A 'Toast' to Dreams

Toast, or Fairytale? “Got on a lucky one, came in at 18 to one,” the song says. “I've got a feeling this year's for you and me.”

The odds against Toast Of New York (Thewayyouare) getting to this point have been infinitely higher, but the bells could yet be ringing out for him in 2018. Visiting his trainer after Christmas–his horses galloping into a spiteful squall of sleet, a world apart from Florida and the world's richest race–it felt impossible to resist the sense that this animal is playing out a fairytale of some kind.

Ten years ago, Jamie Osborne's business was on the rack. The whole market was reeling, of course, but its generic issues were given brutally personal expression when his principal patron (indeed, his landlord at the time) went broke.

“In a way Toast, and the timing of him coming into our lives, was the start of the rebuilding process,” Osborne says. “Those nights I lay staring at the ceiling, wondering how long before the banks pull the plug, there was always a small part of me that believed when your back's really against the wall, a twist of fate will occur. It was my way of staying sane through the whole thing. That belief, that if you do the right things, something will happen to help you out.”

As tends to be the case, that twist arrived–at Goffs in 2012–in impenetrable disguise: a left-field yearling by a left-field sire, one who has tried his luck in four countries without getting anything within a street of this graduate of his first crop. But Osborne could see why Timmy Hyde should have picked him up in Keeneland that January: he hadn't seen a better walker all year.

“I followed him through the ring thinking: 'I might just nick this',” Osborne recalls. “I was in a really deep hole, and not feeling very brave. Down from 100 horses to 25, and my yearling spend would have dropped significantly: I was probably averaging 20 grand a horse at the time. And here was this big, raw animal, bit of a plain head, four white legs, with a pedigree nobody could understand. But you very rarely nick a horse from Camas Park. So he was led out unsold, €60,000, and I eventually did a deal in the bar in the evening.”

Neither party to the negotiation could have begun to suspect the rivers of gold extending ahead of this unlikely keel: the richest 3-year-old prize on the planet, in Dubai; a photo finish for the GI Breeders' Cup Classic itself; and last month–most unfeasible of all, after a tendon injury and an abortive stud career in Qatar–a winning comeback after 1,130 days to set up a crack at the $16-million GI Pegasus S. at Gulfstream on Jan. 27.

As it was, Osborne brought him home to Lambourn and wondered who on earth might take this strange creature off his hands. One of the most dashing jump jockeys of his generation, in his first career, he had to admit that Toast Of New York resembled “a National Hunt store” among his other yearlings. The horse threatened to take forever: a slack palate, growth spurts, you couldn't even think about working him. Perhaps as many as 20 clients turned him down; at one point the horse was nearly offloaded to the late John Hills, a great friend who thought he might have a man for him in his own yard. It was not until Royal Ascot, by which stage the Goffs financial director had Osborne on speed-dial, that Michael Buckley came to the rescue–naming his new acquisition for a 1937 film about the 19th Century robber barons, featuring a rising Cary Grant.

Then one morning Toast Of New York appeared to do something “a bit abnormal for a horse that hadn't done a proper breeze.” Osborne despondently concluded that those accompanying him must all be useless, but 10 days later he did it again. Before long the ugly duckling had unmistakably become a swan. After a green debut spin, Osborne assured Buckley that he would be rewarded for his leap of faith next time, a Kempton maiden–and that he could confidently back him, too.

Now you only need a few minutes in Osborne's company to know that you are dealing with a properly rounded character: relaxed, articulate, honest and humorous. And his description of the way Toast Of New York contrived to get himself beaten that day would be neutered on the page, without his infectious, self-deprecating laughter. At the time, however, it was hard to see the funny side. He already had designs on Dubai and, even when the horse won by 12 lengths at Wolverhampton a fortnight later, there was a fresh disaster: the handicapper gave him a rating of just 74. He needed to be at least 100 to get into the Dubai race.

