Racing warrior Rebel’s Romance continues world tour with Newmarket victory

One of the sport’s great warriors returned to the front line for the 32nd time in a remarkable career on Thursday, with £12.12m in prize money already banked and the all-time record for a European-trained horse of £12.7m now within reach. Jumping fans often complain that Flat horses are rarely around long enough to become heroes, but Rebel’s Romance is a cast-iron case for the defence.

From San Diego to Hong Kong, via Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Germany and Qatar, Charlie Appleby’s eight-year-old has taken on many of the world’s best middle-distance horses since first setting foot on a track in October 2020.

For Appleby, watching Rebel’s Romance compete is “like watching one of your kids on sports day at school”, and his stable star did him proud once again, winning the Princess of Wales’s Stakes, the feature race on Ladies’ Day at Newmarket’s July festival, by half a length as a sell-out crowd roared him on in 33-degree heat.

These were temperatures to make any horse think twice, even a veteran of races in Qatar and Dubai, but Rebel’s Romance knuckled down as he always does when William Buick asked him to pick up his pacemaker two out. His winning margin was modest for an odds-on favourite – a result, perhaps, of a 131-day absence since his last race in the Gulf in late February – but once Rebel’s Romance had hit the front, he maintained a relentless gallop to the line.

Even Buick, Rebel’s Romance’s pilot for 18 of what is now a total of 22 career wins, from 32 starts, was a little stunned by the details of the eight-year-old’s career when he looked through his extensive list of achievements on Wednesday evening.

“I went through his race record again yesterday just to remind myself and it is amazing and outstanding,” Buick said. “Very few horses compete at that level in so many different countries for such a long time. His career earnings, his career wins and his Group One wins. His CV is incredible and he’s got such charisma and presence about him as well.

“You saw today at the age of eight he’s still got it. I really mean it when I say for a horse like Rebel’s Romance to come along in my career is very special. Not many jockeys get horses like him and I’m very privileged.”

The paradox of Rebel’s Romance’s career is that, unlike similar high achievers in global racing like Frankel, Galileo and Dubawi, he will not leave a legacy in the pedigrees of generations to come. He was gelded before his two-year-old debut in October 2020 – but had that not been the case, Appleby might have struggled to get him onto a track at all.

Most Classic races are closed to geldings, and while he won the UAE Derby on dirt in April 2021, Rebel’s Romance’s career only took off as a four-year-old, when he landed three straight Group Ones including the first of two wins in the Breeders’ Cup Turf.

That race, which returns to Keeneland, the scene of his first success, in November this year, is again likely to be the ultimate target for Rebel’s Romance in what will quite possibly be his last season on the track. A win in Kentucky would make him the first three-time winner of the Turf, and the first European-trained horse ever to win £14m in prize money.

“Of course we’d love to go there, but we’ll take it race-by-race,” Appleby said. “If he’s still showing as much enthusiasm next week as he did this week, it will be taken into consideration.

“People are entitled to ask should a horse like him keep running, but if I was to leave him for second lot, he’d be charging the door down and getting himself very wound up that he’d missed a bit of exercise or a gallop.

“He’ll tell us the day that he doesn’t want to do it anymore, and he showed today that he still wants it.”

The Falmouth Stakes, the first of the July Festival’s Group One events, is the highlight of the card here on Friday and Aidan O’Brien’s Precise, already a dual Group One winner in the Irish 1,000 Guineas and Coronation Stakes this season, is expected to set off at odds-on for her first start in all-aged company.

This has not been as reliable a race for the three-year-olds in recent years as last weekend’s Eclipse Stakes, however, while four of six odds-on shots since 2012 – including Inspiral at 1-7 in 2022 – have been beaten.

Blue Bolt, the winner of the Duke Of Cambridge Stakes at Royal Ascot last month, is a clear second-favourite at 7-2, but she was less than two lengths in front of the strong-finishing Jancis (3.35) and is 3lb worse off with that rival on Friday.

Willie McCreery’s mare was an impressive winner on the Rowley Mile earlier in the year, is just 4lb behind Precise on Timeform ratings and looks over-priced for Friday’s feature at around 12-1.