Racing / Glorious Goodwood: Duplicity can cheat Double: Bookmakers count on a punters' favourite fading yet again as the winning post nears in today's Stewards' Cup
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Your support makes all the difference.MANY horses wear blinkers, but Double Blue would perhaps be best helped by rear-view mirrors. The ante-post favourite for the Stewards' Cup has finished second in each of his last four races, leading almost to the winning post until caught by a rival's late thrust.
Double Blue, heavily backed in all those runs, was favourite in three of them, so when Mark Johnston's trail-blazing chestnut endeavours to make all today bookmakers are very hopeful of playing up their winnings.
They probably will. The three-year-old is certainly not a quitter, having scored four consecutive wins earlier this season, but he has climbed rapidly up the handicap and is now too short a price.
Best to look for a long-odds contender capable of cutting down Double Blue inside the final furlong. In a race with a history littered with shock results, each-way support for DUPLICITY (3.45, nap) is suggested. Widely available at odds of 50-1 yesterday, a win for this four-year-old would not surprise his trainer Jack Holt, merely confirm expectations.
John Reid, the colt's regular jockey, again takes the ride and the partnership can overcome a single-figure draw. In recent years, low-drawn runners have increasingly challenged the traditional advantage held by runners on the far side of the track on fast going.
'Duplicity has a touch of class and I always believed him capable of winning in Group company,' Holt, a sprint specialist, said yesterday. 'He ran in Group races last year but wasn't quite up to it. But he's very well just now and the more I look at the opposition the draw is what worries me most.'
Mougins, another with former pretensions to Group class, can finally go some way to fulfilling high stable hopes for him. Trainer David Elsworth engaged the colt in this season's classics after he won a maiden race at this meeting a year ago.
Aims have been revised since then and a 15th place finish in a field of 23 for the Brittania Handicap at Royal Ascot last time appears inauspicious form. But Mougins (2.30, next best) ran from an impossibly high draw that day and his worth is best assessed by a close second at Lingfield in May to the unbeaten Hazaam.
Today's chief danger is Savash, the first of a powerful Goodwood team from the Newmarket yard of Mohammed Moubarak, whose runners are suddenly proving difficult to beat now that the stable is recovering from a viral infection. 'We're going to make up for lost time and do outstandingly well at Goodwood, I'm sure,' Moubarak said yesterday.
Main Bid in the Golden Mile, and Majestic Hawk in the Champagne Stakes, both on Thursday, were given special mentions by Moubarak, but so adamant was his belief in his yard's strength in depth for this week it would be inadvisable this afternoon to oppose Classic Story (4.45) and Magical Queen (5.20).
(Photograph omitted)
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