by Robin Oakley
Other days at Seven Barrows (named after the Saxon burial mounds) I have been aboard the 4 x 4 as Nicky has roared and slithered up muddy tracks to the top of the all-weather gallop, steering with one hand while the other clasps his mobile to his ear. It is a not a mode of travel recommended for those of a nervous disposition.
Having begun at Windsor House in Lambourn village in 1978, Nicky swopped premises in 1993 with Peter Walwyn. He was expanding despite the recession and by January 2000 had notched up his first thousand winners over jumps. The 2,000 mark was passed in January 2011. He told me at the time, ‘It’s nice to get it out of the way. But I’ve a friend down the road, B.W. Hills, and he’s on 3,000. You can think again if you think I’m going after him.’ It seems unlikely that Nicky will seek to emulate Martin Pipe, who stacked up 3,930 jumps winners before retiring at 60. That is partially because the focus at Seven Barrows has been more on quality than quantity and especially on those Cheltenham winners.
Nicky’s Cheltenham experiences started in his days as assistant to Fred Winter at a time when he was also a leading amateur rider. His first Festival ride was on a horse owned by his mother and trained by Winter, which was, he says, ‘a sure ticket to the hospital. I think we’d managed to negotiate five fences before the ambulance picked me up.’ The year Winter won the Gold Cup with Midnight Court Nicky rode Humdoleila to win the last race on the card for Barry Hills: ‘Barry said “Don’t have one behind you at the top of the hill” and I thought I had better obey instructions. It won. We had a very good night.’
Does he treat Cheltenham candidates differently in the yard?
You try to say to yourself ‘Don’t do anything different’. Workwise you don’t. But you just try and put that little extra on them. I don’t say that you give them a little bit extra because if you really thought that was going to work you’d do it to every horse every day. It’s silly to say we do anything special and yet we do. You probably start a month before. They just get a little bit of extra help. I think it’s probably just to keep the trainer feeling he’s doing something to make a difference rather than the fact that he knows it’s going to do any bloody good. Nowadays the build-up is more and more and Cheltenham have got the art of promoting to an absolute T. On the Flat you’ve got several bites at the cherry. You’ve got the Guineas meeting, you’ve got the Derby meeting, you’ve got Royal Ascot, Chester, York, Goodwood, the July meeting, Doncaster, the Newmarket Champions meeting … if you miss Royal Ascot you’ve got Goodwood, if you miss Goodwood you’ve got York … you’ve got several cracks. We finish up with the whole year hingeing around a section of four days … they’ve pushed this four-day event into a completely different stratosphere at which the Irish input is phenomenal.
A bad Cheltenham is a horrible feeling. It’s an empty year, however good the rest of the year has been. With the younger horses we don’t over-race them. In January we consciously back off them, especially those we know are going to Cheltenham; once we’ve got the Christmas festivals out of the way you’ve a pretty good idea of the ‘A’ team. The handicappers kind of fill themselves in a little bit but you know where your novices are, you know where your championship horses are. So they suddenly become in Cheltenham prep from there. You’re backing off them consciously, starting again knowing what your prep race is going to be and it is geared to that.
The night before that discussion he had been making plans with J.P. McManus about his champion hurdler Binocular and when he was to come back in after a summer break:
When I said ‘Where do you want to start?’ he said ‘There is only one objective. How you get there is entirely your own business, but just get there.’ That has to be the attitude with a horse like him. We’re in the nice situation that there might be a couple of others like him as well so they’ve got to fiddle around each other. But horses like that, you know exactly what you’ll be doing before the season starts. It all comes down to one date.
Then you’ve got to make sure that one or two horses get into the handicaps you want to get them into. So you’ve got to start planning on those. Am I high enough to get into the Jewson? Will I get into the Coral? I’ve got to get a third run into that one to get into the Fred Winter … you are planning away all the time. You’ve got a horse you want to run in the Coral that you realise might be two or three pounds too low to get in so you’ve got to try and push it up. The novices handicaps, you’ve got to get three runs into them to be able to run.