Osborne got onto the phone. “I'm going to be the nicest trainer in the world,” he told the bemused handicapper. “I'm not going to run this in a nursery and embarrass you.” Instead he went for a novice race back at Wolverhampton, where he caused equal perplexity in Adam Kirby when issuing his riding instructions. “You're here for one purpose and one purpose only,” Osborne said. “I need this horse rated 100 at the end of the race.”

Kirby was given a two-day ban for giving the horse a slap when winning by 16 lengths, but the rest is history. If the Dubai success came at a price–a raw horse had put in a lot of work through the winter, and thoughts of Epsom had to be shelved as he went off the boil in early summer–then clearly the prizemoney made it one well worth paying. Nor had Osborne exhausted his sense of adventure.

Though a first American raid proved fruitless, on turf at Belmont in July, Osborne persevered to Del Mar on the basis that, like Meydan, it was then operating a synthetic surface. In the GI Pacific Classic, Toast Of New York beat all bar Shared Belief (Candy Ride {Arg})–who would start hot favourite for the Breeders' Cup Classic. An admirable effort, vindicating a clever punt. But it was here that Osborne, by any conventional measure, appeared to get carried away: he decided to follow Shared Belief to Santa Anita, on dirt. A son of Thewayyouare, out of a mare by a half-brother to Selkirk?

“We just had a hunch his style would suit it,” Osborne says. “In New York, when cantering on the dirt, Jimmy [McCarthy, assistant and another ex-jump jockey] always said: 'This horse loves it, he feels better on it.' And Jimmy would be a very good judge. If you look at the horse's style of racing, it's hard, it's a war of attrition, it's who can keep going. And while he has this absolute template of a walk, at the gallop you'd say he's an efficient mover, he's not grassy, flicky; no, it's a little bit lifty, a little bit grabby. And the dirt horses I've seen, they've big backends on them, and big strong thighs and wide hips–and that's what this horse has.”

It proved a stroke of genius. Seldom, in fact, can the sport's obsession with first place have seemed so maddening. Everyone marvelled to see Toast Of New York foiled only by a nose; everyone congratulated his trainer. But the difference those fateful inches might have made to Osborne's international profile is impossible to quantify.

“The extremes of emotion, in a 15-second period, were very hard to compute,” he admits, laughing even as he concedes that the scar still smarts. “I can still cry talking about it. I don't often get nervous before races, but we'd gone to the expense of getting him out there, paying the entry fee, we had plenty at stake; and Michael doesn't have an oil well. So this was a big roll of the dice, and it was a huge relief.”

“But turning in you see Shared Belief is beaten, you see where California Chrome is, and there's just this horse Bayern that I must confess I hadn't given an awful lot of attention,” he says. “And just for those few seconds down the straight I thought we could win the Breeders' Cup Classic. So being 'nutted' was a sort of emotional confusion to me.”

“On the one hand, you are proud of the horse, feel vindicated in the moves you've made, he's run the race of his life, you could ask for no more. On the other, if you're a competitive animal, getting beaten an inch is a gutter. I told myself for a yard of our size, the horses we're fed, it's such a miracle to get there–with a horse bought as a yearling at a European sale–I shouldn't be annoyed. That's fine. But if you really do believe that, you're in the wrong game.”

So many twists, in a story extending through just nine races. A month after Toast Of New York was purchased by Al Shaqab to run in the Dubai World Cup, he injured his tendon. A trying call to the new owners, who sportingly on took the news the chin. Then, as he resumed fast work the following winter, with Dubai again in view, a reciprocal shock: Toast Of New York was to be diverted to kick-start the local breeding programme in Qatar. “We understood their decision,” Osborne insists. “But he'd become like a member of the family, so seeing him go–on Christmas Eve–was tough.”

To their credit, however, his owners also proved prepared to take an audacious gamble after Toast Of New York's desert harem never really got off the ground, and last March restored the horse to Lambourn.

