Ismaili.NET - Heritage F.I.E.L.D.

On February 1, 1983, TV-am launched on British TV screens. It was a fortnight behind the BBC’s ground-breaking Breakfast Time and the public had already shown themselves to be unsure about watching a news programme whilst eating their Cornflakes.

During those early days it looked like there was not enough interest to justify one televised breakfast show, let alone two.

Dark reality is of a beautiful animal being gunned to death by incompetent criminals

So much is crammed into the Shergar legend that the all but certain reality of this beautiful, blameless creature dying a horrible death has become almost a footnote.

The precise nature of how Shergar was killed has never been definitively established, the same as how much of what happened to the record-breaking Derby winner in the days after his kidnap from the Aga Khan’s Ballymany Stud outside Newbridge on February 8th, 1983, remains unclear.

Can you imagine the enormity of the scandal if Black Caviar was stolen and was still missing 34 years later?

A tale like that began on a foggy Irish winter’s evening on Tuesday, February 8, 1983.

Shergar, one the world’s most brilliant, adored and valuable racehorses, was soon to begin his second season as a stallion when a gang of gun-wielding kidnappers broke into Ballymany Stud and forced head groom James Fitzgerald to load the horse into a float.

The winter's night they took ShergarSHERGAR was a wonder horse, loved by everyone but the bookmakers. Bred in Ireland by the Aga Khan, he won six of his eight races. Lester Piggott rode him to a four-length victory in the Irish Derby. The King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes were notched up by the same margin. He won the 1981 Epsom Derby by a record 10 lengths.

Voted European horse of the year in 1981, Shergar remains the last odds-on favourite to win the Epsom Derby.