It may yet turn out that the most significant development in racing this year was the sale of some 250 dairy cows. Back in 1995 Colin Tizzard, a dairy farmer on the edge of the Blackmore Vale, started training point-to-pointers for his son Joe to ride. Joe Tizzard, one-time stable jockey to Paul Nicholls, went on to become a leading rider. Colin steadily progressed from being a farmer who trained to becoming a trainer who farmed, though often with a stockman’s shrewdness, preferring to take a third prize of £14,000 in a Graded race rather than the headline glory of victory in a £6,000 handicap. Now, with Joe and his sister Kim as his assistants, he handled Cue Card, the public’s favourite jumper of recent years, to win a King George. Last season he trained Native River to win both the Welsh National and the Cheltenham Gold Cup. There is nothing racing scribes enjoy more than joining the cluster around Colin as he philosophises in his Dorset burr on the circumstances as well as the science behind yet another triumph: ‘Sometimes you go to the dance hall, and a pretty girl smiles at you and comes over instead of looking away.’
At soggy Newbury on Saturday, as the jumping season opened into full flower, it began to look like déjà vu all over again with the big two stables of champion trainer Nicky Henderson and former champion Paul Nicholls dominating. First Paul took the mares’ novices’ hurdle with Posh Trish, a big scopey mare who will make a lovely chaser. Then Nicky won the red-hot John Francome Novices’ Chase with Santini, former star hurdler. Paul then won the Sir Peter O’Sullevan Memorial Handicap with Kapcorse, a big five-year-old ridden by Bryony Frost, who will only improve, and saddled the second, Brelan d’As, as well.
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