TDN Weekend December 2016 Issue 9
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/920057
'Highness' as part of their name. Quite the contrary. Julian Ince is their ringleader. Picture, if you will, an early-years Robert Redford with wisps of sandy hair: we can afford to be generous – this, after all, is a fairy tale. Jovial only begins to describe Julian: if fun-loving were an Olympic endeavour this English- man's grin and humor would be famous around the world. He is, in short (and he is a little short), the best of company: kind, big-hearted, idiotic. As a boy he delivered newspapers around Newmarket, Brit- ain's horseracing town, including to Lester Piggott, the Twentieth Century's greatest jockey. That's all it took: Julian never looked back, and at 16 he graduat- ed to sweeping the office floor of bloodstock agent Cormac McCormack. By the late Nineties, he was managing a stud farm in Normandy, the especially picturesque Haras du Logis. There, one of the clients boarding mares was the second of our three morn- ing-coated air-punchers: Heiko Volz. Heiko, some eight or nine years Julian's junior and now in his early-40s, has the sleek good-looks of golden era matinee idol. He and his father Helmut, who has not on this occasion made the trip from their home town of Baden-Baden, have been breeding and racing horses together for many years. Their success has somehow evaded universal acclaim, but they have won many of Europe's biggest thoroughbred challenges – including its greatest race of all. Where Julian fizzes with excitability, Heiko is calm and as- tute. He is a spectacularly good gambler and has a great command and instinct for form. I have scarcely ever been to the races with Heiko without watching awestruck as he collects fat post-race wads from tote desk cashiers. Occasionally I've been in on one of his punts: they're Byzantine in their complexity, yet then so rewarding in their execution.