John Ingles reflects on Kalpana's big win at Ascot last weekend 55 years after the late Ian Balding, father of Kalpana's trainer Andrew, won the King George with the great Mill Reef.
In the 1961 edition of the Directory of The British Turf, Ian Anthony Balding, then a 22-year-old amateur rider, nominated the highlight of his career as coming on October 22 of the previous year when ‘winning on Pure Whiskey at Huntingdon and playing rugger for the 60 Club (also winning) within three-quarters of an hour.’ The 60 (or ‘LX’) Club was the second XV of Cambridge University’s rugby team, though Balding was soon to become a Cambridge Blue with a place in the first team.
Not long afterwards, Balding was taken on as assistant to Kingsclere trainer Peter Hastings-Bass, but when the latter died at the age of just 43 in 1964, it resulted in Balding suddenly becoming the licence holder at Park House aged only 25. It was just seven years after that when Balding would have had good reason to update his career highlight thanks to the exploits of the outstanding colt Mill Reef whose string of big-race wins as a three-year-old in 1971 included the King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Stakes.
Last weekend, 55 years later, Balding’s son and successor at Park House, Andrew, won the King George with Kalpana, though sadly his father didn’t quite live long enough to witness the highlight of his son’s career, Ian Balding having passed away in early-January.
But as Kalpana’s trainer himself pointed out after the race, Kingsclere’s history of success in the King George dated back a lot further than Mill Reef. The very first running of the race, in 1951 – the most valuable ever run in Britain at the time – went to three-year-old colt Supreme Court. He broke the track record in a high-quality field of 19, chased home by the Coronation Cup winner Zucchero and the previous season’s Arc winner Tantieme. Supreme Court was trained by the former Grand National and Cheltenham Gold Cup-winning jockey Evan Williams who had preceded Hastings-Bass at Kingsclere.
Andrew’s father trained for another 30 years after Mill Reef came along early in his career, but not surprisingly, he never came close to handling one as good as Paul Mellon’s colt, rated 141 by Timeform, whose wins at three besides the King George also included the Derby, Eclipse and Arc.
But Balding trained plenty of other good winners in Mellon’s famous black colours with the gold cross, including a couple of brothers by Mill Reef who were both placed in the King George. Glint of Gold, runner-up in Shergar’s Derby, was third to Kalaglow in the following season’s King George, the only time, incidentally, that he finished out of the first two in his entire career. A year after Glint of Gold, Diamond Shoal finished runner-up to the previous season’s Oaks winner Time Charter at Ascot. Prior to that pair, Balding had trained another King George runner-up, the Prix de Diane winner Mrs Penny, who was runner-up to Ela-Mana-Mou in 1980.
Earlier this month, the former Mellon silks, which are nowadays those of the Kingsclere Racing Club, were carried to a Group 3 victory by Mount Atlas in the Silver Cup Stakes at York. His dam has no fewer than three strains of Mill Reef in her pedigree.
As well as Mellon, George Strawbridge was another American owner-breeder to enjoy big-race success with Ian Balding, notably with the likes of high-class miler Selkirk and the Prix de l’Abbaye winner Silver Fling.
Strawbridge still has horses trained at Kingsclere and so too does another owner-breeder who provides continuity between both Ian and Andrew Balding. Jeff Smith has enjoyed big winners with both father and son, not least another high-class sprinter Lochsong. Graduating from handicaps where she completed the treble of the Stewards’ Cup, Portland and Ayr Gold Cup, she went on to win a Nunthorpe, a King’s Stand and two more editions of the Abbaye for her yard. Smith’s winners with Kingsclere this year include See The Fire, who won her second Middleton Fillies’ Stakes at York, and Generic, a Royal Ascot winner in the Hampton Court Stakes.
But alongside Smith, Andrew Balding has attracted an enviable list of other major owners to the yard, among them Wathnan Racing, King Power Racing, Al Shaqab, Saeed Suhail, Kirsten Rausing, Highclere and Tony Bloom & Ian McAleavy.
The most significant addition to the Kingsclere roster of owners since the days of Ian Balding, though, is surely Juddmonte. Andrew Balding trained his first runners for Juddmonte as recently as 2022 and had immediate Group 1 success that year with the Dewhurst Stakes winner Chaldean, who went on to win the following year’s 2000 Guineas, three years after the stable’s first win in the classic with Qatar Racing’s Kameko.
Kalpana’s win in the King George was the highlight of a hugely successful July for Juddmonte’s horses in training at Kingsclere. On the same afternoon, Item added to his Dante win earlier in the season over the same course and distance in the York Stakes, while earlier in the month at Newmarket, Blue Bolt followed up her Royal Ascot victory in the Duke of Cambridge Stakes by landing the Falmouth Stakes.
Unlike most who race in the Juddmonte colours nowadays, Chaldean and Blue Bolt were auction purchases rather than homebreds, while Item’s dam was purchased to join the Juddmonte broodmare band. But Kalpana is another example of continuity, as she’s a fourth-generation filly to race in the Juddmonte colours tracing back to Khalid Abdullah’s early years as an owner in the 1980s.
Abdullah bought the Cambridgeshire winner Intermission for 410,000 guineas at the 1982 Newmarket December Sales, a mare who produced Kalpana’s great grandam Interval. Trained by Jeremy Tree, Interval finished second in the Lowther Stakes at two and went on to better things at three, earning a very smart Timeform rating of 122. She finished third to those top-class fillies Miesque and Milligram in the 1000 Guineas but subsequently returned to sprinting (she was by speed influence Habitat) and was rewarded with victory in the Prix Maurice de Gheest at Deauville, then a Group 2 contest.
Plenty of ‘black-type’ performers descend from Interval, including grandson Zambezi Sun who carried the sponsors’ colours to victory in the 2007 Juddmonte Grand de Paris. He was trained by Pascal Bary, as was his listed-winning sister Zero Gravity who was to become Kalpana’s dam. But Zero Gravity had only modest success at stud initially and was sold by Juddmonte for just 35,000 guineas at the Tattersalls December Mares Sale in 2021, the year Kalpana was foaled.
Kalpana is destined to join the Juddmonte broodmare band before much longer, but maybe she’ll get another chance at the Arc before then, her seventh in last year’s race when not doing herself justice the only time she has finished out of the first three in her entire career. A win at Longchamp would not only mean her emulating Mill Reef, but also Juddmonte’s other King George-winning mare Enable, winner of two Arcs to go with her three victories at Ascot.
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