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Mick's Magic Still Casting a Spell over the Racing Game


Racing Post

16 August 2005

IT'S HARD to think of a better way to kick off Ebor week than with a morning at Mick Easterby's, near Sheriff Hutton, where the village pub, The Highwayman, is presumably named in honour of the local trainer.

If the day had ended with an English victory at Old Trafford, rather than yet another dashing against the rocks of Australian grit and obduracy, it would have been a nigh-on perfect summer sporting day. But it was memorable nonetheless, because time spent in Mick Easterby's company is never dull or wasted.

Now 74, Mick is as irrepressibly full of beans as ever, though he was hospitalised and none too clever for a week just after Royal Ascot at York.

General opinion is that he had pneumonia, though needless to say the trainer insists it was bird flu'.

That particular virus, which may be about to wipe out millions west of Ho Chi Minh city, knocked on the wrong door if it chose Easterby as its first port of call.

He is not the type to get ill, and evokes in some of his splendidly piratical and buccaneering ways the late, great Ryan Price, who said: "I don't get ulcers, boy, I give 'em to other people."

The reason for my visit to New Farm - so named because they say Mick buys a new farm most weeks - was to shoot some film for this week's Channel 4 coverage of the Ebor meeting, but my presence was almost wholly unnecessary.

Give him a cameraman and television's leading sound girl and he's off. He is director, star, comic turn and interviewer rolled into one. It would be no surprise if he were on the shortlist for the next James Bond.

But, above everything else, time spent with Mick is a reminder that Flat racing is not all about private jets and international empires. He is first and foremost a stockman, a man who understands animals and, for all the fact that they have made him a fortune, his animals are more to him than items on a balance sheet, although his razor-sharp mind predated the most advanced computers by many a year.

Easterby's racing world is one that has never become divorced from the land, never lost its farming roots. The lorry taking horses to the races does duty delivering beats to market, all the boxes are home-built. It's a culture of hard graft and that most old-fashioned of words - thrift. Of course, you have got to get up before you go to bed of a night to get the better of him financially. But it is all done in the best of humour because to Mick - and indeed the feller who owns the other half of North Yorkshire, brother Peter - being on the right end of a deal is a matter of honour, but also a big slice of the joy of life. It's weathered and ingrained into them like the pattern in marble.

And for those folk who find him a bit intimidating, the rough too ready, then look at how people around him regard him with that telling brand of exasperated affection. There are doubtless days when they want to throttle him, but far more when they want to give the old so-and-so a hug. Nor has he lost his passion for winning, but you get the feeling that racing is just another strand of sport to him. Easterby is a hunting man to his marrow and, of course, that is just another part of the link between the working countryside and the racecourse.

The future of hunting remains unclear, though predictable. In the unlikely event of hunting ever ceasing, jump racing will, of course, continue. But if it had not been for hunting we would never have had jump racing in the first place, though doubtless jumping will soon come under attack for being a cruel sport appealing only to a minority. There will be a degree of truth in the charge but it won't make our accusers right. And if hunting is too unpalatable, then I regret to inform you that Mick has always been a big shooting man as well.

Among the quarry on his land are our old friends the Donalds. In typical style he informs you that he has put a thousand duck down for one of his ponds, adding: "Poor beggars have to queue up to swim!"

You could say much the same of his owners, they must sometimes wonder whether they are sinking or swimming. But Mick's eye, achievements and sense of fun keep the poor beggars queueing up for more, because having a horse with him can only be an education worth every penny. And if he can manage a winner at this week's most Yorkshire of meetings, then few would begrudge him and many rejoice.












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