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Slowly but surely

Robin Oakley

Wednesday, 11th June 2008

Robin Oakley surveys The Turf

You don’t have to be a brilliant rider to make it as a trainer. As jump jockeys, Paul Nicholls and Philip Hobbs never rose above the middle ranks. Both have since proved to be exceptional at training jumpers. In ten years as a jump jockey Tom Dascombe rode only 96 winners, but as a trainer he is making his mark a lot faster.

Unlike Nicholls and Hobbs, though, and despite spending five years with leading jumps trainer Martin Pipe, whom he rates as ‘a genius’, Tom is concentrating on training Flat horses.

The explanation lies in simple economics: ‘I started buying all my horses on spec [without having been commissioned to do so by owners]. It can take a time to find them owners. That’s all right with yearlings for the Flat, but if you buy six jumpers and start looking for owners you could have four of them broken down before you sell them. The established National Hunt trainers have a proper client base. If I had bought jumpers to start with I could have been finished by now.’

Before setting up on his own as a trainer, Tom, who was three years as an assistant to Ralph Beckett, worked plenty of experience into his CV. There was track riding at Churchill Downs in Kentucky, a job in Florida breaking yearlings, time as a bloodstock agent and, crucially, a period working with the South African trainer Mike de Kock looking after the horses he always sends to Dubai.

Tom met de Kock when he took a couple of horses to Dubai for Beckett. Not only did the South African improve Dascombe’s golf, he also entrusted him with a team of 16 who won eight races in their 22 outings, collecting $3.6 million in prize money. So he has been around.

As for Martin Pipe, whom Tom admires not just for his training skills but also for ‘conducting a well-managed business’, he reckons he learnt as much from him in five years as he would have done from others in 15. The best pearl of wisdom in the string? ‘Don’t do anything before the horse is ready. It’s a slow process building up.’ That said, he notes one horse in the yard who had run an indifferent race the week before and who was still bucking and squealing the next day. ‘Some you’ve got to push on a bit. We’ve got to teach him he’s a racehorse, not a fool. But you can’t do that with fillies...you wouldn’t have a horse left.’

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