Guy Harwood remembers magnificent Dancing Brave 40 years on With a furlong and a half to run, Guy Harwood’s jaw tightened in the stands as he watched alongside owner Prince Khalid Abdullah, peering through increasingly unsteady binoculars while arguably the strongest field in Arc history thundered towards the finish. There were Group One winners all over the place, Derby winners and champions coming out of the seams and they were all ahead of Pat Eddery and Dancing Brave as 10 horses passed the furlong pole in front of them. Asked what he was thinking at that very moment the now 87-year-old Harwood pauses. “I was a little concerned,” he says with delightful understatement, before giving a hearty laugh. “I must admit through the whole race one was wondering what Pat was up to.” Whatever Eddery had been up to during the race was to become irrelevant in the dozen seconds which followed, as a charging Dancing Brave hit top speed on the tip of a wing. It was exhilarating. It was devastating. And in 15 strides the pair had swept by the lot. “It was a turn of foot that was unbelievably impressive,” says Harwood, speaking this week to the Press Association from his home in West Sussex. “Was it the greatest? I don’t know whether one can say that. From the point of view of the horses in it, it probably was one of the most competitive.” Harwood, who gave up training some 35 years ago but still runs extensive business interests in the motor trade, is perhaps too modest to make the claim, but a poll in 2022 in the Racing Post delivered the verdict of a generation of racing fans – Dancing Brave’s Arc was voted the greatest horse race of all time. The Dancing Brave story, and Harwood’s for that matter, could have been so different but for a sliding doors moment after the horse was purchased for $200,000 by James Delahooke on behalf of Abdullah at the Kentucky sales two years previously. The horse was initially offered to Beckhampton trainer Jeremy Tree, but he turned it down on the basis of the colt’s breeding – a move that would be compared with the A&;R chief at Decca Records turning down The Beatles. “Jeremy Tree didn’t like Lyphards,” explained Harwood. “He’d had three to train before and they were quite sensitive horses and didn’t like a lot of training and I think Jeremy was probably a little bit hard on them. They didn’t take well to his way of training. “We were second in line of Prince Khalid’s trainers. We loved Lyphards. He had a phenomenal strike-rate and was 4-1 to get a Group colt (one Group winner to every four colts) so he had a very good record. Dancing Brave’s dam was also a very good racemare.” Harwood was probably ahead of his time in terms of method, having absorbed tips from trips to Vincent O’Brien about horses’ weight and also been a pioneer in blood testing. “We used to do all the blood testing for Sheikh Mohammed’s camels in the early days! He used to bring the blood tests from his racing camels and he would bring them down to us to analyse.” Harwood was also firmly of the belief that over-facing two-year-olds too soon could ruin them and he would not step up their training regime until they were two years and three months. Dancing Brave thrived for that approach, winning contests at Sandown and Newmarket in relatively minor contests but being impressive enough to go into the winter as 10-1 Guineas favourite. “It wasn’t until August when I started working him seriously and it was quite clear he was pretty useful,” recalled Harwood. “When we ran him at Sandown he won comfortably. Greville (Starkey) got off him and said, ‘That is my Derby ride!’. That is how good a judge Greville was.” After winning the Craven Stakes and the 2000 Guineas (by three lengths from Green Desert), the Derby was to prove a disappointment for all, not least Starkey who got going all too late and failed by half a length to catch Shahrastani. “He was a horse who loved to come from behind and the race was just not run to suit him,” said Harwood, who remains ferociously loyal to Starkey’s memory. “Unfortunately the race slowed up and concertinaed at the seven-furlong mark and by the time it ‘unconcertinaed’ Dancing Brave was further behind than you would want. “I think if Greville, who had a lot of respect for the horse, had really set about him as he might have done I think he would have won anyway. But if he had we might not have had a horse to go to war with for the second half of the season. He never got beaten in Europe after that.” The Eclipse under Starkey redeemed both, the King George under Eddery decorated his reputation and the Select Stakes at Goodwood proved the perfect preparation for a tilt at Paris in the autumn. “The Arc was always the main target for the second half of the year. After he won the King George he was given a bit of an easy time and then he came back with a prep race at Goodwood which was ideal – pop down the road for a canter round – winning by 10 lengths. “When he went to the Arc I could not have been more confident I had the horse in tip-top shape.” In 1986, with the Channel Tunnel not yet built, Harwood cadged a lift in a private plane with Sheikh Hamdan Al Maktoum’s team to Paris and watched a paddock slowly fill with some of the greatest horses of that generation. York’s International winner and King George runner-up Shardari, Epsom winner Shahrastani, super mare Triptych, German champion Acatenango and the French Derby-winning colt Bering, who was unbeaten in four races in 1986. It was a stunning cast and every one of them ran their race. Unfortunately for them, Dancing Brave was in a world of his own. “There have been other great winners of the Arc and I believe you get a really great horse once every decade. Nijinsky, Sea Bird, the horse that unfortunately got taken by the IRA Shergar, Sea The Stars and obviously Frankel. But the real test is those horses that can win at any distance. That is the difference. I had a lot of Group One horses. Roussillon and so on, but they had very exact distances. As had Lyphard. “Really great horses all, but the thing about Dancing Brave he had the speed to win at any trip. It was very lovely to have had a horse like that. It does keep your name in the headlines. It is 40 years since Dancing Brave and it is about 35 years since I retired and handed over to my daughter (Amanda Perrett). “It is nice to be remembered occasionally.” Dancing Brave’s brilliance will ensure that Harwood’s name is always remembered in the first weekend in October at least.
