Dark Horse (2015)
Louise Osmond (2015)
I took my jump racing-mad friend to see Dark Horse at Curzon Bloomsbury. The caption at the start indicated a ‘15’ certificate and warned of strong language, violence and drug use. Dark Horse was released nearly simultaneously in Britain with the New Zealand picture The Dark Horse and it seemed for a terrible moment that I’d booked us in for the wrong Dark Horse. Fortunately, it was Curzon’s carelessness, not mine: they’d mixed up the certificate captions. The Dark Horse is a drama about a man with bipolar disorder. Dark Horse is a documentary; its subject is the racehorse Dream Alliance and the people who bred and owned him. Louise Osmond – whose previous film, for television, was about the search for the remains of Richard III (The King in the Car Park) – has the confidence to dispense with voiceover narrative. There are contributions from the trainer Philip Hobbs’s wife, Sarah, and assistant trainer, Johnson Smith. Otherwise, the story is told entirely by the main members of the Alliance Partnership. They’re not anyone’s idea of typical racing types. Most of them were and remain less than well off. They are part of a former mining community in Wales – a Caerphilly village called Cefn Fforest.
Jan Vokes was working in the bar at the local working men’s club (and as a supermarket cleaner), when she learned that one of the club’s customers, Howard Davies, had once owned a racehorse. She talked to Howard to find out more. Jan’s father had bred budgerigars, she herself prize-winning pigeons and whippets. She told her husband Brian she was now going to breed a racehorse. Brian, an ex-rag-and-bone man, pooh-poohed the idea at first but very soon realised Jan was serious. The Vokes bought, for £350, a mare called Rewbell, described in the essay on Dream Alliance in Chasers and Hurdlers 2009/10 as ‘of no account as a racemare’. Dark Horse explains, more graphically, that Rewbell ran only three times (unplaced twice and pulled up once) – partly because she subsequently refused to let a jockey sit on her. She was sent by her new owners to be covered by Bien Bien, a decent racehorse in North America but imported to stand on this side of the Atlantic as a little known and inexpensive stallion. The foal from this mating was born in 2001 and spent his formative months in a makeshift stable on a disused allotment on the outskirts of Cefn Fforest. Jan Vokes invited other locals to join a syndicate to own the horse. Howard Davies had sworn never to lose money on a racehorse venture again and his wife Angela was evidently even more determined that he shouldn’t. Yet Davies was among those who joined the syndicate and named their horse, at Jan’s suggestion, Dream Alliance.
Not the least remarkable part of what happened next is that this ‘working-class horse’ (as he’s described, at least once) went into training, in 2004, in a top-flight yard: the previous year, Philip Hobbs had enjoyed what remains his greatest success as a trainer, when Rooster Booster won the Champion Hurdle. Dream Alliance gradually proved a very useful, if inconsistent, hurdler and chaser. He won several races but the first real highlight of his career was second place to Denman, in November 2007, in the latter’s first Hennessy Gold Cup. A clutch of truth-is-stranger-than-fiction coincidences occurred in the twenty-four hours leading up to the Grand National on Saturday 5 April 2008. On the Friday night, Rewbell died, giving birth to her latest foal – as a result, the Vokes, for the first time, weren’t able to go racing to watch Dream Alliance. Philip Hobbs had decided to run him in a three-mile hurdle at Aintree, the race immediately before the National. (Although Dark Horse doesn’t make this clear, it seems likely this was an attempt to refresh the horse’s enthusiasm, after three very lacklustre efforts following his Hennessy second.) The field of twenty-two for this handicap hurdle included two future winners of the Grand National itself – Auroras Encore (who finished fifth, four years before he won the National), and Don’t Push It (who finished eighteenth, two years before he assured himself a place in racing history by carrying Tony McCoy to the jockey’s only Grand National triumph). Dream Alliance was pulled up in the three-mile hurdle. He had sustained a life-threatening tendon injury.
The horse had already given his owners so much amazing pleasure that they didn’t hesitate to fund the veterinary treatment offered. It wasn’t expected that this would enable ‘Dream’ to do more than survive and retire to the allotment. In the event, stem cell surgery allowed a return to training and to racing. In December 2009, his and his owners’ greatest moment came when Dream Alliance won the Welsh Grand National. He ran well for a long way in the McCoy National three months later but was pulled up on the second circuit. The horse was diagnosed with a medical problem – a tendency to break blood vessels which made it difficult for him to breathe at flat-out racing speed. He remained in training for another three years, the last two of them with John Flint rather than Philip Hobbs, but without winning another race. He was retired in 2013 and is now busy – and, his owners say, happy – doing nothing in a field in Somerset, not too far from Hobbs’s Minehead stables.
