Iconic Racehorse Trainer Announces Retirement
Iconic racehorse trainer Sir Michael Stoute, 77, has announced his retirement at the end of the season. The ten-times Champion Trainer has accumulated over four thousand winners in Britain since his first success and was knighted in the 1998 Birthday Honours for promoting sports tourism in Barbados. A visionary who saw the
benefits of international horse racing, including victories in the Dubai World Cup, the Breeders Cup, the Japan Cup, and the Hong Kong Vase.
Despite more than half a century of accolades and sustained success for such an institution of the British racing scene, Stoute was born in Barbados and his father, Ronald, was the Chief Police Commissioner in Barbados. The family home backed onto the Garrison Savannah racecourse, which meant a young Michael could look over the fence and have a bird’s eye view of proceedings. Initially, Stoute’s interest in racing was more media-based, getting a job as a racing commentator while helping out at the yard of Barbados Derby winning trainer, Freddie Thirkell.
It was a media move that brought Stoute to Britain in 1964 when he applied for a job as a racing commentator with the BBC. He got down to the final six of a recruitment process that saw the late BBC racing broadcaster Julian Wilson getting the job.
“I hadn’t been to Britain before going to Pat Rohan’s,” he said. “The West Indies had been federated and the chief justice of the federated West Indies came and retired in Barbados, and he was an Irishman. “My father met him one evening and they got chatting and he said, ‘I’ve got a horse-mad son’ – and he said he might be able to help.
“I was supposed to go to a job in Ireland which fell through and he, Sir Eric Hallinan, made the connection for me with Pat Rohan’s mother. I worked for Pat for three years and then I came to Newmarket I went to Doug Smith for two and a half years. I then went to Tom Jones where I had a year and a half.”
Stoute began to make his name with the exploits of a pair of star sprinter. “I rented Cadland Stables, and I got 15 horses, and, in those days, you had to have 12 to get a licence and it started from there,” he said.
“Alphadamus won the Stewards’ Cup in my second season (1973). Blue Cashmere won the Northumberland Sprint Trophy and the Ayr Gold Cup and the Trafalgar Handicap at Ascot the week after the Ayr Gold Cup. Those were the two that got me moving a bit – thank God I hit the ground running as you can get buried quickly.”
His record includes six Derby winners, including a pair who rewrote the record books. The breathtakingly Shergar won by a record margin of ten lengths in 1981, while Workforce clocked a record time in 2010. His other winners of the premier Classic have been Shahrastani, who beat Dancing Brave in a dramatic 1986 renewal, plus Kris Kin (2003), North Light (2004), and Desert Crown (2022),
At the start of the new millennium, Stoute trailed his great Newmarket rival, Sir Henry Cecil, 10/5 in the Trainers’ Championships. But, by 2009, he had matched him despite the emergence of Aidan O’Brien, the serial Irish Champion. Stoute won the title in 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006 and 2009, with O’Brien filling the gaps. Only Alec Taylor, who won the championship a dozen times between 1907 and 1925, has ever been Champion Trainer on more occasions.
His racecourse appearances are rare these days, and it was no surprise that he announced his retirement. He is well known for being coy with interviewers and giving them the slip, preferring to let his horses do the talking. However, ask him about his beloved West Indies cricket team, and you will get a different discussion. West Indies were the dominant force in the 1980s, a decade when Stoute was also at the top of his game. Shergar was Michael Holding and Viv Richards rolled into one, silky smooth yet wonderfully destructive simultaneously.
Shergar established himself as one of the all-time greats, with his jaw-dropping Derby demolition under teenager Walter Swinburn a memorable image.
“You never forget your first Derby winner. Shergar had won his Derby trials in outstanding fashion. So, he was odds on, he was expected to win, we expected him to win, but it was still a great thrill. I think he won by about ten lengths, and (Walter) Swinburn was pulling him up by the last furlong,” Sir Michael Stoute has said.
That came after similar wins by wide margins in his Sandown Park and Chester trial races. After Epsom, he breezed home in the Irish Derby at The Curragh before landing the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot. He had been retired to stud by his owner, the Aga Khan, when he was kidnapped in 1983 and sadly never seen again.
In 2023, Sir Michael Stoute was inducted into the Hall of Fame, a prestigious recognition immortalising the sport’s Modern Greats, both human and equine, from 1970 onwards. His induction, alongside the fabled racehorse Sea The Stars, was a momentous occasion officially recognised through a special presentation at Newmarket Racecourse during the QIPAO Guineas Festival.
“To be inducted into the Hall of Fame and join Vincent O’Brien, who was my hero and probably the greatest trainer that has ever lived, and Henry Cecil, who was also a very good friend. I am very, very grateful.”
Stoute’s title-winning days are certainly behind him because, by design, he trains fewer horses these days. In the past decade and into his seventies, Stoute has remained in racing’s fast lane with horses such as Integral (2014 Falmouth and Sun Chariot), Ulysses (2017 Eclipse and Juddmonte International); Poet’s Word (2018 Prince of Wales’s Stakes and King George); Mustashry (2019 Lockinge); Crystal Ocean (2019 Prince of Wales’s Stakes) and Dream Of Dreams (2020 Sprint Cup).
In 2022, he and long-time ally Saeed Suhail won another Derby together (after Kris Kin 20 years earlier) with the sublime Desert Crown. In the process, Stoute became the oldest trainer to win the great race, aged seventy-six, and in the autumn, Bay Bridge gave him the first success on QIPCO British Champions Day at Ascot by landing the QIPCO Champion Stakes.
Kieren Fallon hailed the “trainer he always wanted to ride for” after Sir Michael Stoute announced he would retire at the end of the season. Fallon and Stoute won two Derby together with Kris Kin and North Light, enjoying plenty of other great successes during the Russian Rhythm years and with Golan, Islington, King’s Best and many others.
The Aga Khan Studs added their best wishes to the many sent to Sir Michael Stoute after it was announced that he would end his glittering training career at the end of the season.
Legendary West Indies fast bowler Michael ‘Mikey’ Holding has been a friend of Sir Michael Stoute’s for 40 years and was a regular feature at his Newmarket yard in the summer months for over two decades until 2021. Jamaican-born Holding met Barbadian Stoute in the year the Lester Piggott-ridden Shadeed won the 2,000 Guineas in 1985, and from slow beginnings, their combined passion for racing, cricket and the Caribbean led to a long-standing connection.
“Michael was always spot-on knowing when to press the ‘go’ button, and his patience paid off in spades,” John Warren, the late Queen’s former racing manager, said.
Stoute announced his decision in a statement. “I have decided to retire from training at the end of this season,” the 78-year-old said. “I would like to thank all my owners and staff for the support they have given me over the years. It has been a great and enjoyable journey.”
#
“Michael was always spot-on knowing when to press the ‘go’ button, and his patience paid off in spades,” John Warren, the late Queen’s former racing manager, said.
Stoute announced his decision in a statement. “I have decided to retire from training at the end of this season,” the 78-year-old said. “I would like to thank all my owners and staff for the support they have given me over the years. It has been a great and enjoyable journey.”
