Glorious Goodwood Round-Up: The lessons to be learned from the final day of the festival

Glorious Goodwood / Simon Rowlands / 02 August 2008 / Leave a Comment

Simon Rowlands wraps up the festival with this review of day five on the Sussex Downs

The Nassau Stakes has produced some very good winners (Peeping Fawn last year, for instance) and some thrilling finishes (I'm not sure I've seen a better one anywhere than Ouija Board's short-head defeat of Alexander Goldrun in 2006). We almost certainly did not get the former this year but we most certainly got the latter.

Halfway To Heaven (116) came out on top by a head and the same from Lush Lashes (116) and Passage of Time (115), with a performance several pounds below the usual winning standard, but it would have been a different matter had the runner-up got a clear passage. In a race run at a slow pace for a long way, Lush Lashes was checked over 3f out and again twice in the final 1½f but was flying at the finish. She is capable of running to a figure around 120, as she showed at Royal Ascot.

The winner has now provided two of Aidan O'Brien's 17 Group 1 successes this year (the other one in the Irish 1000 Guineas), but both of them narrowly and fortuitously. She is smart but likely to come up short if tried in top open company, and the run of the race probably helped a filly who is speedily bred and had previously run only at 7f and 1m.

River Proud (115) also got the run of the race in the listed 1m contest earlier on the card, dictating a steady pace for a long way, but the likelihood is that he was the best horse anyway. Alexandros (109) and Atlantic Sport (108) might have been closer, but they have done nothing to suggest that they are as good as River Proud had shown himself by finishing third in the Poule d'Essai des Poulains on his previous start.

There was one in the eye for those who were expecting highly drawn horses, racing up the far side, to dominate the finish of the Stewards' Cup. Conquest (109) came from stall 14 and ended on the stand side, and he was followed home by his stable-companion King's Apostle (115) from stall 3 and Borderlescott (121) from stall 1. Knot In Wood (stall 17) was the first home of those to go middle to far side initially.

Borderlescott could not quite add to his win in the race in 2006 and second 12 months ago but emerges with huge credit under second-top weight off a BHA mark of 110. He has failed to win in listed and Group company to date, but this effort, along with his second in the Temple Stakes a few starts back, shows that he is well worth persevering with in such grades.

My performance of the week was Yeats' runaway success in the Goodwood Cup, which, at 130, was a few pounds superior to Henrythenavigator's all-out win in the Sussex Stakes in my book.

* Ratings are form-based assessments, expressed in pounds, and are on a scale similar to those employed by Racing Post and Timeform.