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Today is the 50th anniversary of Mill Reef cruising home to effortlessly win the 1971 Derby.Arguably for sheer grace and aestheticism no performance defeated it.Mill Reef that day reminded me of ballad dancer performing or an antelope running.Simply poetry in motion.It looked as though his feet hardly touched and virtuallly caressed the ground,resembling a Swan skimming or gliding through water.Many horses won the Derby by much bigger margins,but few ever surpassed the sheer fluidity or etiquette of Mill Reef who gave the vibrations of painter’s touch on a board or the notes of a musical symphony.Above all he was ever so diminutive in size.Mill Reef conquered class colts like Linden Tree and Irish ball who won the St Lager and Irish Derby respectively.
To me it was not Mill Reef at his best.However he proved he could stay beyond a doubt and atleast equalled the quality of Nijinsky’s win the previous year.As the season progressed he may have been twice as good.
Arguably in later years only Nashwan revealed grace of similar magnitude.
Mill Reef was an incredible racehorse, not least because he was never bred (by Never Bend) to stay 1m4f and was an incredibly precocious speedy 2yo, winning over 5f at Salisbury in May and landing the Gimcrack at York by the length of the Knavesmire.
It was said his daisy cutter action was so graceful he scarcely left a print and that was cited as a factor in his Arc win, where he floated over the testing ground and barely got his hooves muddy!
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"I never knew Mill Reef had been so precocious Ian, interesting stuff.
I know the huge Derby fields seen in some of these videos from yesteryear contained plenty of optimistic entries and caused their share of traffic problems, but there’s something special about seeing a great Derby winner romp away from a big field.
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