Iconic racehorse trainer Sir Michael Stoute, aged 78, has announced his retirement at the end of the 2024 UK horse racing season. Known as man of few words, Stoute confirmed his retirement plans with a typically short statement to the PA news agency on Tuesday 10^th September 2024:

“I have decided to retire from training at the end of this season.
I would like to thank all my owners and staff for the support they have given me over the years. It has been a great and enjoyable journey.”

The ten-time Champion Trainer has accumulated over four thousand winners in Britain since his first success and was knighted in the 1998 Birthday Honours for promoting sports tourism in Barbados. A visionary who saw the benefits of international horse racing, including victories in the Dubai World Cup, the Breeders Cup, the Japan Cup, and the Hong Kong Vase.

Despite more than half a century of accolades and sustained success for such an institution of the British racing scene, Stoute’s journey began in Barbados. His father, Ronald, was the Chief Police Commissioner in Barbados, and the family home backed onto the Garrison Savannah racecourse. A unique location that gave young Michael a bird’s eye view of the proceedings. The young Stoute helped out at the yard of three times Barbados Derby winning trainer, Freddie Thirkell and then progressed to a job as a racing commentator. This early exposure and his perseverance set the stage for his remarkable career.

Aged 19 Stoute came to Britain in 1964 and, within three months, applied for a job as a racing commentator with the BBC. He made it to the final six of a recruitment process that saw the late BBC racing broadcaster Julian Wilson get the job.

“I hadn’t been to Britain before going to Pat Rohan’s,” he said. “The West Indies had been federated and the chief justice of the federated West Indies came and retired in Barbados, and he was an Irishman. “My father met him one evening and they got chatting and he said, ‘I’ve got a horse-mad son’ – and he said he might be able to help.

“I was supposed to go to a job in Ireland which fell through and he, Sir Eric Hallinan, made the connection for me with Pat Rohan’s mother. I worked for Pat for three years and then I came to Newmarket I went to Doug Smith for two and a half years. I then went to Tom Jones where I had a year and a half.”

Stoute began to make his name with the exploits of a pair of star sprinter.

“I rented Cadland Stables, and I got 15 horses, and, in those days, you had to have 12 to get a licence and it started from there,” he said.

“Alphadamus won the Stewards’ Cup in my second season (1973). Blue Cashmere won the Northumberland Sprint Trophy and the Ayr Gold Cup and the Trafalgar Handicap at Ascot the week after the Ayr Gold Cup. Those were the two that got me moving a bit – thank God I hit the ground running as you can get buried quickly.”

His record includes six Epsom Derby winners, including a pair who rewrote the record books. The breathtakingly Shergar won by a record margin of ten lengths in 1981, while Workforce clocked a record time in 2010. His other winners of the premier Classic have been Shahrastani in 1986 who beat Dancing Brave the pre-race favourite in a dramatic finish,  Kris Kin in 2003, North Light  in 2004 and Desert Crown  in 2022.

At the start of the new millennium, Stoute trailed his great Newmarket rival, Sir Henry Cecil, 10/5 in the Trainers’ Championships. But, by 2009, he had matched him despite the emergence of Aidan O’Brien, the serial Irish Champion. Stoute won the title in 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006 and 2009, with O’Brien filling the gaps. Only Alec Taylor, who won the championship a dozen times between 1907 and 1925, has ever been Champion Trainer on more occasions.

His racecourse appearances are rare these days, and it was no surprise that he announced his retirement. Never one to relish media attention, Stoute preferred to let his horses do the talking. However, ask him about his cherished West Indies cricket team, and you will get a different conversation, especially in the 1980s when the Windies were dominant and Stoute was top of his game.

Stoute’s brilliant 1981 Derby winner Shergar proved himself as one of the all-time greats, with a record-breaking ten-length victory at Epsom under debutant nineteen-year-old jockey Walter Swinburn, who had initially joined Stoute as understudy to Lester Piggott.

Below you can re-watch Shergar winning the 1981 Epsom Deby:

“You never forget your first Derby winner. Shergar had won his Derby trials in outstanding fashion. So, he was odds on, he was expected to win, we expected him to win, but it was still a great thrill. I think he won by about ten lengths, and (Walter) Swinburn was pulling him up by the last furlong,” Sir Michael Stoute has said.

That came after similar wins by wide margins in his Sandown Park and Chester trial races. After Epsom, he breezed home in the Irish Derby at The Curragh before landing the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot. He had been retired to stud by his owner, the Aga Khan, when he was kidnapped in 1983 and sadly never seen again.

In 2023, Sir Michael Stoute was inducted into the Hall of Fame, a prestigious recognition immortalising the sport’s Modern Greats, both human and equine, from 1970 onwards. His induction, alongside the fabled racehorse “Sea The Stars,” was a momentous occasion officially recognised through a special presentation at Newmarket Racecourse during the QIPAO Guineas Festival.

“To be inducted into the Hall of Fame and join Vincent O’Brien, who was my hero and probably the greatest trainer that has ever lived, and Henry Cecil, who was also a very good friend. I am very, very grateful.”

Stoute’s title-winning days are certainly behind him because, as he trains fewer horses these days. In the past decade and into his seventies, Stoute has remained in racing’s fast lane with horses such as Integral (2014 Falmouth and Sun Chariot), Ulysses (2017 Eclipse and Juddmonte International); Poet’s Word (2018 Prince of Wales’s Stakes and King George); Mustashry (2019 Lockinge); Crystal Ocean (2019 Prince of Wales’s Stakes) and Dream Of Dreams (2020 Sprint Cup).

In 2022, he and long-time ally Saeed Suhail won another Derby together (after Kris Kin 20 years earlier) with the sublime Desert Crown. In the process, Stoute became the oldest trainer to win the great race, aged seventy-six, and in the autumn, Bay Bridge gave him the first success on QIPCO British Champions Day at Ascot by landing the QIPCO Champion Stakes.

Kieren Fallon hailed the “trainer he always wanted to ride for” after Sir Michael Stoute announced he would retire at the end of the season. Fallon and Stoute won two Derby together with Kris Kin and North Light, enjoying plenty of other great successes during the Russian Rhythm years and with Golan, Islington, King’s Best and many others.

The Aga Khan Studs added their best wishes to the many sent to Sir Michael Stoute after it was announced that he would end his glittering training career at the end of the season.

Until Aidan O’Brien overtook him last year, Stoute’s 82 winners at Royal Ascot was a record, which included the late Queen’s mare Estimate to win the Gold Cup, the most cherished success of her seven decades as an owner.

“Estimate’s Gold Cup really did mean a lot to her. It was the race she most wanted to win at Ascot. She was a real horsewoman and so knowledgeable. Said Sir Michael.

Here you can relive Estimate winning the 2013 Royal Ascot Gold Cup ridden by Ryan Moore.

Despite all the classic winners and many top-class three-year-olds which Stoute trained, it will be his success with older horses that he’s doubtless best remembered. Known as both a ‘genius and a gentleman’, the Barbadian Newmarket-based trainer will undoubtedly be missed, but his legacy and many of his records will live on for years.