Owen Burrows
Ascot, September 2025, Raaheeb’s racecourse debut, and he wasn’t that smartly away, but that was fine. There was no real rush. It’s a long way from Ascot’s seven-furlong start to the winning line when you are just two and a half years old, and when you are racing for the first time in your life.
The Sea The Stars colt quickly settled into his racing rhythm and just breezed away for a couple of furlongs under Jim Crowley, his rider in the famous Shadwell silks, blue with white epaulettes, blue and white striped cap. He moved up easily to join the front rank as they reached the two-furlong marker and, when his jockey got lower in the saddle, he picked up nicely. He quickly established a break of just over a length on his rivals, and he maintained that advantage all the way to the winning line.
“We were very happy with that,” recalls his trainer Owen Burrows now. “He wouldn't have blown you away at home. He still wouldn’t. He tends to keep his best for the racecourse, and that’s fine with me. I couldn't have told you before his debut that he was definitely going to win, so it was nice that he was able to do that. But he was always going to be high-profile, given his pedigree.”
That pedigree is all blue-blooded, from a top-class Shadwell family. You can go back as far as you like in his family tree, back to the Royal runners Hypericum, who won the Dewhurst in 1945 and the 1000 Guineas in 1946, and Highclere, winner of the Guineas too as well as the French Oaks. Highclere’s daughter Height Of Fashion won the Acomb Stakes and the May Hill Stakes and the Fillies’ Mile and the Princess of Wales’s Stakes, and she is the dam of those top-class Shadwell horses Nashwan and Unfuwain and Nayef and Bashayer, who is Raaheeb’s great great grandam.
Raaheeb’s grandam is Lahudood, winner of the Flower Bowl Invitational and the Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Turf in America for Kiaran McLoughlin, and his dam is Aghareed, which, given that he is by Sea The Stars, makes him a full-brother to Baaeed, who was trained by William Haggas to win six Group 1 races over distances from a mile to 10 and a half furlongs, and to Hukum, who was trained by Owen Burrows to win the Coronation Stakes and the King George.
It's a top, top class pedigree that runs as wide as it runs deep.
Owner/breeders often allow family members follow family members. If a trainer does well with a particular horse for an owner/breeder, it is likely that the trainer will also get that horse’s younger sibling to train. Given that William Haggas did so well with Baaeed, and that Owen Burrows did so well with Hukum, either trainer could have got their brother. In the end, the decision was made by owners Shadwell to send Raakeeb to Farncombe Down Stables.
“I was obviously very pleased to get him,” says the trainer. “He came to me in the summer of last year, so we only have him just over a year. He is not unlike Hukum, he’s a little bit thicker set, but we’ve been very happy with him from the beginning.”
They did think about running him again last year after he won at Ascot on his debut, he did have an entry in the Royal Lodge but, in the end, they decided that they’d put him away at the end of last year, bring him back this year as a three-year-old.
“He was just a bit raw last year, so we were happy to put him away for the winter. He was always a horse who was going to get better with age. I still think that he’ll improve again as he gets older, as a four-year-old, as a five-year-old.”
Raaheeb had his first and only run of 2026 to date in the Classic Trial at Sandown at the end of April, a race that has been won in the past by Troy and Shergar and Shahrastani and Old Vic and, in 2022 by that year’s Irish Derby winner Westover. He won it too. Impressively. He hit the front at the two-furlong marker and he powered away from his rivals under Rossa Ryan to win by over three lengths. The talk then was of the Epsom Derby, but he came out of the Sandown race a little bit stiff, so they decided to by-pass Epsom and, very quickly after that, today’s Dubai Duty Free Irish Derby came onto his radar.
“It wasn’t a major setback or anything like that,” says the trainer. “Just sometimes horses take a little while to get over a run. He missed a little bit of time, and we couldn’t have been going to Epsom having missed some time. Everything has gone well with him since then though, and we’re looking forward to going to The Curragh.”
Owen Burrows has had just one runner at The Curragh before now, Anmaat, who finished second to Los Angeles in the Tattersalls Gold Cup in May last year. Indeed, Owen Burrows has had just three runners in Ireland in his career, and Anmaat has been two of them: second in the 2025 Tattersalls Gold Cup, second in the Irish Champion Stakes at Leopardstown last September.
“It would be nice to go one better.”
His season is ticking along nicely, mind you. Remmooz won a Group 3 race at Chantilly two weeks ago and Touleen ran a big race to finish second in the Coronation Stakes at Royal Ascot last week. She could go for the Falmouth Stakes at Newmarket next month now. Gethin won the Listed Magnolia Stakes at Kempton in early April and he ran the top-class Ombudsman to a neck in the Brigadier Gerard Stakes at the end of May. The Wathnan Racing colt is reportedly very well now and on track for the Eclipse at Sandown next Saturday.
You know that Gethin deserves his place in the Eclipse line-up, because Owen Burrows adopts a selective approach. He will rarely over-face his horses. You won’t often see his horses lining up in races in which they don’t belong. Consequently, his annual strike rate is consistently impressive, it hasn’t dipped below 17% any year in the last decade.
“I’d like to think that we have a fair idea of where the horses should be placed. I don’t like wasting a run, if we can help it. We have only run three two-year-olds this season so far. We have about 40, and we like them as a group. A lot of them are second-half-of-the-summer horses, and some of them we won’t see until the back-end of the season. But we’re looking forward to getting them going.”
In the more immediate term, Raakeeb is fully deserving of his place too in the Irish Derby line-up at The Curragh this afternoon. One of just two British-trained runners in a race that has been won by the raiders just twice in the last decade, he will be his trainer’s first runner in an Irish Classic.
There’s that selective approach again.
© The Sunday Times, 28th June 2026
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