Horse racing

Talking to Paul Nicholls earlier this season, I was shaken to hear the ultra-competitive champion trainer say that he wouldn’t want to be starting again now. If younger trainers are to get to the top they need somewhere they can train a hundred horses from, he said. ‘You need to be in the right place with the right opportunity. It’s very, very tough.’ Two young trainers most would back to make it are former Nicholls assistants Harry Fry and Dan Skelton, and the other major figure whose former assistants are making their mark is Nicky Henderson. Those who have graduated in recent years from Nicky’s Seven Barrows equine finishing school

When Theresa May came to power the Turf community was full of hope. Had she not been, if only briefly and in partnership, a racehorse-owner herself? Perhaps, then, she might revive the question Margaret Thatcher used to put to her ministers about any intended senior appointment in Whitehall: ‘One of us?’ Sadly, those early hopes are evaporating fast. It is not just that the pound’s collapse since she confirmed that Brexit means Brexit has given foreign owners a 20 per cent advantage at the bloodstock sales. It is fear of the government’s puritanical streak, a streak that has led to a new gambling review and the suggestion that ministers are

There are few more compulsive reads in racing than the Kingsley Klarion, the in-house journal of Mark Johnston’s Middleham racing operation, which runs under the slightly ambiguous slogan ‘Always trying’. It is ambiguous not because anyone doubts that every Johnston runner is out on the racecourse striving to be first past the post but because the combatirobin ove Johnston is never short of an opinion, and sometimes those opinions have other senior figures in racing spitting feathers. Once of an opinion, he does not mind whose patience he tries. Last Saturday Mark produced what was for me the training performance of the season when, in a stiff wind, his 25-1

Bookmaking’s image has changed. Alongside the arrival of the betting exchanges, the evolution of the big names like Hills, Coral, Betfred and Ladbrokes into gaming operators rather than old-style bookmakers has seen the decline of the family firms where clients could be sure of the personal touch, total discretion and often half a point or so above the generally quoted odds. Most of the big firms have decided too that telephone betting is not for them, which is how I have (part accidentally) become — to Mrs Oakley’s surprise and potential alarm — a client of Fitzdares, a bespoke operation catering mostly for high-rollers and happy to be described as

Sometimes the labels people give themselves are more than mere braggadocio. Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali if you must) really was ‘The Greatest’. For me Tina Turner’s exultant ‘Simply the Best’ was never bettered in its genre, and Glorious Goodwood manages year after year to live up to the name it has happily exploited since it was coined by an alliteratively minded journalist before the second world war. Sponsorship does not always improve things but the additional funds now provided by Qatar have only enhanced Goodwood’s appeal. Their funding means, for example, that the Sussex Stakes, the first clash of the year between the top three-year-old milers and their elders, is

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Theresa May’s arrival at No. 10 is that it has given us back a prime minister who has owned a racehorse. Well, part of one anyway. Theresa the Merciless was once in a syndicate at William Muir’s friendly Lambourn yard which owned a grey called Dome Patrol, the winner of a couple of races back in the 1990s. At least it did better than Brexit, a two-year-old filly that finished sixth at Newbury on referendum day after being fifth the time before. Not exactly going in the right direction… Pressed back into commenting for CNN  on the resulting festival of conspiracies, cock-ups and character

I love Eclipse Day at Sandown, the first occasion in the year when the classy three-year-olds start taking on their elders. Over the years it has given us some great contests and added lustre to the careers of some great horses. In 1986 Dancing Brave confirmed in the Sandown feature how unlucky he had been not to win the Derby. In 2009 Sea The Stars won the race in the fastest time for 40 years as he made it one of his six Group One victories in six months. In 2000 the ever-combative Giant’s Causeway got back up to win by a head under George Duffield after being passed by

