Strife at Godolphin

Saeed bin Suroor
Mottershead: Godolphin in strife as Bin Suroor reveals internal feud
BY LEE MOTTERSHEAD 12:00PM 5 JUN 2017
After drawing a Derby and Oaks blank, Godolphin continue to be without a British Classic success since Dawn Approach captured the 2013 2,000 Guineas. That is serious. Even more serious is the remarkable situation being played out at the very top of Sheikh Mohammed's superpower stable.

It is now 22 years since Saeed Bin Suroor completed an Epsom Classic double with Lammtarra and Moonshell. Over the subsequent years, the four-time champion trainer has been an uncontroversial figure. Yet when speaking to the Racing Post last week he blew the lid off the major deterioration in relations between himself and Sheikh Mohammed's top racing aide John Ferguson.

Having been in charge of Godolphin since February, 2014, Ferguson was given the title of chief executive in December, 2015, reporting he had been instructed to give the global behemoth "a kick in the belly".

Bin Suroor has since done some kicking himself, revealing that after a 2016 campaign that plainly left him angry and exasperated, he has from this year reported to only one man.

"Now Sheikh Mohammed makes the decisions at Stanley House, nobody else," said Bin Suroor.

"I like things this way. Last year it didn't suit me at all. Everything was top-class in past times, from the work-riders to the people in the office. Now I'm trying to build that up again for the future. The last three years without Simon Crisford has not been the same, has not been easy."

Bin Suroor then went on to say plenty, none of it by mistake. He spoke of how frustrated he had been to have James Doyle foisted upon him as retained rider - without being critical of Doyle himself - admitting: "I was not happy...it was very hard to do my job properly."

He separated his own yard from that of Charlie Appleby by describing his base as "the main Godolphin stable". He then bemoaned his latest two-year-old intake, extremely backward relative to the collection entrusted to Appleby, stating: "It is a disaster. I can't train them, have no chance to run them. The system is not quite great this year."

John Ferguson
It was not hard to read between the lines, principally because Bin Suroor will not have intended it to be.

The rumour heard on racecourses is the relationship between Godolphin's senior trainer and Godolphin's senior executive has completely broken down.

Ferguson - whose son, James, is Appleby's assistant - seemingly has little direct input into plans for the horses trained by Bin Suroor, in whose yard he is thought to be an infrequent visitor at most. In the Epsom paddock during the Derby preliminaries there was also no obvious contact between the two men.

Tension at the top of high-profile organisations is not unusual. What is extraordinary is Bin Suroor is so willing to make that tension public and sufficiently confident in his own relationship with Sheikh Mohammed to do so.

To the outsider it would appear to be a high-risk strategy. It must also be an unprecedented situation, one that surely cannot be sustainable.

Godolphin was built on a team ethos. The organisation has evolved in recent years, so it much more reflects the days of old when horses raced for many different yards in the name of Sheikh Mohammed.

Where once there was maroon and white, now there is blue. However, even if the shape of the team looks different in 2017 to how it did in 1997, there is clearly right now a far from positive team ethos across Godolphin's Newmarket set-up.

One wonders what Sheikh Mohammed will do. Will he see the troubled relationship between Bin Suroor and Ferguson as creative tension or will he seek to knock heads together?

That is unclear. What is clear is Godolphin remain an awfully long way behind Coolmore in the superpower stakes, with the British Classics score since Dawn Approach being 11 to Coolmore, none to Godolphin. The current difficulties can hardly be helpful in reducing the gap between the two.

John Ferguson, who was appointed as chief executive of Godolphin in 2015, has quit his position with Sheikh Mohammed's racing and breeding operation, the Racing Post can reveal.

More to follow .

news.godolphin.com/news/joe-osborne-appo...n’s-global-operation

New regime at Godolphin has the chance for a fresh start with Coolmore
Chris McGrath suggests that everyone can gain from a rapprochement

Galileo pictured at the centre of five Derby winners at Coolmore - the others, from left to right, being Pour Moi, Ruler Of The World, Australia and Camelot
Galileo pictured at the centre of five Derby winners at Coolmore - the others, from left to right, being Pour Moi, Ruler Of The World, Australia and Camelot
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8:16PM, JUN 14 2017

Six mares from the Niarchos family. Five from Juddmonte, and the same from Peter Brant. Four Moyglare ladies. Three sent by the Wertheimer brothers. A couple apiece for George Strawbridge and the Queen. Others in line include Newsells Park, Ballylinch, Foxwoods, Airlie, Prince Faisal, the China Horse Club; and so it goes on.

It's like Fat Sam's speakeasy: anybody who is anybody will soon walk through that door. Anybody who wants to breed a Classic winner, that is, and can either afford the fee or offer mares of sufficient quality to merit a foal-share. Well, jolly nearly anybody. On Galileo's dance card this spring, yet again, there has been one conspicuous no-show - a figure so familiar elsewhere that his absence would be utterly mystifying, had it not become axiomatic; had it not become, in fact, the ultimate Turf shorthand for "cutting off your nose to spite your face."

