HAS ANY horse in history ever had more owners than Desert Orchid? When he leapt to the front at Kempton Park as he did every Boxing Day, it seemed, since time and racing began, millions of people felt the same surge of joy, the same proprietorial pride.
He died yesterday morning in his stable at the age of 27. “He departed from the world with dignity and no fuss,” David Elsworth, his trainer, said. “He did his dying in the same individual way he did his living. It was time to go.”
Dessie was my horse, Dessie was your horse: for we were all on nickname terms with him. And we could always pick him out from the crowd. It was easy: he was always white and always in front. But perhaps we’d have known him without that shimmering coat: from his style, from his swagger, from his fearless, almost reckless leaping, from his damn-the-lot-of-you racing style of winning from the front.
Desert Orchid captured the world’s imagination as no horse had done before or since. He raced from 1983 to 1991, winning 34 of his 71 races over jumps. He collected, should you need the sordid details, £654,066 in prize-money. Never has any figure been so inadequate at expressing the meaning of a sporting life.
Stats are more appropriate to Red Rum, whose stock in trade was relentless victory in the Grand National, or to Arkle, still regarded as the greatest steeplechaser of them all, or to Best Mate, who came as close to matching him as any horse could.
But Desert Orchid had something these others lacked. He was not only a grey and instantly recognisable; he was also fallible. He aroused tenderness and concern as well as admiration. He was never happy jumping “left-handed” as racing people say — that is to say, on an anti-clockwise course. He made clockwise Kempton his own special place, and won the King George VI Chase four times.
But counter-clockwise Cheltenham was an infinitely tougher task for him. His victory in the Cheltenham Gold Cup of 1989 was a moment of vindication for his million owners. He slogged it out in the mud, and won a brutal examination of heart and will. “I’ve never seen a horse so brave,” Simon Sherwood, his jockey, said as a nation fought back the tears. “He hated every step of the way and dug as deep as he could possibly go.”
By this time, the national love affair with Desert Orchid was so huge and so widespread that Richard Burridge, his owner, daren’t run him in the Grand National. It would have been too much for the nation to bear. Love had grown too deep.
I MET him once. I went down to Hampshire to interview him; he was getting fit for Boxing Day. He was long retired, but he was going to lead the parade at Kempton.
He was getting into the swing of things by leading out the two-year old fillies: a bantam rooster with his hens could not have looked more cocksure. Desert Orchid may have been a gelding, but nobody seemed to have told him.
I sat on him, too. It was a bizarre moment. Elsworth, talking hard, effing and blinding and sploshing Scotch into the coffee, suddenly offered me the chance. The horse was saddled at the time, and I was patting his neck and admiring him.
Smaller than you imagined him, of course, because he looked a good 20 hands on television, and less obviously Schwarzenegger-muscled. Less white, too: if you didn’t know who he was, you’d call him a flea-bitten grey. But you always did know who he was because he had a quite colossal sense of his own worth. He stood as if he believed he really was 20 hands and that every other horse in creation would always back down to him.
And suddenly, Elsworth had produced from nowhere a child’s velvet riding hat, which sat on my head like a cherry on a cake, and I was legged up on to the horse that had won four King Georges and a million hearts. I sat there for a moment, sitting tall as a horseman does, and a devil entered my mind and told me to kick him in the ribs and have a bit of fun. The devil never quite reached my heels, probably just as well. Trained and race-fit jockeys had struggled to hold this fellow in check.
But I felt something special in that brief and silly encounter. Not power, no, for he was already an old boy. Instead, I felt a surge of self-certainty: confidence — a desire to take on anybody and bloody well win, or if not, then bloody well run yourself into the ground trying. Even in retirement, this was a horse that was not only ever so slightly fabulous, but was well aware of the fact, as well.
I knew he was something special when my father rang me up to ask: “Did you see him? What a fabulous horse.” My father has nothing but distrust for horses normally, along with dismay that his offspring should have spent so much time and money on the beasts. But with Desert Orchid, he could, suddenly and briefly, see the point.
Dessie did that for everybody. With Desert Orchid, non-horsey people suddenly saw the point. They saw a beautiful, courageous, generous, powerful, athletic, brilliant, character-filled individual; and everyone felt the same rush of proprietorial privilege.
Oh, brave old world that has such creatures in it! To share a planet, to share a life with such marvels. What I, and all horsey people feel every day is something that Desert Orchid allowed people to feel a few times over a few years. He will be lavishly anthropomorphised and sentimentalised and wept over. But why not? He was the horse for all sorts and conditions of humankind, he was the horse for everyone, and above all, he was wonderfully and perfectly suitable for playing the part of Everyhorse.
Desert Orchid, racehorse and equine celebrity, was born on April 11, 1979. He died on November 13, 2006, aged 27.
