Meet the 17-year-old who is riding for the King at Royal Ascot

You would be hard pressed to find any 17-year-old who has ridden for the King at Royal Ascot. So it is little wonder Warren Fentiman describes the prospect as “mind-blowing”.

Friday will see the apprentice jockey take the reins of Purple Rainbow on what is also his first festival racing in front of His Majesty.

It caps a dream start to a career in the saddle for the teenager, coming less than a fortnight after he scored a landmark win on Derby day at Epsom. Like the King, the teenager has the sport in his blood, with his father, Duran, also a jockey. Indeed, just last month, the pair raced against each other for the first time after the latter recovered from breaking his leg in four places back in September.

But, despite boasting more than 400 winners, Fentiman snr has yet to ride for the Royal Family, an honour that is about to be bestowed on his son in Friday’s Sandringham Stakes.

“It’s just mind-blowing that I’m riding for the King,” says Fentiman, whose tender years are all too clear when he refers to Charles as “Your Majesty”, rather than “His Majesty”.

The teenager, who is allowed to carry 5lb less weight until he scores 40 wins, adds: “I’ve never thought about myself riding for the King ever. But doing it as a 5lb claimer, it’s something to be proud of.”

Remarkably, neither of his parents will be there to share the moment, with his father racing elsewhere this week. “He wants all the pictures, videos, me ringing him flat out,” Fentiman says. “Because he’s never experienced the full week here.” He adds of his mother: “Mum would love to come but she’s doing a show with my little sister.”

Fentiman will not be short of support, however, with plenty of family and “close mates” in attendance. There are also those back home in North Yorkshire, including school friends who will now be doing the likes of A-Levels while he rides for the King.

“There’ll be a few people that will just message me, saying, ‘How are you?’, see that I’m doing well,” he says. “And the people that do message me from my school, they always support me and say, ‘Well done’.

“It’s just nice that people that you spent all your early stages of your life with are still watching and supporting.”

Fentiman has already had four rides this week and was winning Thursday’s Britannia Stakes with around a furlong to go before fading badly and finishing 11th.

Admitting he has been pinching himself just being at Royal Ascot, he says: “When you’re just about to go in the stalls, you’re looking at the stands and there’s just thousands and thousands of people. It just gives you a good thrill.”

Bred by Queen Elizabeth II, Purple Rainbow is a 20-1 shot to deliver what could be the King’s first win of this year’s Royal Ascot.

“Everyone wants to win because it’s Royal Ascot,” Fentiman says. “But I’d say he’s got a very nice chance. He’s got a low weight, with my claim off. Hopefully, if everything goes well, he should go close.

“It would be amazing if I won for Your Majesty. I don’t know what would happen. I think my mum would cry.”
Trawlerman break track record in Ascot Gold Cup

They call it ‘doing it the hard way,’ making all the running, but Trawlerman – John and Thady Gosden’s ‘old boy’ – knows no different and ran out a seven-length winner of the Gold Cup in a track record time.

Wearing his heart on his sleeve, the Godolphin-owned gelding ensured there was no hiding place for any stamina-lite rivals.

Aged seven the chances are that Trawlerman is not going to become a multiple winner of the world’s most prestigious staying race like Yeats, Stradivarius or even Kyprios, popular winners of the race in the recent past. But there is something about a heroic front-runner like Crisp, Desert Orchid, Persian Punch, Double Trigger – horses which were all venerated by the racing public.

William Buick went out to ride Trawlerman knowing he had a number of things in his favour; he knew the gelding gets the trip, that his two principal rivals here had never tried it, that he acts on fast ground and that, maybe not that it would have mattered (we will never know), this time there was no Kyprios playing the role of heart-breaker.

Buick’s job was also made easier, he admitted, because the horse does it himself and he only had to start pushing when he could see Illinois’s shadow start to loom just to make sure the Ballydoyle runner would never get the chance to come up for oxygen.

In different circumstances Illinois might have got home but, thus put to the sword, he was in the red on the stamina dial going into the final furlong while Trawlerman just galloped on in his relentless style all the way through the line.

It has been an extraordinary week for the Gosdens so far, winning the feature race each of the first three days as well as two others but this might just have capped it.

“Trawlerman just goes off,” said the trainer, winning it for the fifth time. “I said to William ‘what did you do?’ and he said, ‘I threw the reins at him, he can judge pace better than me’, and off they went together and picked it up from five out. He is an out-and-out galloper and William judged it perfectly – it is not an easy thing to do over two and a half miles.

“On the basis he stays, if anyone is going to go by him, they will know they have been in a race, but they never got to him because he simply outstayed them.”

He added: “He ran Kyprios to a length last year and they were both all out. He deserved, with Kyprios not here, to come back and show that he is a proper horse. We like the Cup races and those lovely staying horses. I remember the great horses – Lester Piggott rode Sagaro and he could turn the last six furlongs in 1m.12s flat. That is what I like, a horse that can go the distance and then go, and you can’t catch them. That is style.”

Even Sagaro might have struggled to go Trawlerman’s lick though. He knocked an impressive 1.9 seconds off the previous track record, set 15 years ago. Record times usually require two things; fast ground and a pace-maker but Trawlerman did it without any help; that really is the hard way.

“We tried the same tactics last year,” said Buick, “and we were only beaten by the great Kyprios. He has been such a good horse and is so genuine. He had a beautiful prep and was just so smooth throughout the race today; he’s really what you want in a two-and-a-half-mile race. I did not have to touch the brakes once. He was on autopilot; he knows his own speed and stays well, so I was just a passenger.

“Winning the Gold Cup is right at the top. It is two and a half miles, an extreme distance, at Royal Ascot. It is a race that, when you get into the last half-mile, that is where you separate the horses that stay and don’t stay. That is when Trawlerman comes into his own.”

Aidan O’Brien might have had to settle for second in the Gold Cup but he still managed three winners with Charles Darwin in the Norfolk, Garden of Eden in the Ribblesdale and Trinity College in the Hampton Court so it was left to the Highclere-owned William Haggas-trained Merchant to get the winning feeling out beyond the coterie of big owners who have been dominating this week.

Merchant is owned by 15 members of Highclere’s Barn Owl syndicate. “When we bought him my phone was ringing and ringing, and I thought, ‘Aargh, who’s that?’” explained Harry Herbert who has been running Highclere for over three decades. “It was William who said, ‘I have just seen you’ve bought that horse. I have never asked before in 33 years, please can I train him?’ And here we are, at Royal Ascot – it’s very special.”