Not to be confused with the race of the same name run at Bunbury Racecourse in Western Australia, the Bunbury Cup is a historic, seven-furlong handicap run at Newmarket Racecourse, Suffolk, in the East of England. The race commemorates Sir Thomas Charles Bunbury, ‘Perpetual Chairman’ of the Jockey Club and co-founder of the Derby, and has been a fixture of the July Festival at ‘Headquarters’ since 1962.
The intermediate distance of seven furlongs requires a combination of speed and stamina, such that the Bunbury Cup is a specialists’ event, which can attract the same horses year after year. Indeed, in six decades since its inception, the race has produced a total of four multiple winners. The first of them, Mummy’s Pleasure, trained by Patrick Haslam, provided Lester Piggott with the fifth of his record seven winners in 1983 and returned to repeat the dose, under talented apprentice Tyron Williams, in 1984.Piggott retired, for the first time, in 1985, but returned to the saddle in 1990 and went on to complete his septet of Bunbury Cup wins on En Attendant, trained by Ben Hanbury, in 1993 and 1994.
Next up came the most successful horse in the history of the Bunbury Cup, Mine, trained by the recently-retired James Bethell in Middleham, North Yorkshire. In 2002, as a four-year-old, the son of Primo Dominie dead-heated with Capricho, trained by John Akehurst, only for the latter to be disqualifed and placed last following an objection by the Clerk of the Scales. Beaten a short-head in the 2003 renewal, Mine would run in the Bunbury Cup four more times, recording back-to-back victories in 2005 and 2006, before finishing down the field in 2007 and 2008. More recently, Motakhayyel, trained by Richard Hannon Jr., also recorded back-to-back victories in 2020 and 2021.