Forced to depart Ascot earlier than usual to fulfil a cruise lecture booking on the fjords, I hadn’t reckoned with June in Norway. It turned out to require anoraks and sweaters rather than shorts and suntan oil, although Mrs Oakley and I were better prepared than one lady passenger: having travelled without a scarf, she confessed that it was indeed her deftly folded nightie she had wrapped around her neck for warmth. At least a bit of book-signing went without a hitch, better than the time a young lady asked me to write ‘To Bubbles with love and kisses’ and then, when asked to pay for the signed volume, demurred,

How much strength do you need to win a horse race? Do women have enough? And if they don’t should they be given an allowance to help them in one of the few sports where they compete professionally against men? The question came up as I shared a farmer’s platter with champion trainer Paul Nicholls in his Ditcheat local at the end of the jumping season. Paul is no softie: one of the things he most admires in Ruby Walsh is his toughness, win or lose, and the end was signalled for one young rider in the Nicholls yard because he came into the unsaddling enclosure in tears after a

It has been a little like scraping from the plate as slowly as possible the last traces of Mrs Oakley’s exquisitely sauced vitello tonnato; like draining reluctantly the last glass of our best Condrieu: this year I never wanted the jumps season to end. Sprinter Sacre came back to his best, Richard Johnson finally won the jockeys’ title, Paul Nicholls gutsily collected his tenth trainers’ championship. But if the joy of jump racing is continuity, the attraction of the Flat lies in its sense of renewal. As sleek would-be contenders started strutting their stuff in the Classic trials, as the first precocious two-year-olds bounded excitedly on to the scene, I

The difference between praying in church and praying at the racecourse, a gnarled old punter once said, is that at the track you really mean it. At Sandown last Saturday, the last day of the jumping season, all our prayers were answered: you simply could not have asked for a better day. One reason we were all there was to celebrate Richard Johnson’s first jockeys’ championship after 16 times finishing a good-tempered and sporting second to his friend A.P. McCoy. In between the autograph-signing, Dickie Johnson provided the perfect seasonal sign-off by winning the bet365 Oaksey Chase on Menorah for trainer Philip Hobbs in the familiar blue colours of Diana

Not quite nil humanum a me alienum, but I have always been interested in other people’s trades and worlds. That was one reason why I enjoyed the late Woodrow Wyatt’s invitations to the annual Tote board lunch. I always found myself on a table with racehorse owners and trainers. When they realised that I barely knew the difference between a fetlock and a bridle, they became politely distant, until they discovered that I was a political journalist, which made them barely politely suspicious. Politicians they disdained. As for hacks, they only took notice of the ones that they could ride. That said, I am sure that they would have paid

With great victories in Flat racing you witness hats-in-the-air exultation. You see the pride of trainers who nurtured the winner to full potential or of jockeys who timed their challenge perfectly. Sometimes you even spot the quieter satisfaction of the owners and breeders who framed the mating that brought it all about. But much of the joy springs not from the victory itself but from the oodles of cash the winner is now worth at stud. In jump racing that financial bonus is lacking and yet the raw emotion often seems ten times as intense, as we saw after Rule the World won this year’s Grand National. The winning trainer,

I shared a taxi from Cheltenham station to the house party in an outlying village with a stripper. Finding a taxi in Cheltenham during the Festival is as difficult as picking a winner in the Bumper, and we were amazed and pleased to have got one so easily. One wouldn’t have guessed that the dark, petite young woman, thickly wrapped against the cold night air, was a stripper, but she was proud enough of her occupation to talk about it on the seven-furlong ride between the station and the ‘gentleman’s club’ where we dropped her. She’d come all the way from Cardiff, she said, to dance in a cage from

‘Racing is 99.9 per cent disappointment,’ said the trainer philosophically, as I sat in the yard sipping coffee, waiting for the vet. She arrived in her pick-up a few minutes later and wound down her window. ‘Am I in the right place?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said, still in sardonic mode. ‘It depends what you’re looking for.’ I leapt up and showed her the way to the far stable, where Darcy was standing on only three good legs. The foot that trod on the screw was now fine and she was sound on it. But then, during a short hack on the common, she had gone suddenly very lame in