- Cunha decided to stop his successful career as a pilot and become a trainer
- The former flight expert now trains Prague who was once sold for just £10,000
- Cunha reached his goal for the year of training 30 winners on Wednesday night
The symbolism is inescapable and Dylan Cunha cannot help but laugh as it is pointed out: here he is, a former pilot turned trainer, watching an equine ‘aeroplane’ fly past.
This is one of those magical Newmarket mornings, when everything is still and all you can hear on the famous Limekilns gallops are the thunder of hooves. The hooves we have come to see belong to Prague, the fairytale horse Cunha will saddle in Saturday’s Queen Elizabeth II Stakes.
Fairytale can be an overused term but not here. Prague, a son of the great Galileo, was once in Aidan O’Brien’s care but never made the track for the master trainer. When he was sold last autumn, the last thing O’Brien would have envisaged was to see him line-up at Ascot on QIPCO Champions Day.
‘This is how to put it,’ says Brett Little, a friend of Cunha’s who owns the nearby Gee-Gees wine bar and has joined us to watch this workout. ‘It’s like Man City sold Erling Halaand from their reserves to Newmarket United and now he’s scored the goals to put Newmarket in the Champions League.’
It’s a beautiful analogy, one that works on every level. When a horse is sold for £10,000 out of Ballydoyle, the most you might expect is for it to run at provincial tracks but Prague, under Cunha’s astute guidance, has hit the big time and will compete for a £655,709 first prize on Saturday afternoon.
How he has ended up in such a situation is remarkable. He was bought by Amedeo Dal Pos, a Venetian, who has worked for Cunha for 18 months. He has spent his life in racing, the last 12 years in Newmarket, and with some scrimping, saving and a little help from lifelong friend Hugo Zaneni was able to buy Prague.
‘I love him,’ says Dal Pos, in the way a parent would say about a child. He goes into Cunha’s yard each morning at 430am to check on all the horses but Prague gets that little bit of extra attention and how you can tell as his bay coat gleams. There won’t be a better turned out runner at Ascot.
‘He is my best mate and I am living a dream with him. You can see he has the same passion as I do. I call him “Pipo” and I know how to handle him. If he doesn’t know you, he will try to bite you! He always tries so hard and his heart is so big.’
Dal Pos rides him in all his work and what we witness was all the evidence Cunha needed to pay the £70,000 supplementary fee to add him to the QEII field on Tuesday. Prague, who has two of his five races for Cunha, almost pulls his owner’s arms out as he bounds past and “travelled like a tank.”
But this has always been the way since he arrived in Newmarket. Dal Pos recalls, wide-eyed, the gallop in February when he made up 20 lengths on his work companion and finished 10 lengths clear at the end. There was no surprise in the yard, then, when he was his maiden at Sandown at 40/1 in April.
Prague’s place in Saturday’s outstanding race is owed to a thumping triumph in the Group Two Joel Stakes at Newmarket last month, the £55,700 prize pot giving them the funds to take a gamble. Support is building for him around town, with many messages of goodwill coming the stable’s way.
‘I remember Amedeo and I looked at him the first time,’ said Cunha. ‘We were like “wow!” Someone said you had better get the vets in because we thought there must be something wrong. How could we have got him for £10,000? You’ve seen him yourself, he’s such a beautiful specimen, isn’t he?’
He really is. Victory would be transformative for Dal Pos and his wife, Federica, and it would be too for Arsenal-devotee Cunha, who arrived in Newmarket during Covid in November 2020 with his wife Taryn and children Ayrton and Jordan carrying just the bags they had travelled with from Durban.
Cunha had been a trainer in South Africa, a Group One winner no less, but called it quits in 2009 having trained to be a pilot. He wasn’t being sent horses, so took the skies and might still have been up there had the pandemic not intervened. The airline he was flying for went bust.
‘Flying taught me discipline,’ he says. ‘We did loads of long-distance routes: Johannesburg to Jordan was one of the longest. My favourite was Johannesburg to Zanzibar, because Zanzibar is a lovely place. I went into Iraq during war time: Basra, Erbil, Kirkuk.
‘I had a contract for a few months for Royal Jordanian airlines, we flew to places in the Middle East you would never go. It was brilliant. I was on the 737-800 but I flew all the others. I was a lucky boy. When you have your pilot’s licence, you never stop studying.
‘I was wondering what to do, as initially I thought I would only not be flying for a couple of weeks. When I came over here, I had a chance to fly for Ryanair. That was an option. I’ve nothing against them and I fly with them all the time but I just felt like I needed a change.’
That change, a real sliding doors moment, led him to the headquarters of horseracing.
‘I will never forget it,’ he recalls. ‘It was freezing, we walked into the house and it was empty. Neither of us had jobs and we didn’t know what the future would hold. The smallest things would set you off – not having a tin opener or a cheese grater. But we have kept going.’
They certainly have. Cunha, whose phone persistently rings to the theme tune of Only Fools and Horses, reached his ambition for the year of training 30 winners on Wednesday, when Cartwheel was successful at Kempton and each one has vindicated his decision to turn away from a life in the air.
‘I came here and started training with three horses,’ he says, proudly. ‘What I’m doing now is a dream.’