Is there a problem with owners pressuring him to go to Cheltenham with a horse that isn’t up to it, or too soon?
There is, because I don’t think there’s anyone who goes out to buy a horse who doesn’t start asking, mentally at least, ‘Have we got a Cheltenham horse here?’ I’ll be saying, ‘We haven’t broken it yet, but I hope so.’ Every time you buy a horse you start with a dream. The owner who doesn’t think of his horse as a potential Cheltenham Festival horse is rare indeed.
The only time one tries to assert one’s influence is when there is a young horse who is not ready, he’s a year away from Cheltenham. Then I will try and persuade them to wait a year. They know as well as I do the pitfalls that befall racehorses. They know as well as I do that the chances of it’s being 100 per cent in a year’s time are pretty hard. The story on that score was River Ceiriog.
He was owned by Bobby McAlpine and had come to me from Barry Hills. He was still a maiden coming into Cheltenham and though we did think he was good I hadn’t won a race with him and his jumping hadn’t exactly been natural. Bobby McAlpine was chairman of Aintree. I’d stayed with him for Aintree and my plan was to run River Ceiriog on the Friday after Cheltenham in a maiden at Wolverhampton in order to lead him into the novice hurdle at Aintree. I spent the whole of Sunday morning trying to persuade Bobby that it would be more sensible to go to Wolverhampton, win the maiden and then go on to Aintree. Bobby being Bobby, he won the argument and we pitched up at Cheltenham.
I was just getting the saddle off Steve Smith-Eccles for the first race when in comes Peter O’Sullevan asking ‘Nicky, how do I pronounce this horse’s name?’
I said, ‘Don’t worry Peter, you won’t have to mention it’ – and River Ceiriog came in one of the easiest winners of the Supreme Novices Hurdle we’ve seen in many years; I think it was twelve lengths he won by. Sometimes you have to bow to owners’ wishes and there you are. It was a wonderful day and it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t persuaded me to do it.
The race I’m not so keen on with young horses is the Champion Bumper. You’ve got to be very certain that you’ve got a very good horse for that bumper. That is a race I’m nervous of. I’ve messed up a couple of good horses in that over the years … In the average novice hurdle there’s always a pack of horses you can go round with that anybody can keep up with. At Cheltenham if you’re not in that first half-dozen coming down the hill you are flat to the boards, off the bridle, invariably tired and everything’s happening too quickly. You can do a lot of damage to a horse that isn’t ready for it and I think that’s what happens in that bumper. If you’re in that half-dozen and you’re travelling, it’s great. But once you start coming down that hill off the bridle and struggling then it is very easy to damage young horses mentally and physically.
One of the enjoyable things about spending time with Nicky Henderson is to hear him talk about those Festival winners, something he does with affection and with humour.
The horse who won Nicky three of his five Champion Hurdles was See You Then, who had legs like glass and could be raced so rarely that the racing press nicknamed him ‘See you When?’. He was typical of Nicky’s attention to detail. Steve Smith-Eccles, who rode him to all three victories, believes that See You Then’s second success in 1968, a year when much racing was frosted off, was achieved only because his trainer drove a tractor at intervals through the night to keep the all-weather strip at his stables useable when many trainers were unable to work their horses. He sa
id of Henderson’s feat: ‘Winning two Champion Hurdles with such a horse would have been an outstanding training achievement. To win three was a horse-racing miracle.’
What I learned talking to his trainer was that See You Then was not only a permanent potential invalid but a savage too.
We put a ‘Yorkshire boot’ on him one day because we thought he was knocking a leg. It took us four days to get it off him. He was a wonderful horse outside but inside the box he was a brute. He would eat people. Glyn Foster looked after him all his life and got bitten and kicked to ribbons over the years. [Head lad] Corky Browne and I couldn’t go in the box without him. Nor could vet Frank Mahon …
We ran See You Then just once in the last year before Cheltenham. He went to Haydock and it was obviously going to be a tense night waiting to see what was going to happen to his legs. I woke up in the early hours and thought, ‘I’m going to go into that box and take those bandages off and see what they are like’, knowing full well that I couldn’t really go into the box without Glyn – and it was a Sunday morning; he probably wasn’t going to be coming in until about 8.00. I got up and went downstairs and went to his box and, oh my God, the door was open … there was Frank Mahon sat on the manger. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he replied, ‘I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d come and take those bandages off and see how he was.’ ‘So why are you up there?’ He said, ‘He won’t let me out!’
