Tales from the Turf

by Robin Oakley

  Martin Pipe

  Martin Pipe first came to notice on the Festival scene with Baron Blakeney, the winner of the Triumph Hurdle at 66-1 in 1981. In fact it was his first winner at the course, let alone the Festival. With typical self-deprecation he says:

  We really fancied it. If it had been trained by a proper trainer like Fred Winter it would have been about 14-1. It had won its last couple of races and had reasonable form. Baron Blakeney was about sixth or seventh on ratings but because it was trained by an idiot, an unknown, it was such a big price. We told everybody to back it. All the owners’ kids had £10 each way on it and all won nearly £1,000.

  Paul Leach rode it, beating a horse of David Nicholson’s ridden by Peter Scudamore. We always had a picture of Baron Blakeney beating Broadsword in the hall and so when he came to work here Scu had to walk past it every day as soon as he came in the house. He didn’t appreciate it.

  Martin Pipe had to wait another eight years for his next Festival winner, Sondrio in the Supreme Novices Hurdle. Sondrio had been sent for stud duties in the USA but was then gelded and came to Martin to be trained.

  He had won nearly $450,000 in America but he hadn’t raced for some considerable time and he was a gross horse, he was very fat when we ran him at Hereford. I remember apologising to the owner. Of course he won, didn’t he, and was aimed at the Festival. Two weeks before that he ran at Ascot. He was a certainty. He couldn’t possibly get beat. Scu rode him, and he was beaten. He never jumped a hurdle and did get beat. Scu didn’t want to ride him at Cheltenham, he’d been offered another ride in the race and so Jonathan Lower, who was our second jockey at the time, came in and we schooled him every day, two or three times a day trying to get him to jump. He was a big strong horse: he probably didn’t respect the hurdles and could go straight through them, but you can’t do that in championship races. So Jonathan was schooling him morning noon and night and he rode him.

  Scu rode this other horse and fell early on and he was lying on the ground listening to the commentary. Jonathan made all and as he was going past the post and it was announced that Sondrio was the winner Scu was beating his whip on the ground in frustration. The ambulanceman ran across and said ‘You’re obviously in great pain’. And he was saying ‘Go away, go away, leave me alone’.

  When he took out his first training licence in 1977 Martin Pipe was not an overnight sensation. He had never worked in anybody else’s yard and he learned his business by trial and error, starting with the cheapest of horses at the lowliest tracks. For ten years he averaged no more than a dozen winners a year. But the results by the end of his 29-year career were phenomenal. He trained the winners of 4,182 races, 3,926 of those over jumps. He was champion National Hunt trainer fifteen times and appointment as his stable jockey virtually guaranteed the chosen rider a jockey’s championship too. He took Peter Scudamore, Richard Dunwoody and, many times, Tony McCoy to the title. He rewrote the record books: the fastest 100 winners in a season, the fastest 200 winners, the most prize money won, the most winners trained in a lifetime (achieved after just 25 years). His record total of 243 winners in the 1999/2000 season will probably never be beaten and he won the Grand National with Minniehoma.

  Although he never trained a Gold Cup winner, Martin Pipe twice trained the winner of the Champion Hurdle; Nicky Henderson is the only man living who has trained more Cheltenham Festival winners than Martin Pipe’s 34. Pipe revolutionised the training of jumpers.

  With his interval training up steep slopes and a ruthless eye for the opportunities offered by race conditions, Pipe sent his horses to contest the right races hard and leathery fit. Peter Scudamore would make the running on them as often as not and leave fields strung out behind him.

  Punters owe Pipe a vote of gratitude because since his day most horses from other yards too have been sent to the races ready to run. French bloodstock agents too should bless him – Pipe was one of the first to spot the possibilities of importing early-maturing and early-schooled young horses from France who could exploit the significant pull four- and five-year-old novice chasers enjoyed in the weights. He was the first to have his own laboratory on site to analyse blood samples rapidly and monitor the health of his horses. Until he began, no trainer had been quite so meticulously organised or so ruthlessly efficient in his planning.

