The turf
Sense of purpose
Robin Oakley
Stand on the top of Tom George's gallops and you can feel you own the world. You can experience, too, quite a nasty jab from the green-eyed god of jealousy. Hills fold away in front of you to the distant Severn and the two nearest valleys are all part of the family's 400 acres. Below you, topclass jumpers are turned out in a patchwork of fields across the road from their boxes in mellow Cotswold stone barns. Down Steambridge Lane past Tom's home, banks of daffodils nod gently in the spring sunshine and long-tailed tits dart in and out of the trees with a flash of pink and grey. It was in a George-owned field on the way down to Slad village that Laurie Lee, the author of Cider With Rosie, got lucky with his eponymous love under a haycart. The chronicler of rural bliss lived in the village
and is buried there, and some of the locals who wave hello to the cheery trainer went to school with Slad's most famous son yet.
In years to come it might just be that Slad will be famous, too, for a sporting name, for no stable has made bigger strides in the latest jumping season than that of Tom George's 40-horsepower yard, and whatever his fortunes he has no intention of moving. The Springbank stable's 28 current successes include a Cheltenham Festival victory with Galileo in the Royal and Sun Alliance Hurdle. Mailis has won three races including the Lanzarote Hurdle at Kempton. where Tremallt won a big chase early in the season, Historic beat First Gold over hurdles at Newbury.
Tom was educated at Gordonstoun, where they have a reputation for toughening-up outdoors, and I can see why he has some of the fittest horses on the circuit. Walking the last couple of hundred yards to the top of the hillside gallops didn't faze the grinning trainer, who has the pink cheeks and clear eyes of a true countryman, but it had my conversational flow down to a few grunts and a gasp. Any animal which gets to the top of his precipicelike three-furlong fibre-sand strip is going to find competition on the racecourse a doddle. But there is a steady preparation, too, with lots of hack canters round the sand circle at the bottom of the hill.
Tom has a two-mile hilltop grass gallop and is currently importing Wexford sand from Ireland to build another option. Wexford sand, he says, is something special. 'It rides very, very deep. They go in deep but it is not too hard on their legs. It means you can get a lazy horse fit without putting him under too much pressure. You don't have to get him mentally scarred by going after him.'
Much thought clearly goes into the George training process, not surprisingly for a man who spent learning time with Arthur Moore in Ireland, with Francois Doumen in France and with Martin Pipe in Somerset, as well as with flat trainers Michael Jarvis and Gavin Pritchard-Gordon in Newmarket. For good measure, he also did a course at the National Stud and spent time with the British Bloodstock Agency. Having distilled what he wanted from their collective wisdom but with ideas of his own, he started the usual way in 1993 with other people's cast-offs, buying four cheap horses at the Ascot Sales. But he had Cheltenham and Ascot winners that first season with Newton Point and the winner totals have increased every year since.
Torn is a great believer in natural ways. 'They're not short on work but I keep things as close to nature as I can. All my horses drink spring water and they're all turned out every day. In the fields he keeps them in small groups together. He has pretty well finished for the season now because he likes his horses to get the best of the grass in May and June before bringing them all back in for the new season on 1 July. The stables are all open and airy and an isolated hilltop yard has to be a help in avoiding the viruses that dog so many training yards, 'Mind you,' says Tom, 'I think a lot of diseases are stress-related.' He believes in keeping his horses switched off and happy, and he is successful enough in doing so to boast: 'I'm no Richard Dunwoody, but there isn't a horse in the yard here I couldn't put a head collar on and ride to the village and back,'
Out in the field we stop to say hello to Historic, who has become bored with hurdling and will go novice chasing next season, and to Festival winner Galileo. Galileo, of course, is one of Tom's eight imports from Poland, where he won the equivalent of the St Leger. 'He's probably never eaten grass since he was a yearling,' he explains, since the Polish horses race at one track and are kept in rather dark, gloomy barns. So well has Tom done with Polish imports like Cobbett and Corlett°, winning with every one he has run, that you almost expect a whiff of vodka from the feed baskets. He won't talk prices on his Polish horses but is confident he has had the best of them. When his imports were coming along nicely and before Galileo's Cheltenham success, he went back to Poland and bought the best of what he had left before.
Watch out for the mare Kombinacja, unbeaten in her native land. On the dogeared pages he showed me of probably the only copy of the Polish handicap book in Britain, she was rated at 91 to Galileo's 85. And he doesn't do badly with his more traditional Irish imports either. If vet Nick Mills has been a key ally in buying Polish horses, Tom is well set too on the Emerald Isle. His wife Sophie's father is John Edwards, one of the most successful trainers of Cheltenham winners in recent years with horses like Pearlyman. He now lives in Ireland and scouts for good prospects for the family. Situated in such a mini-Eden, Tom George has some good things going for him. But that is never enough, and he now has the results to prove he knows what he is doing with them. The ambition is not for greater numbers but for ever-improving quality, which gives the yard a sense of contented restlessness. Country calm there may be in Slad, but there is no mistaking the sense of purpose.
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