There is more than a touch of the Jamie Vardys about Mick Appleby. Both were born in Yorkshire, both have a prolific strike-rate in their chosen professions, and in the same way that no profile of the Leicester forward was once complete without a nod to his non-league roots, Appleby is still familiar to many racing fans from his breakout seasons as the “king of the sand”.
By Sunday morning, however, he may have earned a new title: the king of the Grade One sprinters. Big Evs, who was Appleby’s first runner and first winner at the Breeders’ Cup when he took the Juvenile Turf Sprint at Santa Anita 12 months ago, is back in southern California for a crack at the Turf Sprint at Del Mar on Saturday night. And, quite remarkably, Appleby has found another lightning-fast juvenile, Big Mojo, to attempt a repeat win in the Juvenile Turf Sprint on Friday.
Both Big Evs and Big Mojo race in the colours of Paul and Rachael Teasdale, who paid a relatively modest 50,000gns (£52,500) for Big Evs before reinvesting 175,000gns (£183,750) of his £620,000 earnings in 2023 in Big Mojo.
Many thousands of two-year-olds are bred each year. As the hammer fell, the odds that Big Mojo would follow in Big Ev’s hoofprints at the Breeders’ Cup 12 months later were immense. However Appleby and his new owners saw something in Big Mojo they were determined to have.
“We liked everything about him,” Paul Teasdale said on Thursday. “He’s was the standout horse at that sale for us. There was a lot of strong bidding but we stuck our neck out and said, look, we’re having him. It was one of those days when we weren’t going to get beat.”
A few years earlier, Teasdale saw something he liked in Appleby, too. “We’d done a bit of research, we wanted a yard that was big enough to be professional but not so big that it wasn’t really personal,” he says. “Mick and his team have very happy horses and that goes a long way towards making them successful. A lot of people have said to Mick: you’ve come from this to this. I think when you’ve got the quality and class that Mick and the team have, then with the right ammunition, this is where you end up, at the Breeders’ Cup.”
The Juvenile Turf Sprint is the first race of the meeting, and also one of the deepest and most competitive, with British bookies at least struggling to find a favourite.
It also draws together many of the storylines for the weekend as a whole, as Aidan O’Brien, who saddles City Of Troy in the Classic on Saturday, has two leading contenders in Whistlejacket and Ides Of March, with the latter due to be ridden by Frankie Dettori ahead of his major chance on Emily Upjohn in Saturday’s Turf.
The horse that may prove to be Big Mojo’s biggest rival, meanwhile, is Ecoro Sieg, one of around a dozen likely runners at this year’s meeting from Japan. With starters in nine of the 14 races, it feels like a statement of intent from Japan’s well-resourced and ever-strengthening racing industry, and the squad includes Forever Young, a challenger to City Of Troy and the local hope Fierceness in the Classic.
The Breeders’ Cup has often been described as racing’s version of the Ryder Cup, with the best of the Europeans up against the cream of American racing. But this year’s meeting promises to be a genuinely global event, and Ecoro Sieg (9.45pm) appears to have an outstanding chance to get Japan’s weekend off, quite literally, to a flying start.
He broke a 22-year-old track record at Nakayama in September by no less than 0.6sec, taking 0.3sec off Japan’s all-time six-furlong record for a juvenile in the process. And that was after having been a little slow to stride.
Ecoro Sieg is, in other words, potentially something of a one off, and while a draw in stall eight is not ideal, anything close to his level of form last time could well be enough.
Uttoxeter 12.20 Lookaway 12.55 Irish Chorus 1.25 Railway Bell 2.00 Diamond Dealer 2.35 Chankaya 3.10 Crystal Glance 3.45 Song Of Earth 4.22 River Rider
Newmarket 12.35 Magnetite 1.08 Marching Mac 1.43 Magic Mild 2.17 Montezuma 2.52 Claxton Bay 3.27 Swatch 4.02 On The River
Wetherby 12.45 Kart D’Estruval 1.15 Cadell 1.50 Luckie Seven 2.25 Liam Swagger 3.00 Galop De Chasse (nb) 3.35 Queens Venture 4.10 Romancier
Newcastle 2.30 Humble Spark 3.05 Kaleidoscope Eyes 3.40 Fastnet Jenkins 4.15 Dimsons 4.45 Calafrio 5.15 Commander Of Life 5.45 Bobby Joe Leg (nap) 6.15 Patontheback 6.45 Clotherholme
O’Brien is two wins away from a share of the all-time record for Breeders’ Cup victories and the warm favourite Lake Victoria (11.05pm) could well supply one of those in the Juvenile Fillies’ Turf.
There is a strong European contingent in the Juvenile Turf, including New Century, Aomori City and Al Qudra, but Zulu Kingdom (12.25am), who picked up in eye-catching fashion at Aqueduct last time, is a live runner for the home team. East Avenue (11.45pm), owned by the Godolphin operation’s US arm, and another Japanese-trained runner, American Bikini (10.25pm), with Ryan Moore booked to ride, are also fair bets at the likely odds in the Juvenile and Juvenile Fillies’ respectively.