  Self-taught he may be, but the lessons were still painful:

  We used to buy only cheap horses, the cheapest we could buy. The first horse we bought was £300. I got it home from Ascot sales and didn’t realise until then it only had three legs. It had a bowed tendon. That was how much I knew. From that came all my involvement in veterinary matters, I loved it so much. We had to get the vets to treat the tendon and give the horse a year off. Once you start paying through your pocket it makes you learn so much quicker. The horse was called Bobo’s Boy and we got it to win a point-to-point about eighteen months later. It was a very valuable lesson.

  I wanted to win sellers. I managed to win with cheap horses. I thought that if I could win sellers, since there’s one every day, I could get 50 winners a year, wouldn’t that be fun? I wanted to start at the bottom. The first time I had 50 winners they were all hurdlers. I couldn’t afford to buy a chaser.

  Working in his father’s bookmaking business wasn’t such a bad preparation for training, says Martin. It taught him method and a respect for figures and for information. He learned to handle paperwork and organise systems. That is why son David now has a sheet with all the horses on, listing all the work they do. Says Martin:

  All our jockeys have to give written reports on their rides. We have a written report every day on every horse in the stables. The head lad does one, all the assistants do. So David can look and see this one has a cut on his knee, its been treated with ointment, it’s OK or he can’t run for four days …

  It’s just having all the facts that are available. Facts and figures, that’s what life’s all about. You must have your finger on the pulse and know everything. All their temperatures are taken every day. By 7.30 every morning David knows the temperature of the horse, whether he’s eaten up, everything, and he says ‘Ah that one will have to have an easy day’ or whatever.

  Martin’s father’s experience also explained his ‘no excuses’ approach.

  He had horses in training with other people and he used to have, say, £100 on when they said the horse was fancied. The horse would get beat and the trainer would say, ‘Ah, I thought he’d get beat, he didn’t eat up last night.’ There would be all these excuses after the race: ‘They didn’t go fast enough for him’ … Why didn’t we make the pace then? You can only do that if you jump well. So you’ve got to teach your horse to jump well. When I first started training my horse would jump one hurdle: ‘That’s it. He’s good. He’s jumped it well, take him to the races.’ But of course racing’s different and they didn’t jump so you had to do it properly. You have to school them loads of times.

  He was worried at first that too much work would crock his horses and they would be unable to race.

  But that’s a risk you’ve got to take. You’ve got to have practice at what you’re doing. Jumping is all about jumping. If you don’t jump you don’t win. That’s why Make A Stand was a Champion Hurdler. I remember seeing it loads and loads of times: Group horses coming out to run over hurdles and they couldn’t jump and got beaten.

  His first Champion Hurdle winner was Granville Again in 1993:

  He was very laid back. He had a lot of problems and Michael Dickinson came across and helped me with them. I am very friendly still with Michael. He gave me advice on what to do with him and how to train him and that has helped me train many more winners.

  It is appropriate that the two should be friends. Both are totally imbued with the work ethic and with a voracious thirst for knowledge. If he isn’t watching the horseracing monitor screens Martin Pipe will have his head in some obscure veterinary volume.


  The second Champion Hurdle winner was Make A Stand, whom he plucked from Henry Candy in a seller at Leicester.

  We sent out a letter to all our owners offering a half share for £4,000 and my wife told me off saying no one else would buy the other half. Lo and behold we couldn’t sell it and we retained the half share. I am very glad we did because over the next year the horse won £250,000.

  Make A Stand was a real athlete. It took him a while to get going, he wasn’t a natural early on, but once he had the hang of it he could really jump. AP got on very well with him but loads of jockeys won on him. Jockeys who got on him just had to understand the pace, to allow him to dictate and just conserve his energy. He was really exuberant, he really enjoyed it. He really enjoyed his racing. In the Champion Hurdle we were really anxious but it was great that he went on and kept going up the hill.

  Suffering a number of health problems, Martin Pipe handed over to his son David in 2005, but an ankle operation has very much improved his mobility. He is still very much in evidence at Pond House and full of relish at what they do.

