they weigh 500 kilos, whereas a human will do far more exercise to stay fit. I think the trick to training horses is to train them as little as possible.

The highs and lows
When you're having a good run you're more confident in your decision-making. Confidence is a good catalyst for success, but I’ve been training for 29 years and you become pretty resilient in that time. I was assistant to Paul Cole when he was at the top of the tree and I remember him telling me: ‘Don’t get too high with the highs and too low with the lows.' Things will always level out.

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