Total Eclipse – Michael Roberts remembers magical moments with Mtoto

Michael Roberts looks well. Pretty much like you remember him, if a little heavier. Checked shirt not silks, but smiling, affable, reminiscing with Durban’s beautiful training centre in the background and his memories crystal clear.

Memories of coming to England to make a go of it in 1986 and being told by the late Alec Stewart he would be down the pecking order behind the likes of Pat Eddery and Willie Carson for his Maktoum-owned horses.

“‘I can’t promise you anything, but let’s give it a go’ he said,” the now 72-year-old Roberts says with a smile.

And memories of a horse who confounded that and delivered the world. Mtoto, with his white blaze and talent, would change his life, winning the Brigadier Gerard, Prince of Wales’s Stakes, King George and, of course, back-to-back Eclipses at Sandown in 1987 and 1988.

“He put me on the map,” says Roberts, speaking to the Press Association. “He was a special, special horse and without doubt the best I have ever ridden. I knew from the moment I first sat on him that he was going to change everything.”

It is a telling feature watching their partnership back on grainy clips, one that ended with narrow defeat in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe of 1988, that Roberts never hit Mtoto with the whip, winning three Group Ones with hands and heels.

“I never used to use my stick on him because you could feel he was giving his all,” said Roberts. “I used to just flick him with it. Only once in the second Eclipse when he beat Shady Heights did I catch him in the flank and that was when I picked up the stick.

“I put it down immediately and went hands and heels and he found an extra gear.”

That astonishing acceleration was the thing with Mtoto, but he had taken time to get his career going, struggling with a cracked bone in a hind leg at two and fragile hooves in his second season, winning just one maiden at Haydock in seven outings.

Stewart had always harboured hopes he would hit the heights and Roberts, who had ridden his first winner in 1968 and been 11-times champion in his homeland, needed one meeting to sign up for the journey.

“One morning Alec said to me I thought a lot of this horse as a two-year-old before he got an injury. We went over Racecourse Side and he put two horses in front of me and said just sit at the back and come and join them when you get out of the dip.

“I pulled him out and wow, I couldn’t believe what I was sitting on. He had this unbelievable acceleration. As he pulled up the gu’vnor came up to me on his pony and said, ‘what do you think?’. I said I think he’s the best horse I have ever ridden.”

Roberts and Mtoto went on to prove that with an electrifying come-from-behind display at 16-1 in the Brigadier Gerard, a turn of foot that prompted Greville Starkey on the odds-on Allez Milord to ask as they pulled up “where the hell have you been hiding that?”.

After winning the Prince of Wales’s Stakes under Richard Hills, the pair were reunited for the Eclipse where they faced Derby winner Reference Point and globetrotting French mare Triptych.

The result was settled by another thrilling burst to master the Derby winner on whom Steve Cauthen had set such murderous fractions that Triptych’s pacemaker Media Starguest never got to the front. And it put Mtoto and Roberts on a different plane.

“Sheikh Ahmed had asked in the paddock whether I thought we could beat the favourite and I said, ‘we will win, sir’,” says Roberts. “Alec came after me and said, ‘Jeez, why did you say that’ and I said to him, ‘because we will win’.

“After we beat Reference Point the phone never stopped ringing.”

Returning at five Mtoto was even better, winning the Prince of Wales’s Stakes again, this time under Roberts, a second Eclipse – beating Shady Heights with another withering run – then going on to win the King George, the Select Stakes and then attempting to land the Arc.

He failed to win in Paris, going down by a rapidly-diminishing neck to Italian star Tony Bin after encountering trouble in running in the short straight. “It was the saddest day of my career to be honest,” says Roberts. “We were trapped in for four or five strides before we saw daylight and that cost us the race.”

With Mtoto packed off to stud, Roberts went on to be champion jockey in 1992. He had a season as first jockey to Sheikh Mohammed and rode in Britain until a fall at Wolverhampton in 2001 effectively ended his career.

“I don’t remember too much about it apart the ground coming up fast,” he says. “But I was lucky not to end in a wheelchair as I severed my spinal cord and had to have my C3 and C4 vertebrae fused. They said if you carry on you risk losing it all.”

Roberts took the advice and retired from the saddle to go back to South Africa to farm Jersey and Red Angus cattle back at the family operation near Durban.

He says he loved farming but horses not beef were his true calling. In 2005 a side-operation training a few racehorses took over his time leading him to sell up the farming business.

Roberts trains 40 horses now and says he is loving still being involved. “I’ve had some smart horses and we won our first Group One in the Cape Derby three years ago with See It Again, but it is not easy to get the really good ones.”

Mtoto, who died aged 28 in 2011 after a long and successful career at stud, was one of the best.