  He loves to see the youngsters being taught their job:

  There’s nothing better than watching youngsters, three-year-olds, going round in a loose school. They’re only playing, enjoying themselves, but you see them jumping, you see them having to think for themselves: ‘There’s a jump coming up here, I’ve got to shorten or to lengthen’, and they learn. Conditional jockeys would see them in the loose school and think ‘I want to ride this one, this one is super, he just goes there and pings it – all you’ve got to do is to point him at the jump and he’ll jump it, so the horse is full of confidence.’

  And if he likes to see horses being taught to think for themselves, the same goes for jockeys at Pond House. It is, says Martin Pipe, a much more professional era:

  Everything is much more professional now in every field, in every walk of life. With television, with videos, with everything, we can now see all the replays and see what went wrong. AP didn’t like it at first when we had all the slow-motion replays, although he does it all the time … You have to learn by your mistakes. We have tutors now and mechanical horses. We’ve always had one of those. We don’t allow our jockeys or the lads to carry whips on the gallops so they can go and practise on the mechanical horses and learn how to use their whips there and be instructed how to use it correctly, how to change their whip hands.

  How appropriate it is that Cheltenham named a race on the Festival programme after Martin and chose the conditional jockeys race as the one.

  Nicky Henderson

  It can only be a matter of time before they name a Cheltenham Festival race after Nicky Henderson. Nobody has ever succeeded there more often. Of course, some comebacks take longer than others. George Foreman, the Punching Preacher, won the world heavyweight boxing title for the first time in 1973, lost it to Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) in 1974 and did not regain it until 1994 at the age of 45. When Nicky Henderson became champion jumps trainer in the 2012/13 season it was not for the first time. But it had been a while. The previous seasons in which he had been champion were 1985/86 and 1986/87. Throughout the intervening period the championship had largely been divided between Martin Pipe (fifteen times the winner) and Paul Nicholls (seven times).

  Nicky Henderson’s Cheltenham Festival record is quite incredible. It took David Nicholson, ‘The Duke’, eighteen years to train his first Cheltenham winner. Noel Meade bent, Pope-style, to kiss the turf when he had his first Festival success after 21 years of trying. Nicky Henderson has proved himself a master of fine-tuning with no fewer than 50 Festival winners, taking the Champion Hurdle five times and the Gold Cup twice, most recently with Bobs Worth, a £20,000 purchase.

  Nicky has been kind enough to give me time when I have been engaged in a number of writing projects and I have never forgotten my first visit to his Seven Barrows stables in January 1999. At 7.30am the neat black and white yard with its big chestnut tree in the middle was a hive of activity with the clatter of buckets, the swish of brushes and the wisecracking of stable staff tacking up the horses under the watchful eye of head lad Corky Browne, a weathered figure in a khaki coat. He had started his feeding routine two hours before.

  In the office, secretary Rowie Rhys-Jones sat imperturbably fielding endless phone calls. The walls were stacked with form books and Timeform annuals going back years. A set of sit-on jockey’s scales stood in the corner festooned with sticky labels recording stable staff weights. Next to it was a hoover, which clearly didn’t get much exercise, and in a corner basket lolled a Dalmatian and a rough-coated terrier.

  A marker-board recorded the handicap ratings of the 100-plus horses at Seven Barrows, with red for chase form, black for hurdles and green for the Flat. There were pictures around the walls of previous stable stars like See You Then, Remittance Man, Classified and Zongalero. Nicky himself was constantly on the phone. He was appalled that day to discover that Martin Pipe had ten entries in the Stakis Casinos Handicap Hurdle at Warwick, all with jockeys declared, to qualify them for a Cheltenham final.

  Soon we charged across the yard (no other word would do) to the covered ride where Henderson buzzed around calling out questions to stable lads and lasses, assessing the progress of horses due to run soon. Blessed with eternally youthful looks, he is a man of natural authority, confident in his status and radiating intensity. Photographer Ed Byrne, who was there on a separate assignment, commented wryly, ‘He probably takes some of the nuts himself.’ There was the creaking of boots and saddles, the chewing of bits as some horses trotted on their toes while others loped around with a more relaxed ‘seen it all before’ air.

