The best racing yards combine experience and tradition with youthful energy. Walk into Park House Stables, Kingsclere with the blackbirds swooping about their brood-raising business and you feel the vibes immediately.
There is grandeur and solidity about the red-brick Victorian yards built by the great John Porter, trainer of 23 Classic winners, with their turrets and chimneys. But there is, too, under Andrew Balding a modern, cheerful informality. What was in Porter’s day the lads’ chapel, missed at your peril, is now the colours room for owners’ silks, prominent among them the Queen’s purple.
Racing takes note of a good pedigree, and pedigrees don’t come much better than Andrew’s. His great-grandfather Aubrey Hastings trained four Grand National winners, his uncle Toby Balding two more. His other uncle William (Lord) Huntingdon trained three Ascot Gold Cup winners. Andrew’s father Ian, the all-round sportsman, not only sent out more than 2,000 winners from Kingsclere but also handled the incomparable Mill Reef to win the Derby, Eclipse, King George VI and Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.
That put the pressure on Andrew from the start eight years ago, a pressure swiftly met as he won the Oaks with Casual Look within months of taking over.
In fact, he had started earlier. Having knocked about at Uncle Toby’s with the likes of A.P. McCoy, Berry Fenton and Emma Lavelle and ridden 20 winners under Rules, including the Moët and Chandon ‘Amateurs’ Derby’ on a horse of the Queen’s, Andrew spent two years in Yorkshire with Jack and Lynda Ramsden, as good an education as anybody could have in placing horses. He brought their handicapper Top Cees back to Kingsclere with him and, taking charge of two yards under his father, won the Cesarewitch with him.
Still only 37, he has a young man’s clear objectives coupled with patience and perspective — one reason perhaps why his authority is clear in the yard, without the need for forelock-tugging.
As the string walked up cool, tree-lined pathways to exercise on the springy ancient turf of the Hampshire Downs stretching towards Watership Down, he explained his preference not for bustling along with sprinters but for developing middle-distance horses for good prizes. ‘The eight most valuable races in the world are all, perhaps with one exception, over one and a half miles or more.’
Like Luca Cumani, he believes that you race in Britain for prestige and fun, and abroad for money, as he did so successfully with Phoenix Reach, winner of Group Ones in Canada, Hong Kong and Dubai. ‘If you come through the grades at two and three and don’t have to sell them, then you’ve got some nice four-year-olds to campaign with.’
But selling sometimes has to be the option. Kingsclere keeps its loyal staff partly because they live on site. Maintaining the huge estate is expensive and its training fees can’t be at the bottom of the market. Only a few of his regular patrons, like George Strawbridge, Jeff Smith and the Queen, are likely to resist the right offer for an improving horse. The talented Gardening Leave has already been snapped up out of the yard this year after an impressive seasonal debut. At least punters can see, as assistant trainer Chris Bonner points out, that ‘if we get one or two that win early as two-year-olds, then they’re probably pretty good’.
One who worked especially well, I thought, was Robin Hood. It turned out to be a tactful comment. ‘He’s the most expensive yearling I’ve ever bought.’
The grey Dream Eater, narrowly beaten in Turkey’s rich Topkapi Trophy last year, has undergone two wind operations and should pay his way when fit again. They have hopes, too, of Balducci. And of the ex-Cumani inmate Riggins if his delicate feet stand up to racing.
Later on the gallops behind the stables, Tartan Grip and Jeff Smith’s Opera Gal impressed and a couple of Phoenix Reach youngsters, as yet unnamed, were learning the job. Future travellers on the international circuit hopefully.
It isn’t just the horses that you enjoy at Kingsclere but the easy sociability of the whole Clan Balding, certainly if you arrive as I did on no. 2 son Toby’s second birthday. Father Ian is still very much involved, riding out every day briefed with Andrew’s meticulous instructions. Mother Emma runs the adjoining stud as well as scooping up grandmotherly duties — watch out for her Side Glance — and Uncle William is much in evidence, too.
Andrew and his wife Anna-Lisa, experienced in the PR world, are true racing ambassadors. The day before, the entire Charlton Athletic football team had arrived for morning exercise, the week before it was a 94-year-old on a birthday treat.
Some racing folk never quite mesh into the modern world. Despite outward affability, their social style or dress can create barriers. Andrew and Anna-Lisa you can envisage living, as far as racing laws permit, a normal life of children’s tea parties, friends’ weddings and nights out booked on the internet. Racing needs their kind of warmth.
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