UAE racing fans with longish memories, especially those who follow the fortunes of Jebel Ali Stables, will have turned back the clock when watching certain events unfold at last weekend’s Breeders’ Cup bonanza.
Santa Anita highlighted riding talents that shone as apprentices carrying the yellow and black colours of Sheikh Ahmed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and which were so spectacularly replicated last Saturday by James Orman for trainer Michael Costa at the family-orientated racecourse.
Tom Marquand set the ball rolling on Friday when he stoked up Big Evs to win the Juvenile Turf Sprint, and the following day William Buick sparked an astonishing winning burst from Master Of The Seas to pip fellow Godolphin-owned Mawj in the Turf Mile.
Both Marquand and Buick were young bucks, starting out on stellar careers, when they responded to invitations from Jebel Ali Stables.
Marquand, champion apprentice in Britain in 2015, had the briefest stint in the UAE at the start of the 2017-18 season but won a couple of races from his 27 rides. Buick, who shared the claimers’ title with David Probert in 2008, enjoyed much more productive spells at Jebel Ali from 2008-10, with 22 and 19 winners respectively in his first two seasons, before injuries incurred in two falls a couple of days before the end of 2010, after seven winners, ended his third term.
The rest, as the old saying goes, is history, yet they were hardly the first jockeys to benefit from a policy begun by trainer Dhruba Selvaratnam almost as soon as he received the call from Sheikh Ahmed in November 1990 to relocate from Ireland, where he had been assistant to the legendary Vincent O’Brien for a decade, when the new racecourse and stables were established.
Selvaratnam drew heavily from Britain and Ireland for his stable jockeys, and four – Willie Supple, Johnny Murtagh,
Gary Hind and Brett Doyle – won UAE championships while in the post.
Then there was Pat Smullen, who had three separate spells as stable jockey to Selvaratnam and finished third in the table behind Ted Durcan in the last of them in 2001-02.
Smullen, who went on to become stable jockey to Dermot Weld and has a race named after him at Jebel Ali following his death in 2020, expressed his feeling for the Gulf in his autobiography Champion, saying: “Dubai has always been good to me. It was always a home away from home, and Dhruba and Erwan Charpy were brilliant trainers to ride for.”
Apart from a two-year spell in Ireland, Dhruba Selvaratnam was Sheikh Ahmed’s trainer in residence until the end of the
2016-17 season, when he returned to Ireland and was succeeded by his brother and former assistant Gopi. Fortunes dipped and after one season and three winners, Nicholas Bachalard was drafted in from Saudi Arabia.
After an unsteady start, Bachalard got the Jebel Ali Stables back on an even keel, but after just four winners from 63 runners in 2021-22, he left and was replaced by Michael Costa, who had risen from stablehand to trainer of 120 horses on Australia’s Gold Coast.
With 14 winners and 41 other prize earners from 93 runners in his first season, Costa hit the ground running, enabling fellow Aussie Jean van Overmeire, the latest Jebel Ali stable jockey, to set a tally of 15 wins and 67 other second-to-fifth places from 194 rides.
Overmeire has delayed his return, with dual Brisbane champion jockey Orman benefiting from a short-term call to step in that resulted in the weekend five-timer. The glory days of Jebel Ali Stables and its No. 1 jockey are back.
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