I’d remembered Dream Alliance winning the Welsh National, and had an idea that this was the culmination of an unexpected comeback, but little else about his racing career. I’m glad I didn’t research it before seeing Dark Horse. Amnesia made the film more suspenseful – and gave me a better sense of how it might come across to an audience not otherwise interested in racing. It’s no surprise that Dark Horse won the audience award for a documentary at this year’s Sundance Festival: it’s a very engaging and likeable piece of film-making. In terms of supplying key information to the uninitiated, Louise Osmond does a good job – although she might have had one of the talking heads make clear why Dream Alliance, either when he was injured or when he retired, couldn’t have a stud career, even as a working-class stallion. (Like most hurdlers and chasers, he’d been gelded.) Even for the cognoscenti, though, Dark Horse is sound. A clip of Clare Balding interviewing Jan and Brian Vokes in the paddock, obviously before the 2010 Grand National, is inserted much earlier than it should be in the otherwise chronological narrative. There’s a reconstruction of the villagers in a pub, cheering on ‘Dream’ in the Welsh National at Chepstow on a television screen: they’re actually watching a recording of a flat race on a right-handed course (Chepstow is left-handed). I didn’t like the melodramatic sudden blackout of the screen as the field approached Becher’s Brook in the Aintree National – it implied that Dream Alliance’s race ended more suddenly and grimly than it actually did. Otherwise, I spotted no gross errors of racing fact or confusing details (as the above makes clear, I was on the lookout for them).
Dark Horse is more skewed in other respects, though. It’s only natural that Louise Osmond stresses the unexpectedness of the syndicate members as owners in the ‘Sport of Kings’ and some of the illustrations of this are funny and instructive social comedy. The raggle-taggle Cefn Fforesters arrive at Newbury for Dream’s debut and the officials at the racecourse entrance are on the point of ejecting them, until the syndicate flash their owner passes and leave the Gauleiters with their jaws dropping. But this element is occasionally pushed too hard. For example, Howard Davies contrasts the syndicate’s slender means with those of the Maktoum family, ‘who’ve spent literally billions of pounds on trying to get a Derby winner – and failed’. The dominance of a few, exceptionally wealthy owners is increasingly threatening to limit the appeal, for the racing fan as well as for potential owners, of jump racing as well as flat racing – but the latter branch of the sport, because of the stud potential of the most successful horses, has always been a vastly bigger-bucks game. In financial terms, they’re verging on being two different sports – so the Maktoums are a pointless comparator. (Davies is also wrong about their ‘failure’. It’s true that no Epsom Derby winner to date has carried the colours of Sheikh Mohammed, the most ardently involved member of the clan, but the 2008 winner, New Approach, was a gift from the Sheikh to one of his wives, Princess Haya of Jordan, and the Maktoum family has so far had three other winners of the ‘blue riband of the turf’[1].) Jan Vokes says that the racing establishment doesn’t like ‘the likes of us’ gatecrashing their private party. You see what she means but the implication of determined exclusion is misleading. The costs involved in flat racing are so very high that the sport’s elitism rules effortlessly – to such an extent that Sheikh Mohammed’s Godolphin racing and breeding operation has become, in recent years, virtually the underdog in its battle with Coolmore.
It’s ironic that it’s Howard Davies who invokes the Maktoums because he is himself incongruous in the syndicate. Davies must have been in the working men’s club when Jan Vokes first asked him about racehorse ownership but, as he explains, he’d spent most of his working life as an accountant with a firm that sounds like PwC. His wife Angela is interviewed in what is presumably their living room – a very different space from the ones in which Jan and Brian Vokes and others are shown. There’s no doubting the intensity of Davies’s emotion when Dream Alliance wins the Welsh National. (There are shots of his reaction in the Chepstow stand and this is evidently actual footage rather than a reconstruction: you wonder how it came to be filmed.) Jan Vokes points out that she and Davies had different ideas about the horse’s future after his blood vessels problem was diagnosed in 2010: while she wanted to retire Dream Alliance immediately, Davies was keen to persevere. Vokes explains this diplomatically but tellingly and there’s no doubt that Louise Osmond downplays the tensions within the syndicate in the latter years of Dream’s career. This may or may not explain why Philip Hobbs, from whose stable the horse was removed, doesn’t appear in the film.
Dark Horse has been well received by British critics and there’s talk of developing it as a based-on-a-true-story dramatic movie. I hope this doesn’t happen. What is amazing as a documentary narrative would be much less distinctive if it were ‘fictionalised’. I found this film a more eloquent description of the human effects of closing down coal mines than dramedies like Brassed Off or The Full Monty or Billy Elliot. One of the syndicate members in particular looks and sounds to be still traumatised by the loss of his livelihood. The blue- and wild-eyed Tony Kerby expresses the heart of the story that Louise Osmond tells – the difference that Dream Alliance made to his owners’ lives. Kerby describes the horse as ‘something good that came out of this place’, something that made a change from Cefn Fforest ‘just being forgotten about’. A proper sequel to Dark Horse would be not a version of Pride with an equine rather than LGBT flavour but the emergence of a real successor to Dream Alliance. Jan Vokes still works as a cleaner at Asda but she says she’s determined to breed, ‘if it’s the last thing I do’, a horse that wins the Cheltenham Gold Cup.
29 April 2015
[1] Erhaab (1994), Lammtarra (1995) and High-Rise (1998)