Be Friendly was one of just two two-year-olds to win what was, for a time, Britain’s richest all-aged race, with his owner Peter O’Sullevan commentating on TV. That, in 1966, was in the inaugural Vernons November Sprint Cup at Haydock. O’Sullevan had napped it to the readers of his column in the Daily Express. Be Friendly won it again in 1967, napped again, and might have won the year after but for the meeting being abandoned due to fog. The horse also won the King’s Stand and the Prix de l’Abbaye. He won twelve of his 29 races and was placed in ten others. He then enjoyed a happy time at stud. According to O’Sullevan in Calling The Horses, at the time of his death in 1981 he had sired the winners of 325 races.
He “made” the Haydock race, which evolved into today’s Group 1 Sprint Cup in early September. It’s only right that the Be Friendly Handicap is run on the same card.
Strangely, Haydock began a Friendly Handicap, without the Be, in June 1969, when the horse was still in training. In 1973 it was renamed the Be Friendly.