Boldboy wore the then-famous brown and green colours of Lady Beaverbrook. She had a big string of horses and equally famously gave them all one-word, seven-letter names, the logic being that was the most common number for Derby winners to have. Born Marcia Anastasia Christoforides, she was a personal assistant to a much older wealthy baronet, married him and looked after him for 14 years as his health declined. Now Lady Dunn, she inherited his fortune and seven years later married another much older wealthy peer, Lord Beaverbrook. He died a year later and Lady Beaverbrook was left with so much money she could afford to breed and buy horses on a grand scale as well as make large philanthropic donations – said to be worth $300 million in today’s money.
Boldboy was the first of her star performers and the most popular, although not during 1972, his two-year-old season, when he showed more temperament than ability. He was gelded.
He was a revelation at three, winning the Greenham, Diadem and Challenge Stakes. He couldn’t run in the very best races, being a gelding. At four he won the Abernant (qv) and Lockinge Stakes. He proved versatile enough to score at distances from six furlongs to a mile. He made the Abernant his own, winning in 1974, 76, 77 and 78 – the last time with Willie Carson only needing to push him out gently with hands and heels. He was second in it in 1979, at the age of nine. That was his final year of racing. He bowed out with 14 victories and 19 placings from 47 starts, an unthinkable turnaround from his juvenile days, and according to his trainer Dick Hern he had never been lame. He lived to the good age of 28.
Like Abernant, he had a race named after him at the Craven Meeting in 1979 – a sprint handicap for three-year-olds – but it wasn’t as durable as Boldboy himself and it ended in 1994.