Then there was the two-mile chaser Remittance Man:
He was a terrible worrier, he used to go round and round his box, so we put a sheep in with him. The first sheep was nicknamed ‘Alan Lamb’ and then we had ‘Ridley Lamb’ and ‘Nobby Lamb’ – the sheep came from Dad’s flock. When Nobby went home for the summer and joined his mates, another sheep was sent. Remittance Man flung it out, literally. He picked it up and chucked it out of the door. We put it back in. There was a lot of fur flying and then out it came again. I thought, ‘We can’t do this to the poor sheep’, so I had to go back to Dad’s flock and look for the right one, not easy with 400 of them. Amazingly we sent in a horse and 399 of the sheep went one way and one came out, and that was Nobby. From then on we used to put a blue blob on his backside – the sheep – when he went home for his summer holidays!
There are many and varied secrets to a trainer’s success.
Races and courses
There is something about life on the racetrack that encourages people to let themselves go and to have a good time. Sometimes though a little caution is required. ‘Chaps don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses’ goes the old refrain. But at Kempton Park in October 1999 I discovered that that doesn’t necessarily stop the girls in glasses. As I was queuing for a drink, a lady in a smart suit with a hefty pearl bracelet and red bag turned from the bar and declared, ‘I could drown in those beautiful eyes. You must let me tell your fortune.’
As I looked behind me to see if Cary Grant or Paul Newman had joined the queue, she said, ‘No, I mean you.’ A Turf columnist at that moment short of copy, it seemed to me, could do no less than accept her offer, with the proviso that the fortune-telling included her selection for the next race.
Pausing only to exploit the gap at the bar with envious dropped jaws to either side still watching her self-confident exit, I seized a fortifying whisky and joined my new friend, to discover she was slightly less discriminatory than I had imagined. Another fifty-something, heavier than me and in a leather jacket, had been selected for the fortune-telling treatment too. She obviously always backed each way. Feeling my jacket lapels, Violet, as I shall call her after her chosen colour of eyeshade (and there was a lot of it), declared, ‘I have you down for a successful businessman. Well, reasonably successful anyway, though perhaps a bit of a fly-by-night.’ I would have to look again, I decided at that point, at my second-best racing suit. Until that moment I had always seen it as a tasteful compromise between the hairy tweed set and the sort of thing you wear when you are not quite sure how formal an out-of-London occasion might be.
As the analysis continued it became apparent that Violet had no idea what was even running in the next race and that she was less inclined to predict the long term than to attempt to influence my immediate future. As she claimed that she had connections with the on-course medical team Leather Jacket muttered ungallantly into my ear, ‘I think she’s into mouth-to-mouth resuscitation too.’ So, explaining that I was a happily married man of 33 years and pleading the need to get my bet on for the Cesarewitch, I left them to it. As I did so I heard Violet telling Leather Jacket, ‘Well now, you look to me like a boy who likes a bit of fun …’
Normally, to Mrs Oakley’s relief, my racecourse focus is on the horses and the races, and over the years I have developed my favourites. Epsom and Aintree I have already discussed but here are some of the other tracks associated with my most vivid racing memories.
Kempton Park on Boxing Day – King George Day
Kempton Park for me is not the most atmospheric of tracks, although it has sometimes been a profitable one. You can’t go far wrong, for example, backing Nicky Henderson’s horses there between December and March. But one day at Kempton is very special: the Boxing Day card including the King George VI Chase, which is always won by a classy horse. Some potential Gold Cup candidates don’t always show their best over Cheltenham’s undulations and extra two furlongs but excel at the sharper, flatter Thameside track.
