(Left) B Srinivas Rao takes Ajayajeet past the finishing line. (Above) Beaming trainer Richard Alford, co-owner HS Gill and Alford’s daughter Roxanne with Ajayajeet as he struts out of the tracks at RCTC. Pictures by Gautam Bose

A youngster equally strong off the front foot and back raced to a stunning debut win on Wednesday, 14 summers after Sourav Ganguly had galloped to a century at Lord’s.

Ajayajeet, the three-year-old horse blamed for a kick that killed his syce two days ago, turned out in braided hair with yellow ribbons and a red bindi to beat the field in The Finalist Plate at the Royal Calcutta Turf Club.

The brown beauty, wearing number 4 and spurred on by over 4,000 people screaming “go… gooooo”, powered past the finishing line six-and-a-half lengths ahead of his nearest rival.

“Horses are sensitive animals. He was sitting with his front legs crossed after Raghunath (Paswan, the syce) fell. I don’t remember the last time he sat like that. Horses sit only rarely,” Richard Alford said, running his hand down the silken brown coat more like a doting dad than a horse trainer.

“He is a quiet type, docile and disciplined. He couldn’t have kicked Raghunath. He wouldn’t have been happy with all that was being said about him.”

Like every morning, Richard began the big race day cuddling his ward, and possibly whispering into his ears that he had to put on the blinkers and just do it.

Horses are not known to have great memory, a racing veteran said, but they respond to familiar touch. Maybe that is why Ajayajeet refused to enter the starting stalls, shaking his head and moving away, his black, bulging eyes glistening. For six minutes, jockey B. Srinivas Rao and a rookie handler tried to coax him in. “He had never been like this before,” said Rao.

A buzz went around the stands. Will he be pulled out? “Must be,” warned an old hand. “A horse is bound to miss his handler.”

Champions are made of sterner stuff. Ajayajeet had to be “backed into” the starting stall, but once inside, there was no looking back.

From 3.21pm, when the starting gates swung open, he pressed ahead with every gallop. The lean, satiny frame covered the 1,200 metres in a fraction more than a minute and 20 seconds.

“No race,” screamed someone as Ajayajeet neared the finishing line. “What is this Ajayajeet?”

He has the look of a champion, said Richard. The man with over half a century on the racetracks had picked up Ajayajeet from a farm near Meerut for H.S. Gill and Sanjay Agarwal.

Gill was in tears as his friends prodded him for the evening party. “There is no greater high in life,” he said later. “Fairy tale,” said Agarwal.

At the parade before the race, Ajayajeet had turned on the style. Here he bowed in acknowledgement while walking past and there he wagged the tail, the cropped and combed three-foot-long brush.

He was the crowd favourite before the race began — a far cry from the opening odds of 16:10 on Wednesday morning. As the day wore, the punters’ odds swung only one way — 3:1 at 2.30pm, 6:4 at 2.45pm and 5:4 at 3pm.

For Richard, though, this may not have been the biggest race Ajayajeet has won. “An affliction in the pedal bone had almost taken him away. He survived that. He is a winner all through.”

“He is Ajayajeet, invincible against all odds, maybe also death, as the name suggests,” said Gill.

Raghunath, the syce, had applied icepacks on his hoof for months to bring him back to the tracks.

If Ajayajeet had got a turn at the podium for a Thank You speech after a man-of the-match performance, he would have probably dedicated his triumph to Raghunath and Richard Sir.