When you drive up the hill past the Ridgeway from Ashbury, the sweeping Berkshire Downs open up in front of you. But before you enter the Valley of the Racehorse, you pass Ashdown House.
The 1st Earl of Craven built it in the 1660s for the ‘Winter Queen’, Charles I’s eldest sister, Elizabeth of Bohemia, but she died of pneumonia before she could move in. This tragic masterpiece is my metaphor for the two decades I spent in Lambourn.
The sun was shining on the grand Dutch-style hunting lodge last week as I re-trod the path I first took 45 years ago. Jamie Osborne now trains in the yard where Nick Gaselee mentored the King during his short race career, so it seems appropriate that Jamie is coaching amateur jockey and Sunday Times royal correspondent, Roya Nikkhah.
‘She’s proficient,’ says Osborne of his new pupil. ‘She wouldn’t make a living as a jockey. Thankfully she can write’
Roya’s alarm clock is set for four on the mornings she rides out. ‘How often is that?’ I ask, knowing how tough race-riding will be. ‘Well, that depends on whether PH is in town,’ she replies knowingly.
So it isn’t only the King who has his timetable buggered around by the ginger menace from Montecito.
The first insight the wider public got into the unusual partnership of this amateur jockey and the battle-hardened, outwardly brusque, wizened trainer was during an interview on Times Radio with Jane Garvey and Fi Glover. I laughed so much when I listened to it, I had to pull over the car.
On the basis that Roya was about to ride Epictetus at York and raise a huge amount of money for Macmillan Cancer Support, Jane and Fi were probably expecting a load of nicey-nicey, isn’t-she-so-wonderful platitudes from the trainer. But if they’d known that Osborne’s original critique of Roya’s riding was, ‘You need to stop looking like a sack of shit when you sit on a horse’, they might have been better prepared.
‘So is Roya being very modest… is she quite good at riding?’ Jane asked Jamie. ‘She’s proficient,’ he replied. ‘I thought it was going to be an uphill battle to get her there… She wouldn’t make a living as a jockey but thankfully she can write.’
‘I hope you’re nicer to your horses,’ Jane blustered before recovering with what she thought was a safe follow-up question. ‘Can the horse tell who’s in charge?’
‘We’re hoping the horse will be at York this Saturday,’ Jamie replied. I just wish I’d been a fly on the studio wall.
‘I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Jane and Fi lost for words, but unvarnished Jamie briefly stopped them in their tracks,’ Roya later reports. ‘They asked me if he was always so dour. “That was nothing,” I assured them. “Imagine him at 7 a.m.”’
Whether Epictetus or Roya were in charge is hard to say, but they had the race sewn up a furlong out. Never in doubt. She’s now aiming for a much tougher race: the gruelling, leg-burning, lung-searing Newmarket Town Plate on 22 August over approximately three miles – a double marathon for a flat race.
Osborne has already turned his ex-eventing champion daughter, Saffie, into the best female jockey in the world, so what does she think of her father’s tutelage? ‘I think he’s tougher on Roya than he was on me,’ says Saffie. ‘But it’s amazing to see how hard she’s worked, and we love having her around. She’s really part of the team. But you do need a thick skin to put up with Dad.’
Fitness is part of that hard work and is the first barrier to entry for any would-be jockey, whether they want to ride as an amateur or professional. ‘The fitness test was bloody brutal,’ Roya confirms. ‘Four-minute plank, lift half your body-weight, press-ups and pull-ups, exercise bike, then throw up.’
Probably no worse than riding a bike without a saddle, as recommended to Roya by the King. A trick I suspect that he got from his sister.
Osborne is a tough taskmaster: think Thomas Tuchel rather than Gareth Southgate. But if you look behind the scenes in every successful racing yard, you will find an ex-National Hunt jockey pulling the strings.
Jimmy McCarthy is that man in Osborne’s yard, and I suspect he is the one who puts his arm around Roya’s shoulder. ‘He’s my saint of Lambourn. When I tacked up the wrong horse he quietly took it off me and said, “If you ride that, you’ll end up in Wantage.”’
But if she has learnt anything from Osborne, it will be how to survive. He was the best National Hunt jockey of his generation, and he’s put the resilience required to bounce back from serious injuries into training Flat horses. And no matter what material he has to train, he is a man who can find needles in a haystack. He always has a plan.
‘How horrible are you to Roya?’ I ask the trainer after she has ridden out three lots and not broken sweat. ‘I suppose our language was pretty brutal in the 1980s and 1990s,’ Jamie concedes. ‘We’re much gentler now.’
That got an eye-roll from the pupil. ‘He can be a grumpy sod sometimes through that Silk Cut haze,’ she adds.
Roya may get verbally duffed up in the yard when she’s slow tacking up, and out on the gallops when her horse Hierarchy takes control, and Jamie is ‘quite terrifying’. But I suspect the whole experience is quite good therapy away from the soap opera of the royal family.
‘She is dedicated,’ Osborne concedes. And then he mumbles something that sounds like ‘quite impressive’, but I know there’s no point in asking him to say it louder. Compliments are soon obfuscated. ‘Have you seen her [racing] colours? They’re very royal.’
‘So have you been the making of Roya?’ I ask, shutting my notebook. ‘Certainly not,’ she answers before he can get a word in edgeways. Something tells me these two have been quite a match for each other.
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