Benvenuto Cellini

My name is Benvenuto Cellini. I am three years old and they tell me I’m a champion. This weekend will be the sixth race of my life. Last month I came first at Chester and won £82,229.50 for my ‘owners’. I was beaten with a whip multiple times to get me to speed up at the end. This weekend’s prize money is £1,000,000. I wonder how many times I will be beaten for that amount of money… 

Many winners of the Epsom Derby stop racing within a year or two of winning, because the money that can be made from selling our children is higher than the value of any prizes to be won racing. So, we’re sent to ‘stud’. Stud is a lifetime of sexual servitude. Females are brought in by humans who pay tens of thousands of pounds to have a ‘champion’ like myself mate with them, so we’re made to do so – over, and over, and over again. We don’t get to choose our partners, we’re simply made to mount whoever is in front of us, and we will likely never see them, or our children, again. 

Those of us who avoid being sent to stud but keep racing don’t have much better fates. 2022’s Epsom Derby winner, Desert Crown, was dead by the end of 2023. He broke his leg in training and was killed shortly after. 2019’s winner, Anthony Van Dyck, was dead by the end of 2020 – he was sent on to race in Australia where he too broke a leg and was killed. 

Behind the million-pound prizes, the top hats, the fascinators, and the clinking of champagne glasses, are hundreds of horses like me. Horses who, just children ourselves, have had nothing but dark fates sealed for us from the second we were born, from ‘champion bloodstock’, into racing. 

My name is Benvenuto Cellini. I am someone.