Robin Oakley

Nobody I know has ever been interviewed by an opinion pollster. Nor do I ever encounter anybody who has won one of those holidays in the Bahamas we are encouraged to enter competitions for every time we open a crisp packet or pull the tab off a soft-drink can. I used to be equally sceptical

Most racehorse trainers, those at least who didn’t have a legacy from Aunt Agatha to lubricate their way into the business, have attended the School of Hard Knocks, their tutors including some famously celebrated deliverers of colourful reprimands. Think Gordon W. Richards or Barry Hills. Having worked for Jenny Pitman and served eight years as

The longer Donald Trump sits there the better Ronald Reagan looks, not least because he had a sense of humour. The President who told his aides that he should always be woken in an emergency, even if he was in a cabinet meeting at the time, once declared that he wasn’t worried about the budget

Any of us can forget little things on leaving home in a hurry. To the chagrin of Mrs Oakley, who might need a pint of milk or a few more tonics on my way home, my mobile phone and I don’t always arrive at the races together. In that regard I have long sympathised with

Every Grand National reminds me of a hero of my youth: Beltrán Alfonso Osorio y Díez de Rivera, the 18th Duke of Alburquerque, a Spanish amateur rider who became obsessed with the race but whose only entry in the record books is for breaking more bones in competing in the National than anybody else. I

Bookmaker Paddy Power once famously declared, ‘Cheltenham is the best craic you can have and if you cannot look forward to it you need to have your doctor check you are still alive.’ This year it seemed that the whole place was in danger of being enveloped in Irish tricolours. Irish-trained horses won 19 races

If the championship for training jumpers went to a set of gallops rather than to a trainer it would not be Paul Nicholls’s Ditcheat precipice nor Nicky Henderson’s historic Seven Barrows facilities outside Lambourn or even Colin Tizzard’s Venn Farm on the Dorset border in the lead: the prize would go to the two stiff

When the generals have lost heart and crept away from the battlefield it is hard for the ground troops to keep up their spirits. Although the Cheltenham Festival buzz is already in the air, BetBright Chase Day at Kempton Park last Saturday definitely had something deflated about it. Everybody was still doing their jobs but

The drumbeats are quickening ahead of the Cheltenham Festival and at this stage there really is no substitute for going racing. Some might have ducked Newbury’s Betfair Hurdle meeting on Saturday because of the bitter wind, which made a hot-water bottle the most prized object on the winner’s rostrum, and because the other two key

Away from frosty Britain, lecturing my way across the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro, life has been dominated more by Donald Trump than by Dickie Johnson with passengers seeking refuge in jokes about the new president. ‘Why does Donald Trump keep marrying foreign women?’ ‘Because there are some jobs Americans just won’t do.’ ‘What can

You had to feel for ITV’s new racing team on their opening day at Cheltenham. It was cold, wet and utterly miserable but they opted not to take refuge in a warm studio but to stay close to the action under their brollies, putting a brave face on things. During what I nowadays look back

The biggest oohs and aahs on the entertainment scene this winter were nothing to do with the ‘He’s behind you …oh no he isn’t’ of pantomime. They were the collective gasps of astonishment from 21,000 spectators at Kempton Park on Boxing Day as Thistlecrack, a novice steeplechaser in only his fourth race over the big

It is a long time since I spent a morning on the gallops with the footballer-turned-racehorse trainer Mick Channon (he was in Lambourn at the time), but it proved an education for me and for two inappropriately dressed young owner’s daughters who also turned up. Their vocabularies were extended considerably. National Treasure though he became,

Talking to Paul Nicholls earlier this season, I was shaken to hear the ultra-competitive champion trainer say that he wouldn’t want to be starting again now. If younger trainers are to get to the top they need somewhere they can train a hundred horses from, he said. ‘You need to be in the right place

When Theresa May came to power the Turf community was full of hope. Had she not been, if only briefly and in partnership, a racehorse-owner herself? Perhaps, then, she might revive the question Margaret Thatcher used to put to her ministers about any intended senior appointment in Whitehall: ‘One of us?’ Sadly, those early hopes

The only downside about going racing is irritation born of encountering pig ignorant people who talk through their pockets. Beside me at a Newmarket betting counter on Saturday shortly after Aidan O’Brien had once more dominated the big event of the day, not only winning the Dewhurst Stakes with his Derby prospect Churchill but taking

There are few more compulsive reads in racing than the Kingsley Klarion, the in-house journal of Mark Johnston’s Middleham racing operation, which runs under the slightly ambiguous slogan ‘Always trying’. It is ambiguous not because anyone doubts that every Johnston runner is out on the racecourse striving to be first past the post but because

Bookmaking’s image has changed. Alongside the arrival of the betting exchanges, the evolution of the big names like Hills, Coral, Betfred and Ladbrokes into gaming operators rather than old-style bookmakers has seen the decline of the family firms where clients could be sure of the personal touch, total discretion and often half a point or