Portcullis gets royal breeders dreaming at Newmarket’s ancient first rite of spring

Captain Cook was a few months away from landfall after his first circumnavigation of the earth when the first ­Craven meeting was held on Newmarket heath in the spring of 1771.

It is older than any of the Classics, and old enough too to have the great Potoooooooo – who got his name when a stable lad was unsure how to spell potatoes – on the Craven Stakes’s roll of honour in 1782. For a quarter of a millennium250 years, the first meeting of the year on the Rowley Mile at Newmarket has been Flat ­racing’s first rite of spring.

“It’s what keeps everybody going,” Jason Singh, the marketing director of the famous bloodstock auction house Tattersalls, said here on Thursday, “and I speak as a breeder and racehorse owner myself as well as a sales company employee.

“Every year, at this time of year, everybody has got hopes that the next horse they’ve bought is going to be the next superstar, and until it’s not, it could be. In horse racing, you’ve got to be an optimist. If you were a realist, you wouldn’t own a racehorse, so it’s full of people who are optimistic about what the season holds, and the start of the Flat season is exactly that, everybody is full of hopes and dreams, until they’re not.”

These days, the dreaming starts on Monday, when dozens of juveniles exercise – or “breeze” – at the racecourse before being sold at Tattersalls’ Breeze-Up Sale on Tuesday and Wednesday evening. While business this year was not as brisk as last year’s record-breaking sale, the firm still managed to shift 117 lots at an average price of 134,500gns (£141,000): a grand total of £16.5m-worth of hope.

The 1782 Craven Stakes winner, Potoooooooo, so named as a nod to a stable lad’s inability to spell potatoes. Photograph: Photo Credit: National Horseracing Museum

Stuart Williams, whose 50-horse stable less than two miles from the course is not big by Newmarket standards, also epitomised the Craven spirit after winning the Nell Gwyn Stakes, a trial for next month’s 1,000 Guineas, with the 50-1 shot Azleet on Wednesday. “We don’t get a chance to train a horse like this very often,” he said, “so why not go for the Guineas?”

And down in the winner’s enclosure after Thursday’s Wood Ditton Stakes, John Warren, racing manager to royalty for a quarter of a century, was allowing his imagination to run away with him just a little, too.

The Wood Ditton is perhaps the Craven meeting’s definitive race for dreamers, as the conditions stipulate that it is open only to unraced three-year-olds. It is debs’ ball for sons of Frankel, Kingman and other top-end stallions, and this year’s winner, John Gosden’s Portcullis, was as impressive as any in recent memory.

Portcullis was bred by King Charles and carries the famous royal colours, but the plan to send his mother, Castle Lady, to be covered by the mighty Frankel was one of the last to be conceived by the late Queen Elizabeth II. Like many of the runners in Thursday’s race, he looked clueless in the early stages but visibly learned on the job for the remaining three-quarters of a mile and eventually crossed the line nearly six lengths clear of the runner-up.

“He seems a bit of a natural, which is good,” Warren said. “I’m going to call it a joint effort by all [the late queen and the current king and queen].

“What makes it exciting is to think that we’re only on the first rung. When they’re bred like that, do it like that and they’re in great hands … Ryan [Moore, the winner’s jockey] said something like ‘I think you can be brave’, so that was indicative of the feel he got from the horse.

“I’m thrilled for the king and queen as they’re getting so much pleasure out of their horses. I never thought they would get as much pleasure as they are. I always thought the queen might, but I thought the king might be so caught up with so many other things.”

Oisin Murphy wins the Craven Stakes on board Oxagon, who will next run at the 2,000 Guineas, the only British Classic his trainer, John Gosden, has never won. Photograph: Steven Cargill/racingfotos.com/Shutterstock

There is enough time between the Craven and Royal Ascot for Portcullis to have another run, and news of his next destination will be keenly awaited. There is no doubt about where Gosden’s second winner of the day will be heading, though, as like so many Craven Stakes winners before him Oxagon will run next in the 2,000 Guineas, over the same course and distance on 2 May.

The 2,000 Guineas is the only British Classic to elude Gosden over the course of a 43-year training career, and his disappointments in the race have included Field Of Gold, last year’s Craven Stakes winner and the hot Guineas favourite, who went down to a half-length defeat.

“It doesn’t worry me that I’ve never won it,” he said. “Everyone thinks I have sleepless nights about it.” Maybe so, but Gosden was still prominent among the dreamers as the 2026 ­Craven meeting drew to a close.