When Jerry Bailey rode Arcangues, a 133-1 outsider, for André Fabre in the 1993 Breeders’ Cup Classic, he had no idea what the trainer looked like and could not find him in the pre-race scrum in the paddock. His initial ambition, he conceded later, was that he “just didn’t want to finish last”. But, on the final turn for home, as he glided around the rail travelling more like an odds-on favourite, Bailey was already raising his sights considerably higher. “I thought I had a chance to win it,” he told an interviewer years later. “But a lot of times, you’ll be sitting on a horse and you think you have a bunch left. And when you ask the question, the answer’s no.”
As Bailey was about to discover, when a horse is trained by Fabre, the answer is generally yes. A 53,000-strong crowd at Santa Anita was about to learn the lesson, too. As Arcangues galloped straight past Bertrando, the front-running favourite, half a furlong from the line, the noise level in the grandstands went from 11 to zero in an instant as though the trainer himself had flicked a switch.