“I think he's got about 10 babies,” Osborne says. “Now obviously bringing a horse back after this kind of absence, it's been done over jumps but I shouldn't think too many Flat trainers have ever tried it. And since the process is a bit unknown, you kind of make it up as you go along–how much you dare do. You're dealing not with a tendon, but a mixture of tendon and scar tissue. But touching wood it's been consistent now for a long time. Everything we did was extremely small steps and thanks to Al Shaqab, they never put me under any pressure.”

All the old fire seemed to be there at Lingfield; literally so, as the horse had always become aggressive before a race and duly discarded Frankie Dettori going to the start. But in the race he saw off a subsequent listed winner–and now he has a Pegasus slot, still in Al Shaqab colours, but with the risk shared by Dean and Patti Reeves (best known for racing Mucho Macho Man) and Randy Hill, whose collective enthusiasm makes Osborne still more ardent for this latest remarkable punt to pay off.

As a rule, he has to be fairly ruthless with himself. “This has had to evolve into a trading operation,” he reflects. “We do have to sell a lot of horses, I feed other parts of the world where we've regular customers that trust us. In a way, I'm a sifting station. When you have four kids, being a pure trainer doesn't work.”

But doesn't he resent the lost opportunities for professional fulfilment, when a flourishing horse is exported to continue his improvement elsewhere? He shakes his head. “Two things stop trainers taking a sensible business view of this,” he says. “One is the desire to experience the excitement of having a good horse. And the other is ego. I had a lot of that for 16 years riding: I got to ride some very good horses and win plenty of big races. I had all the ego massage I needed. So I'm kind of immune to that. What's more important is to have happy customers, and secure the future for the family. A lot of my clients now get as much of a kick out of selling a horse well as they do out of winning a race.”

Here, however, is a horse who can match every cent of even the world's biggest purse with commensurate romance. “And his desire to win is unflinching,” Osborne says. “Whether he's coming at a horse, or a horse is coming at him, he just grits his teeth. If you've got that on your side, and combine that with being an elite athlete–which he is: his heart rate, his recovery rate, his lactate levels are different from any other horse in the yard–you've the makings of a proper animal.

“Probably some horses' desire wanes over a period of time but with the character of this one, that wasn't an issue in my mind,” he says. “The issue was: had the period of time off lessened his physical capacity? And, to a certain degree, we don't yet know the answer. I am 100% confident the desire is there. Florida may tell us he wasn't as good as he was. But I think there's also a chance Florida will tell us he's better than he was.

Said Osborne, “He's had nine runs in his life. Does their ability diminish over a period of time through wear and tear? Or is it just aging? I don't know. Is he a more mature, a better horse now? The way we gallop them, I don't know the answer to that. I'm not a trainer who'd be trying to find all the answers in the morning. I will let the racecourse be the arbiter of that one. My job is to get them there retaining their desire; as fit as I can get them; as comfortable, as sound, as pain-free as I can get them; and to give them the opportunity to show whether or not the ability still exists.”

“We'll let this race tell us where we are,” he notes. “We learned a little bit from Lingfield. But we didn't learn everything. His next race, we'll learn everything. In many ways, what we're doing is a ridiculous roll of the dice. Because we're going to use a race with a $1-million entry fee to find out whether or not this horse is as good as he was that day at Santa Anita.”

Again, that self-deprecating laughter. “But if I, really deep down, believed we are dealing with a lesser animal there's no way I'd have encouraged this. I could be wrong. But I think there's a very strong chance he's as good as he was. And if the unbelievable happened, that would be a career-defining stroke of luck–anything we consider to have been bad luck, to this point, would be very clearly negated.”

And remember the Fairytale, as told by the Pogues: “Can't make it all alone, I've built my dreams around you.”

“If something like this could happen, it's just such a phenomenal tale isn't?” Osborne says. “There's a part of me that still allows myself to have a little dream. Because you know what, if you don't, what's the point?”