Lockinge Stakes analysis: David Ord on Audience's shock win

Well that will teach us.

All week we've built the Al Shaqab Lockinge Stakes up to be a straight shoot-out between Big Rock and Inspiral.

The powerful front-running French colt who finished in a different parish to his rivals in the QEII last autumn against the fleet-footed miling queen of Britain, who signed off her own 2023 campaign with a brilliant victory in the Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Turf.

And dear reader, we were wrong.

Because Audience, in the second silks of Cheveley Park Stud, there to set the pace for Inspiral, to ‘soften up’ her market rival, went to the front – and stayed there.

We’ve seen it before in Group Ones – famously in this very race back in 1998 when Cape Cross was in there to lead them a merry dance thus allowing Kahal (no me neither) to come through and pick up the pieces under Frankie Dettori.

He, too, wasn’t for catching.

Big Rock was beaten before the race developed, Insprial never a threat in fourth having raced in the rear of the field until just after halfway.

They had the choice to track the winner from his draw in one but Gosden senior was uncomfortable with that idea in an ITV Racing interview beforehand. He feared a private Clarehaven match-race down the centre as the real action took place among the main group on the stands’ side.

So Inspiral switched to join them instead. Her rider Kieran Shoemark puffed out his cheeks as he returned to the unsaddling area. The mare had blown up, and so had his dream of chalking up a first Group One win as stable jockey to the Gosdens.

That man Dettori features again, a huge shadow for anyone who tries to follow in his footsteps to emerge from beneath, let alone the first brave enough to try on the boots for size.

He called his successor on Friday night to talk through the race and that feeling, of knowing the prize was slipping away that Shoemark must have felt as they passed the three-furlong marker, would be very familiar to the man who was watching on from a hotel room in Pimlico.

By the end of his relationship with his mentor, the Italian was Group One Frankie, there for the big days. He’d earned that right despite the wobble the previous year over what Gosden senior lamented as being “too many holidays”.

Shoemark doesn’t want one of those any time soon, he just wants momentum, a big winner or three. He came across well in an interview on Luck On Sunday last month, a young rider comfortable to be stepping into such a high profile role.

Saturday was a disappointment, but not a self-inflicted one. Inspiral didn’t fire. She and her rider will have bigger days this summer – even if we do get a visitor from America ahead of the Queen Anne.

But for all the talk of changing times at the stable, the winner was a nod towards continuity.

Where Dick Hern had Brian Procter, where Henry Cecil had Willie Ryan, the Gosdens have Rab Havlin.

A jockey who has been a key cog in the wheel for many years, entrusted with the quirky, tricky rides, educating them, passing on decades of experience from the saddle.

He’s also getting on some A Listers too. This was only a second Group One success for the Scotsman, but he’s sat on countless top-flight winners at home. And Audience is his ride.

In a 13-race career, Havlin has only not been on board twice, defeat in a conditions race at Newmarket in the spring of his three-year-old career under Dettori and then a blow-out in the Jersey Stakes at Royal Ascot a couple of weeks later with Ryan Moore doing the steering.

Slowly but surely, they’ve transformed what his jockey referred to as “a bit of a thug” in his younger days, into a Group One-winning miler.

Was this a fluke? A simple case of them leaving him alone down the centre of the track? Possibly. Quotes of 14/1 for the Queen Anne suggest bookmakers and punters alike aren’t necessarily expecting a repeat performance in Berkshire next month.

Havlin, as you’d expect, is less inclined to write this off, saying: “It was his first run at a mile. Last year he would never have got a mile, he was a bull in a china shop, but since we let him get on with it, he came back a winner a couple of times last year against Kinross and good horses like that.

“If he can improve at a mile, which he obviously has, there are more good races for him.”

A head-scratching Lockinge, one in which we thought we had one simple question to answer, has left us with far more of them.

We spent most of 2023 writing and talking about the stable jockey at Clarehaven. It looks like a chunk of 2024 might be dedicated to it too.

But there in the shadows is Havlin, riding winners up and down the country, putting crucial finishing touches to key preparations for the big days.

A huge asset for his team and on Saturday he was centre stage in the warm, Newbury sunshine.

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