  Words were not needed to see where the life force of the whole operation came from. Just occasionally you get the chance to glimpse such a phenomenon – Graeme Hick rattling the boundary boards with a flick of the wrist, Michael Schumacher getting the line right through a tricky bend, Tina Turner strutting exultantly across the stage to lift the crowd with a twitch of the hips. With Nicky Henderson in the centre of the indoor school at Seven Barrows you had that same sense of a person in their element, doing what they were ordained by nature to do and doing it con brio.

  Accompanied by black Labrador Wanda we moved on at an Olympic walker’s pace to the schooling grounds behind the stable. There Mick Fitzgerald and fellow jockey John Kavanagh were involved in some serious education, constantly slipping off one horse and mounting another to put it through its paces. Two of their charges had had an indoor session with jumps coach Yogi Breisner three days before. The stable’s conditional jockeys, said Nicky, loved those sessions because they learned as much as the horses.

  With Wanda scurrying about eagerly retrieving leg bandages, Nicky dashed from fence to fence calling out comments and seeking the riders’ opinions as they were legged up on other horses. The hard work jockeys put in on these occasions is the forgotten side of the job and you can injure yourself just as easily on the schooling grounds as on the racecourse. That day Stormyfairweather, a Cheltenham winner to come, nearly deposited Mick on the damp grass. When he first joined the yard on finishing his claim at Jackie Retter’s, some owners would insist on having Richard Dunwoody or Jamie Osborne on their horses. ‘Now some don’t want to run their horses unless they have Mick. He’s really good at talking to owners too.’ Indeed. Introducing a hurdling demonstration at Lambourn’s Open Day, trainer Richard Phillips explained a delay by commenting, ‘They would have been here five minutes ago – but Mick Fitz had just begun a sentence.’

  On my visit Nicky said that he was basically an old-fashioned trainer, making full use of his 400 acres of grass gallops including a stiff mile and a half. ‘But we do use the all-weather too. Philip’s Woody [a fine old stable servant then at eleven] doesn’t set foot on grass from one year’s end to the next but he comes out and wins his four every year.’

  What did he remember from his days as assistant to Fred Winter? Mostly
, he said, the regimentation and the routine. It was the end of the ‘old school’ era. Winter’s and Fulke Walwyn’s horses would be out on their appointed days. ‘Fred would always say “For God’s sake don’t go swopping things about”. Nothing was ever really changed at Uplands.’ Since then there had been enormous change, particularly in the use of interval training. ‘In the old days, on Saturday mornings for example there would be a huge rush to get your team first up on Mandown. Now you hardly see a horse up there. They’re all going up and down a precipice somewhere.’

  The competitive element hadn’t changed though. For a long while Winter battled Walwyn to be Lambourn’s top dog. When Henderson became the new challenger for space on the honours board, ‘Fred took us to Stratford on the last day, fighting for every pound’.

  Nicky does not buy much of his talent ready made. Although he has some ex-Flat horses, he still likes to buy jumping-bred three- and four-year-olds and educate them steadily into mature performers. But although he likes to see his horses get a break, especially the older ones, he did wonder aloud about the logic of giving jumpers a couple of months off at grass:

  We must all be crackers. Nobody says to an Olympic athlete, ‘OK, you’ve won your race. Now go off for eight weeks, go to the pub every night and be sure you smoke plenty of cigarettes.’ We do 90 per cent of the damage when we’re getting them back to fitness after the summer break.

  A full works breakfast with the fresh-faced assistant trainers Harry Dunlop and Iona Craig was still not relaxation time for the trainer as he made phone calls, scanned the paper and fired out questions. Then it was back to the office to speak to Rowie, who was asked to ring a couple of trainers and find out if they were running their charges in a particular race. By now it was sheeting down on the indoor ride with a gale blowing. The third lot of mostly younger horses were spared the misery of battling with the elements that day on the gallops; instead they were to trot seven times around the indoor ride, giving them about a mile.