My film director son Alex and I go to the King George together every year that his filming schedule and our wives’ diaries permit, but arriving there amid the boisterous crowds on the day after Christmas brings mixed memories. Scenes of Kauto Star’s five victories and Desert Orchid’s four float back along with the heroics of Silver Buck and Wayward Lad in the Michael Dickinson heyday. Unfortunately there is also engraved on my memory the year the infield churned to mud and even leaving before the last race, along with dozens of others I got stuck in the car park. I turned up three hours late for my brother-in-law’s Christmas dinner (he thought I had done so deliberately) and was banned by the family from Boxing Day racing for two years.
In 1996, when One Man won the King George for the second time they were trying to keep the party spirit going with an Irish band, a pantomime horse, a man on stilts and a hung-over fairy of uncertain years who had gone rather heavier on the lipstick and mascara than is customary for Tinkerbell. As she muttered and gesticulated about the lack of Christmas spirit around her she was in danger of being done by the stewards for a whip offence with her wand. One does have sympathy though for someone forced to pirouette in the biting cold in tights and several yards of net curtain. Perhaps she should have stationed herself by the champagne bar entrance. Put a match to the fumes wafting out of there and you could have incinerated the nation’s entire stock of Christmas puddings.
It had long been a maxim of mine never to ignore a horse which French maestro Francois Doumen sent over at Christmas time. He had won four King Georges. But this time it was Djeddah in the Feltham Novices Chase who did the business at 9-2 (11-2 for us early birds).
It was of course the King George VI Chase that we had all come to watch. Any owner/trainer combination prepared to take on Gordon Richards’ selected in any of that season’s big chases, especially anyone prepared to take on the redoubtable One Man at Kempton on good ground or better, deserved a salute.
When the British boxing champion Don Cockell was due to fight Rocky Marciano, negotiations were proceeding about the size of the ring and the great Jack Dempsey’s advice was sought. ‘If I were Cockell,’ he said, ‘I’d go for a five-acre field, heavily wooded.’ The right terrain counts for a lot and it was hard to see what was going to beat One Man over Kempton’s flat right-handed three miles.
The talented but inexperienced Strong Promise was never going well. The handsome Mr Mulligan led them at a good pace but was cooked when he fell at the last and Rough Quest was totally unsuited to the conditions. I didn’t know whether
to praise the United Racecourses chairman Andrew Wates for the sense of duty he felt towards the Christmas crowd in running his Grand National winner or to castigate him for risking a horse we all loved on the frosty Kempton turf. I suspect he felt the same. But the important thing was that Rough Quest came home safe and sound and did so within twelve lengths of the winner with everything favouring One Man.
I wrote at the time:
One Man is a fine horse, a spectacular jumper and a real crowd-puller. The way he moved up to Mr Mulligan when he chose had the stamp of real class but many better judges than me believe he does not get a yard over three miles, certainly not 3m 2f around the Cheltenham gradients. Nor is the course lucky for him: he has been beaten there 30 lengths in a hurdle, he was injured in the Sun Alliance and he flopped in last year’s Gold Cup. I suspect he will not run in the Gold Cup, so don’t take any of that 10-1 the bookies are offering.
For once I was prescient: One Man was again beaten out of sight at Cheltenham in 1997. But the next year Gordon Richards took the bold step of aiming his ‘little bouncing ball’, as he called him, at the two-mile Queen Mother Champion Chase, in which he scotched his Cheltenham hoodoo with a famous victory.
Glorious Goodwood
What memory of England do expatriates call to mind when they dream of home? Tower of London Beefeaters? Thatched cottages with roses round the door? My vision if transported for a tour of duty alongside the grey, green, greasy Limpopo or in the Kalahari would be of sunny days at Glorious Goodwood with a light breeze blowing above the world’s loveliest racing backdrop.
They have been racing over this patch of the Sussex Downs since 1802. King Edward VII, who popularised there both the panama and the linen suit, called it ‘a garden party with racing tacked on’. For me it is Ascot without the excess.