The original reasons for Sheikh Mohammed's refusal to deal directly with Coolmore may conceivably have been more cogent than any publicly surmised. But conjecture and gossip, seldom in short supply round a sales ring, need not be confined to those bygones that somehow have never been allowed to become bygones. It also extends to the attribution of the boycott - in some authoritative accounts, at any rate - to the man who left his service last week.

Whether or not John Ferguson was indeed responsible for the cussed insistence that the world's most expensively assembled stable should be denied access to its most potent stallion, his exit would appear to present the perfect opportunity for a fresh start in policy as well as personnel.

Unwavering

On one level, you have to admire such unwavering commitment to a perceived point of principle, misguided or otherwise. On another, however, you can only feel a little embarrassed by some of the indignities embraced as a result.

It's apparently okay, for instance, to pay Jim Bolger for back-door access to sons of Galileo. This strongly evokes the squeamishness of the first Duke of Westminster, who preferred to pay a middle man £14,000 for the 1873 Derby winner rather than give £10,000 - itself an unprecedented sum - direct to the self-made, aggressive Glaswegian coalmaster who owned him.

For a long time, equally, it was evidently okay to indulge years of underachievement by Godolphin - until Ferguson himself administered that famous "kick in the belly" when expanding his brief after the Al Zarooni scandal.
By force of intellect and character, Ferguson was always likely to make that kick register in parts others might not reach. The most obvious departure - long overdue, to many of us - was to ensure that top-class bloodstock was stabled with demonstrably top-class trainers. If that came at a cost to the coherence of the original, highly politicised Godolphin vision, then so be it: better to have John Gosden or Andre Fabre or Bob Baffert on your team, than against you; better to keep Ribchester in Yorkshire, than to take Libertarian away from Yorkshire.

Skewed

As everyone now knows, however, it was sooner in the internal distribution of horses that Ferguson rocked the boat. After all, Godolphin's own ranks have long been divided as to whether its Classic record, in particular, sooner reflected deficiencies in the breeding or training divisions.

But the point is that it's not really okay, at all - for any of us. Because Godolphin’s failure to punch its weight has so skewed perceptions of the sport that Paul Hayward, as respected in the mainstream as he is thoroughly schooled in our own backwater, told Daily Telegraph readers on Derby morning that Ballydoyle's "near-monopoly in the grandest races can feel like a single story on a loop" and that "it would be dishonest to pretend that the presentation of a single, unvarying narrative translates easily outside the core of the sport."


The situation profits nobody. The Classics certainly suffer, not least given the commercial stampede towards fast, precocious sires who would never produce a Derby colt if sent 100 Urban Seas. At the other end of the scale, equally, what does Sheikh Mohammed think when he sees Prince Khalid Abdullah’s symbiotic dealings with Coolmore? Danehill going one way; Frankel - out of a Danehill mare, of course - going the other.
What does he think, come to that, when he tots up Group 1 races in Britain and Ireland over the past year - and finds Galileo responsible for seven times as many winners as Dubawi?

Carousel

What does he think when he looks at yet another turn of the Classic carousel, and sees Galileo producing Churchill, Winter, Rhododendron and Cliffs Of Moher; his sons producing Enable, Cracksman and Eminent; and a daughter producing Barney Roy, the one colt to make an impression in the royal blue silks?

What does he think, when he reads the list of mares sent by other major breeders to Galileo - never mind the sire’s private harem at Coolmore, which this year included the dams of Minding, Found, Gleneagles and The Gurkha? Does he borrow from Michael Caine at the end of The Italian Job? "Hang on a minute lads, I’ve got a great idea…"


In one respect, at least, the Sheikh has already responded to the crisis by investing in an outstanding sire - namely by appointing Joe Osborne to fill the Ferguson breach. Joe and his siblings testify vividly to the value of heredity, their father having been such a cherished counsellor to the Sheikh. So he knows what he can expect from an Osborne: dignity as well as flair, judgement as well as commitment.
Lest we forget, the Sheikh has far more important things to worry about. As such, he must feel badly let down by some of those to whom he has trusted to ride the slipstream of his immense wealth, energy and vision. Without presuming rights and wrongs, in individual cases, he appears to have been betrayed by personal piques, jealousies, intrigues and ambition. The final breakdown between Ferguson and Saeed Bin Suroor, remember, was virtually simultaneous with a very similar rupture in Godolphin's Australian wing.

So perhaps someone will now take the chance to ask whether the Coolmore embargo is itself a matter of pique, jealousies, intrigue and ambition?

If you can't beat them, join them. That has evidently been too unpalatable a climbdown for some tastes, very possibly including those of the Sheikh himself. But whoever is responsible, surely this is the moment at least to ask the question. Is it all about self-respect - or merely self-regard?