Gosden Going Back to England : After Successful Decade in California, Trainer Is Leaving

John Gosden was furious, which was unusual. It was the fall of 1983 and the young trainer was at Belmont Park, trying to win the horse-of-the-year title with a gawky, sore-legged giant named Bates Motel.

Gosden was not unhappy with the track. The weights for the upcoming Woodward, a stake run under allowance conditions, were out of the racing secretary’s hands and Bates Motel, whose soundness never reminded anyone of a brass bell, had had a cracked hoof patched and was doing well, all things considered.

Gosden had just returned to his Belmont barn from the backstretch kitchen, where the conversation had driven him off.

“Those blokes over there are daft,” Gosden said, sounding like the Englishmen he is. “It was all I could do not to take a pop at a few of them. They were talking about California racing and giving us none the best of it. They don’t know, of course. They don’t know a whit about how good it is out there.”

Gosden himself had been a Californian for only 6 years, and had been a head trainer on the West Coast only since 1979. But he was a portable champion of the sport, Santa Anita and Hollywood Park versions.

As of today, California racing is one spokesman short, because Gosden, after a meteoric decade here, is going home--again. He is returning to England, where his late father told him again and again to find a career out of racing.

When John was a teen-ager, a fledgling flat jockey quickly growing too tall to stay in the saddle, John (Towser) Gosden told his son: “Training horses requires 24 hours a day and 7 days a week of a man’s time. The phone is always ringing. It’s a sport reserved for the insane. Working with animals never stops.”

John Gosden, 37, is crazy about horses, and not complaining. The 6-foot 4-inch trainer won two U.S. championships--with Bates Motel as the best handicap horse in 1983 and with Royal Heroine as best female grass horse in 1984--and his stable earned more than $21 million in purses. But early this year, Sheik Mohammed al Maktoum, also a former Cambridge man, offered Gosden the chance to train his horses in Newmarket, England.

The timing was right, and Gosden has gone. A success here and assured of well-bred stock there, Gosden returned to England once before, after graduating from Cambridge and working as a land developer in Venezuela. Then, he was quickly disenchanted.

“When you’re born to racing it gets in the blood,” Gosden said. “But back in England, I found that it wasn’t what you knew, it was who you knew. To train there, you needed capital--to buy your own yard (farm) and stables. Money was something I had precious little of.”

Gosden, who had worked at New York tracks during a couple of summer breaks from Cambridge, was helping Sir Noel Murless’ operation at Newmarket when he was assigned to bring J.O. Tobin to California in 1977. J.O. Tobin went on to upset Seattle Slew, the undefeated Triple Crown champion, in the Swaps Stakes at Hollywood Park.

After working for Vincent O’Brien in Ireland, Gosden returned to California, hoping to catch on with its premier trainer, Charlie Whittingham. Twice Whittingham didn’t have an opening, so Gosden worked for Tommy Doyle before taking out his own training license.

That was in the fall of 1979, and Gosden had a 3-horse barn at Santa Anita. “There was not a . . . good one in the bunch,” he said. “One had a bad tendon, another had a fractured knee and the third one was sound, but he had the worst ailment of all--no ability.”

Gosden won his first American race for a man who once raced horses with the trainer’s father, and his first stakes victory here came at Hollywood Park in 1980.

Gosden has always appreciated the value of momentum, and after cracking the $1-million mark in purses in 1982, he quickly became a perennial fixture on the national money list. His highest annual finish was fifth place in 1986 with $4.7 million.

“It’s a great game when it’s going well, and a rotten one when it’s not,” Gosden said. “It’s a game of dreams easily shattered. The trick is to keep the bandwagon rolling.”

More than any winner’s-circle pose, a lasting memory of Gosden here is his rushing pell-mell to the clubhouse turn at Santa Anita in 1984, after Royal Heroine went down in a frightful 3-horse spill.

Gosden’s concern was for both the horse and his jockey, Fernando Toro, who escaped with only scratches. In another way, Gosden offered support for another rider, Terry Lipham, who was still removed as the jockey on Bates Motel by John Gaines, the influential Kentucky breeder.

Royal Heroine’s victory in the Breeders’ Cup Mile at Hollywood Park in 1984 might have been Gosden’s biggest U.S. win, but other horsemen cite his work with Bates Motel and Barberstown, another gimpy horse who ran third in the 1983 Belmont in only the third start of his life and the winner of the Del Mar Handicap in 1984.

“John brought that horse back from the dead,” says Lipham, now a jockey agent, talking about Bates Motel. “The horse couldn’t walk for 3 weeks because of a foot injury and I never thought he would be as good as he was when he won the Santa Anita Handicap.”

Describing Bates Motel’s victory in the 1983 Big ‘Cap, Gosden said: “Lipham brought him wide, but within reason. I didn’t want Terry going by way of the (Los Angeles County) Arboretum and then finishing fifth with a couple of parrots on each ear.”

Gosden once said that Bates Motel “looked like the Santa Monica pier. All spare parts and nothing hung together.”

He’s taking with him to England his wife Rachel, who was a classmate of Gosden’s at Cambridge and is now a lawyer; and their two young children.

“It’s California’s loss and England’s gain,” said Dick Mandella, another trainer. “He’s been one of our best trainers and one of our best people. I wish I had the polish he has, and the ability to present myself as well as he does.

“The thing that surprises me, with all of his intelligence, is that he bothered being a horse trainer. Why didn’t he be something really important?”

It is likely that Gosden will periodically return to America with horses that won’t be firing blanks. Sheik Mohammed, a member of the family that rules oil-rich Dubai, won the 1985 Breeders’ Cup Turf at Aqueduct with Pebbles, and is committed to invading the country where he buys most of his bloodstock.

The sheik’s people figure that if anybody knows the territory here, it would be Gosden. They’re right, of course. This Gosden bloke is now in a position to work both sides of the Atlantic.

JOHN GOSDEN’S U.S. TRAINING RECORD

Year Wins Purses Rank 1980 8 $176,000 -- 1981 16 397,000 -- 1982 48 1.2 million -- 1983 66 2.6 million 6th 1984 75 3.4 million 6th 1985 77 3.2 million 8th 1986 84 4.7 million 5th 1987 76 3.4 million 5th x-1988 76 2.5 million 17th

x--Through Nov. 30. Daily Racing Form statistics. Rank is national.