The moving tale of an owner's lifelong love for her racehorse

The Front Runner is Chris Cook's morning email exclusively for Members' Club Ultimate subscribers, made available today as a free sample.

Today, Chris writes on Captain Scott, a horse that reached the grand age of 28 before passing away last weekend.

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A sad and lovely tale I heard this week about lifelong love for a racehorse. It concerns Captain Scott, who died last weekend having attained the excellent age of 28.

He will have been older than some of you. Others will remember him as a tough and successful handicapper in the late 1990s, when he was beaten only by Right Wing in the Lincoln.

For the 21 years since his racing days ended, he has been owned and cared for near Bicester by Sue McMullen, one of the motley crew of racing journalists who made up the Write State Partnership, whose green silks he carried. Ideally, we would all have someone in our lives who speaks of us the way McMullen speaks of Captain Scott.

"That tenacity and courage he had in racing, it transmitted into his retired life," she tells the Front Runner. "He had a lot of things to cope with, he had a fractured skull, mobility issues, he fractured his pedal bone."

When he suffered that last-mentioned injury a couple of years ago, his owner fretted over the right thing to do. Recovery would entail months of box rest. Was it fair to put an old horse through it all?

"The minute he showed any sign of, 'I've had enough', we were going to call it a day. But as usual he pulled it out the bag and recovered. He was just so mentally tough. That's what the vets loved him for.

"If he had his teeth done, he didn't have to be sedated. It was like he was saying, I've got this.

"He was such a kind, kind horse. It's difficult to talk about a horse like him and not become mawkish. He was one of a kind, a very special individual and anyone that dealt with him, they always said he was such a gent, such a nice person."

Tony Coleman, another member of the Write States, tells me Captain Scott was essentially gifted to trainer Jeremy Glover by his breeder Peter Player, the Newmarket chairman in those days, for whom Glover had won a Cambridgeshire with Clifton Fox. With his conformation, Captain Scott was not a great sales prospect. Player's asking price was a case of wine if the horse managed to win anything - which he did, first time out.

The horse was cleverly named, being by Polar Falcon out of Camera Girl. The real Scott had come up with the idea of employing a photographer on Antarctic expeditions for fundraising purposes.

Needing colours, the members of the new syndicate decided to seek a famous old set that had been allowed to lapse. They got the first about which they enquired, the light and dark green checks with a white cap which had been the European silks of Nelson Bunker Hunt and had sailed to King George glory on Dahlia.

As the Front Runner managed to lose on a fancied Sir Mark Prescott runner this week, it's timely to recall how Captain Scott turned over Ferny Hill from that stable in an early race at Ayr. "He looked like a show hunter, compared to our lightly framed lad," McMullen recalls. "They went toe to toe and Captain Scott beat him in a photo. When he was on song, he was a battler.

"He gave us so much. You're buying a dream when you have a horse. It's not just what they do, it's what they might do. He took us to Royal Ascot."

That was for the Royal Hunt Cup, in which the horse's physical frailties got in his way and he had to be eased down by Jimmy Fortune. But he had allowed his connections to live the dream and would have been a realistic winner at his best.

"We were even having the conversation about who would pick up the trophy because the Queen, historically, had presented the trophy for that race."

Early that year, he had won the Lincoln Trial at Wolverhampton, pulling clear of what had seemed a competitive field. "That was my favourite race of his," McMullen says, "because it was run at a strong pace and the pacemaker couldn't live with them.

"He came off that bend and made it look effortless. That was him.

"For two weeks after, we were leading owners, above Sheikh Mohammed and everybody. I'm eulogising to distraction but we owed him so much..."

It was an amazing experience for owners like the Write State team and they went to Doncaster with high hopes of another triumph. It so nearly happened, too, but Richard Quinn delivered a fine, patient ride on Right Wing to take it off them in the final seconds.

McMullen found herself seated next to Quinn at an awards dinner nine months later and remembers him saying: "Your horse was the only one I had to beat, so I sat on his backside."

She explains: "Right Wing was very mercurial, he had to be produced very late or he would stop. Whereas our lad was all genuine, but set it up for him and Right Wing picked him up on the line.

"Every time Right Wing won after that, I was thrilled, because he paid Captain Scott a compliment." There were nine such occasions as Right Wing eventually proved he had been very handily treated at Doncaster. He won Group 3s in France and at Newmarket.

Meanwhile, McMullen was commissioned to write a feature about her own horse for Scotland On Sunday, "the hardest thing I've ever written". Coleman and their fellow journalist-owner Paul Wheeler would probably not have emoted quite so freely, had they been asked. "I said he taught us the meaning of courage."

The evil day came when Captain Scott could no longer race and he began a retirement that was about five times as long as his career. "He had a close friend who shared a field with him, another old racehorse and they were peas in a pod," McMullen says. The friend was Dome, who could not be persuaded to win a race by trainers including Roger Charlton and Mark Pitman.

"I've got him too. I had to move Scotty last year because I needed him to be in a big barn during the winter where he could walk around, and I took his friend so he wouldn't be alone. The minute they were together in a field, they were cheek to cheek, grazing."

It was surely not Dome but some other horse in the same field who kicked Captain Scott in the head in 2007, causing a fracture. "He was lucky, he didn't need surgery but he had to have two holes drilled in his skull to be flushed through with antibiotics."

Yikes. But these are the problems you may encounter if you shoulder responsibility for a horse.

In the end, 'Scotty' spared McMullen the need to make any final calculation as to quality of life versus pain. He dropped dead of an apparent heart attack last Friday night.

She had been with him just hours earlier. "He was following me around, mugging me for Trebor mints. He loved them and he had little tricks he would do. Sometimes when I was leading him, I'd stop and he'd stop, then I'd step back and he'd step back, so he'd get a mint.

"Before I fed him, I kissed his cheek, which he couldn't stand, but he knew there was a mint in it. And I was very close to his eye and the sun was coming in. I've got this image of the iridescence in his eye, he had a kind and beautiful eye.

"And I said to him: 'Have you had enough, mate? Are you ready to go?' Because I just felt this last winter took it out of him more. He hadn't picked up as he would normally have done.

"I fed him and he was eating as I left."

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The Front Runner is our latest email newsletter available exclusively to Members' Club Ultimate subscribers. Chris Cook, a four-time Racing Reporter of the Year award winner, provides his take on the day's biggest stories and tips for the upcoming racing every morning from Monday to Friday. Not a Members' Club Ultimate subscriber? Click here to join today and also receive our Ultimate Daily emails plus our full range of fantastic website and newspaper content