Robin Oakley

The making of a racing realist

The trainer Chris Wall is one to watch

One of the greatest parliamentary sketch-writers of all time, Norman Shrapnel, made a point of never socialising with the politicians whose performances he chronicled. ‘I was worried it might dilute the purity of my hatred,’ he explained. When writing about Turf figures, the danger is a different one: you end up backing too many horses trained by those who have become friends. One day at Goodwood recently I plunged on three horses whose handlers had encouraged me to do so and not one of the three finished in the money. But that was my fault for suspending disbelief. As the Irish trainer Mick O’Toole once explained, ‘If there weren’t a lot of folk out there who thought their horses were better than they are then racing would collapse.’

You do come to value the realists and one of those, Chris Wall, is having a splendid summer. I admire trainers with small and middle-sized yards who choose to operate alongside the big battalions in Newmarket as he does at the neat Induna Stables, which he acquired in 1992.

The son of the small-time jumps trainer Ron Wall, who advised him against a career in racing, Chris had what might be called an ideal preparation, working first for Barry Hills in Lambourn: ‘A big yard was a good place to acquire self-discipline. You had to adapt quickly. You could soon have got lost if you couldn’t go the gallop.’ There followed two years with Sir Mark Prescott in Newmarket: ‘He didn’t have so many good horses but was very organised and left nothing to chance.’ Two years more were spent ingesting the patient approach of Luca Cumani, ‘a man who did not over-race his horses’, before in 1987 Chris Wall took on the role of private trainer to the colourful Singapore-based Ivan Allen: ‘It was the best opportunity I was going to get without having to fund myself, a good interim between being an assistant and setting up on my own.

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