It takes a lot to keep me away from Newmarket’s Champions’ Day meeting but the prospect of an hour on stage at Cheltenham’s Literary Festival with Ruby Walsh and Paul Nicholls talking about Paul’s autobiography Lucky Break (Orion, £20) was lure enough. The champion trainer’s careers master might have been surprised to find the ever-reluctant schoolboy there. When Paul said he wanted to go into racing he warned him, ‘You will never make a living out of horses.’ Uh-huh? Paul’s horses have won some £3.5 million in each of the past two seasons.
The ‘lucky break’ occurred when a horse kicked out in a Devon lane in 1989 and painfully shattered Paul’s left leg. Not most people’s idea of good fortune, but for him the turning point towards a training career. Even as he lay awaiting the ambulance he dreamed of big meals awaiting him in hospital. He had for nine years tortured himself to keep a big policeman’s body (both his father and grandfather were in the force) two stone at least below his natural weight in order to go on being a jockey.
Much of his riding life, he admits, was like being terminally ill as he starved, tossed down the ‘pee pills’ and sweated on the way to the races in a tracksuit, coat, a woolly hat and bin bags with arm holes cut out.
The champion trainer is unduly modest about his achievements in the saddle, accepting the label of ‘journeyman’ and saying, ‘I was exactly the kind of jockey I would not employ now.’ He twice won the Hennessy Gold Cup and had a Welsh National to his credit too. But the second lucky break came when big-time dairy farmer Paul Barber, whose ambition was to milk 1,000 cows and win a Cheltenham Gold Cup, chose Paul from the applicants to be the tenant of Manor Farm Stables in Ditcheat. He now milks 3,000 and Paul has given him two winners of the Gold Cup in See More Business and Denman.
Paul Barber once offered the intriguing thought that it is the lesser jockeys who tend to make the best trainers: ‘Jockeys who haven’t been successful have the time to see what is going on, to think, to watch, to pick up an awful lot so that when they go into training they have it half thought out.’ Paul, he noted, has always had, too, that touch of arrogance you find in most of those who get to the top.
In the early days Paul used to find it hard watching others ride his horses. He bawled out those who didn’t do it exactly as he had wanted. Now he has mellowed and the relationship with Ruby, who has no retainer with the yard, just a gentleman’s agreement to a sort of open marriage as he also rides for Willie Mullins in Ireland, is a harmonious one.
Gambler Harry Findlay, part-owner with Paul Barber of Denman, named another of his horses ‘Herecomesthetruth’ because he says that is what you always get from Paul. Certainly he is one of the most open in the sport, and in this autobiography, excellently crafted by collaborator Jonathan Powell, there are some stark revelations. Nicholls had to be restrained by friends from punching his arch-rival Martin Pipe after Pipe’s Cyborgo, ridden by A.P. McCoy, squeezed See More Business out of a Gold Cup race as he pulled him up injured. Now Paul totally dismisses any conspiracy theory and praises Pipe for flagging the way in getting horses fully fit. But he and Pipe never managed to rub along.
Owners looking at the vets bills for their horses stabled with other trainers will, too, read with interest Paul Nicholls’s dismissal of trachea washes and blood counts and endless weighing. Fitness is all, he says. ‘I do more with a horse in a day than others do in a week,’ and that can be assessed by eye. He won’t delegate the training of his animals to vets.
Of course, with horses like Kauto Star and Denman and Master Minded winning prizes everywhere Paul now gets sent the best. But he improves those who seem restricted by breathing problems with a wind operation which vet Geoff Lane calls ‘the Nicholls’. His only coy moment on stage was when I asked him who’d had the op this summer. But he did give us a horse to follow: Aiteen Thirtythree, which is the name of Paul Barber’s best cheese. They wouldn’t have bestowed that on an also-ran.
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