There are high hopes for a royal winner at Ascot this week, when the king and queen are expected to have a runner on the first four days of the meeting. Many fans, though, will also hope to see the green and red of the Aga Khan Studs in the winner’s enclosure after the weekend brought final closure in the ill-starred story of Shergar, whose 10-length winning margin in the 1981 Derby remains the all-time record.
In an interview with the Telegraph, Princess Zahra Aga Khan, the daughter of Shergar’s owner and breeder, Aga Khan IV, confirmed what had been the general wisdom in racing for many years – that the five-year-old stallion was shot not long after being kidnapped from Ballymany Stud in County Kildare by an armed IRA gang in February 1983.
“We now know the horse was killed within two days [of the kidnap],” Princess Zahra said.
“It was very unprofessionally done, and when they finally killed him, they did so in an awful way. The horse didn’t deserve that. Even as a stallion he was the kindest horse in the world, he was so unfairly treated.
“And why? He was a national symbol of Irish breeding and racing. It’s a long time ago, it was a very different world and people had different motivations back then.”
Shergar’s final resting place is unlikely to be found, as he is believed to have been buried in a bog in County Leitrim soon after being shot. His place on the roll of racing’s greatest champions, though, remains prominent, thanks to a brief but extraordinarily dominant sequence of wins in his three-year-old summer.
Shergar’s two-year-old season ended in defeat in what is now the Group One Futurity at Doncaster, where he was beaten two-and-a-half lengths by Beldale Flutter, but his Classic season opened with a 10-length success in the Guardian Classic Trial at Sandown that prompted the bookies to cut the Derby price for Michael Stoute’s colt from 25-1 to 8-1.
Even 8-1 was a price worth having according to this newspaper’s first racing correspondent, Richard Baerlein, who famously (and somewhat chauvinistically) concluded his report on the race with the suggestion that “surely this is the time to bet like men”.
Shergar won the Chester Vase in early May by a dozen lengths before turning the Derby itself into a 10-length procession from Tattenham Corner after Walter Swinburn sent him for home at the top of the home straight.
Watching it back, 45 years on, the first thing that many modern punters might notice is the sheer size of the crowd enjoying a midweek day off at the Derby, with scarcely a blade of grass to be seen on the infield and spectators against the running rail from most of the mile-and-a-half trip around the Surrey downs.
The field of 18 runners is big by modern standards too, but Shergar can soon be picked out travelling easily a few lengths off the pace, and even at the top of the hill, with around three-quarters of a mile still to travel, it is less a case of whether he will win and more a question of how far.
Shergar’s famous record-winning margin might have been wider still had Swinburn not started to ease down inside the final furlong. Peter Bromley, commentating for BBC Radio Two, suggested at one stage that he was “at least 15 lengths” in front.
There is, of course, piquancy too as we look back, knowing as we do that his story would reach such a sad conclusion. And even before midsummer, as the Epsom crowd acclaimed one of the Derby’s greatest ever winners, Shergar’s racing career was also close to its conclusion.
He made three more trips to the track. A four-length win in the Irish Derby, with Lester Piggott replacing the suspended Swinburn, was followed by another four-length success in the King George VI & Queen Elizabeth II Stakes at Ascot, Shergar only race against all-aged opposition. But the St Leger at Doncaster on soft September ground proved to be a race too far, as Shergar trailed home in fourth, nearly a dozen lengths behind the winner, and he was retired to Ballymany a few weeks later.
Shergar’s dominance through the summer was enough to see him ranked at the time as joint-seventh in Timeform’s all-time European Flat rankings on a mark of 140. Dancing Brave was awarded the same mark in 1986, and only Frankel, who now sits at the top of the list on 147, has earned a higher rating in Europe in the 45 years since the summer of Shergar.
Frankel’s legacy in the pedigrees of Flat champions for generations to come is already secure. Shergar, sadly, had just a single season at stud, at a time when champions were syndicated, usually into 40 shares, that entitled the holder to a single “cover”.
The 40 shares at £250k each in Shergar’s syndicate amounted to what was, at the time, a record stallion valuation of £10m. He sired one winner at the highest level from his only crop of foals – Authaal, in the 1986 Irish St Leger.
While Shergar did not get a chance to stamp his name in the Stud Book, though, his late owner’s breeding operation endured as one of the world’s finest and most successful.
Princess Zahra has already enjoyed a series of big-race victories with the horses she inherited from her father, including a win in last year’s Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, the race that the late Aga Khan IV cherished above all others, with Daryz.
Even amid the long list of champion racehorses from around the globe due to be competing at Royal Ascot from tomorrow, Daryz’s name stands out as surely the biggest star on show. In the week when a line was finally drawn under the miserable story of Shergar’s demise, he would be a fitting and poignant winner of Wednesday’s Prince of Wales’s Stakes.
