ed dunlop
“
She was locked up in quarantine for eight days, she got loose, fell over and ripped her knee, then she had to do an eight-hour lorry journey down to Kyoto for three days. She’s incredibly tough, and it was an amazing feat.
A
fter picking up two thirds and a win in her two-year-old season, Dunlop came to the conclusion that she was a decent filly, “though we had no notion, even through the winter of her two-year-old career, that she was going to turn out to be a seven-time Group 1 winner.” She went on to amass in excess of £3.5million in earnings, winning the Oaks, the Irish Oaks, the Hong Kong Vase, the Prince of Wales’s Stakes, the Nassau Stakes and twice winning the Breeder’s Cup Filly & Mare Turf. Her remarkable jet-setting triumphs have been emulated by Snow Fairy, just four years later. “The amazing thing about the pair,” reasons Dunlop, “is their fantastic attitudes to travelling. A lot of good horses can’t handle it mentally, but both mares have coped so well with the pressure of travelling around the world.” While on paper the two mares revealed similar progressions from two-year-olds to three-year-olds, in reality the plan with Ouija Board had always been to step up in trip, wheareas with Snow Fairy it was more down to chance. “Snow Fairy was an exposed two-year-old and had run six or seven times. She’d been placed in the Prestige Stakes at Goodwood over 7f, but then ran appallingly on very soft ground at Newbury when I’d always thought she wanted soft ground,” Dunlop explains. “She was rated 102 at the end of her two-yearold career so she wasn’t completely hopeless, but she wasn’t quite what she is now.” She’s not bred to stay 1m4f so it hadn’t crossed Dunlop’s mind that she’d be so good over that trip. “The plan had been to go and win the German Guineas, but she threw a splint. We
The champion
“
suggestion that Dunlop is a specialist with the fairer sex. “Well, the statistics say I have, so there’s no point denying that,” he agrees. “But as a team we don’t think we have [more affinity with mares] — we’ve just been lucky enough to have been sent some very well-bred fillies.” That’s certainly the case with Lord Derby’s famous mare. She’d been broken in as a twoyear-old before joining the yard. “She was a tallish, weakish filly,” he recalls. “Nice temperament, and she moved well enough, but nothing extraordinary to start with.”
thought she’d go for a Listed fillies’ race being rated 102 as she couldn’t run in a handicap as she’d have carried too much weight. “We had to go for some form of pattern race so the plan was to go to York for the May meeting, but I scratched her as the ground was very firm. The only race I could find then was an Oaks trial at Goodwood, and the rest, as they say, was history.” Having repeated Ouija Board’s double of winning the Epsom Oaks and the Irish Oaks, having been supplemented for both, Snow Fairy then finished second to Midday in the Yorkshire Oaks and fourth in the St Leger, before returning to her winning ways with the Queen Elizabeth II Cup in Kyoto and in the Hong Kong Cup at Sha Tin in December. But it was her win in Japan that stands out most for Dunlop. “It was an amazing thing for a three-yearold filly to do. She was the first international winner of the Queen Elizabeth II Cup and the actual process of getting her there and through quarantine was arduous. She went on a private plane to Amsterdam, then went on another plane to Milan, then to Tokyo. She was locked up in quarantine for eight days, she got loose, fell over and ripped her knee, then she had to do an eight-hour lorry journey down to Kyoto for three days. She’s incredibly tough, and it was an amazing feat by her and also by my staff to get her there.” But sport is always full of ups and downs. Two weeks after International Thoroughbred visited La Grange, the news arrived of Snow Fairy picking up a minor leg injuy while preparing for her run in the Sheema Classic. The plan is now for a return to action in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot. “The vets did extensive tests and found minor bone damage on the right cannon bone and while not a serious injury. It has obviously came at the wrong time for her to be able to run in Dubai,” reports Dunlop.
www.internationalthoroughbred.net
37