The turf
Quality operation
Robin Oakley
You know within a few minutes when you've walked into a well-run racing stable. It is not just neat tack rooms or a wellswept yard: it is organised bustle, the clear sense that everybody is moving somewhere with a purpose, the questions rapped out by a trainer and the readiness of the answers from his staff.
At Loretta Lodge, on the Headley Road just half a mile from the Epsom Derby course, Terry Mills and his son Robert are running a serious operation. Theirs is not a famous racing dynasty like the Baldings or the Hills family, Terry began as a lorry driver when he left the army, built up haulage and demolition businesses and at one stage with the A.J. Bull company he sold a few years back was running a fleet of 2,000 vehicles. He began owning racehorses 30 years ago with an animal called As Dug, bought out of the proceeds of digging gravel from the pits on the Kempton Park course and trained at Epsom by John Sutcliffe. As Dug did not win, though he managed five seconds, but Terry was hooked. His second horse, Swinging Trio, won five times. Nine years ago he began training himself.
This is not the case of a millionaire playing at things. Of the 156 runners from Loretta Lodge this season, as I write 23 have won, 29 have been second and 17 third. Terry is 19th at present in the trainers table ahead of names like Henry Cecil, David Elsworth and Brian Meehan for stakes won. At 15 per cent his strike rate puts him ahead of Richard Hannon, Mick Channon and Barry Hills. Few trainers show a profit on the basis of a £1 stake invested on their runners. Terry Mills tops the table on that score: £1 wagered on his runners this season is currently showing a profit of £62.10.
Terry wouldn't tell me how much he has spent so far on racing, but friends say he has sunk something like £4 million into the game already and it shows, with state-ofthe-art facilities. Proudly, stopping to pick up a single fragment of plastic sacking that had drifted onto the grass, he drove me round the circular five-furlong Polytrack that can't have cost less than £300,000 and showed me the horse walker, the lunging ring, the isolation boxes and paddocks on the 170 acre estate, the heated equine swimming-pool and solarium. They have a computerised weighing machine and a £20,000 blood-testing operation on the premises. He pays top dollar to attract good staff like head lad Jimmy 'Whacker' Gregory, who came from Manton, and he feeds his horses on the best available.
But he is a realist. When Terry applied for his licence and put in his financial plan the powers that be exclaimed: 'But this shows you're going to lose money.' Of course it did,' he told me on a misty morning at the top of the uphill sand gallop on the Downs. 'Anybody who'd told them anything different would have been deluding himself.' He acknowledges that so far he has subsidised the operation. 'This is my pleasure rather than boats or houses in Spain but it's still got to be run as a business and it's coming right.' It is hard, he admits: 'Demolition and waste disposal were a kindergarten compared with this game. You go and spend £250,000 on a horse, gambling that it's got an engine. If it's no good you can't ring up and say put a new gearbox in. One minute you're up in the air with a winner, the next day two scope dirty and another pulls a muscle.'
Though they can have their differences, Terry and Robert work well as a pair, their thoughts chiming in with each other. 'It takes the jar out of their legs,' said Robert over the swimming-pool, 'and it keeps their lung capacity nice and clear,' added Terry, as if in one sentence. Both certainly work at it. Terry had got back from a Leicester evening meeting the night before shortly before 11.00 p.m. and was still up at 4.45 a.m. First lot pulls out to head down the Sheep Walk to Epsom Downs at 6.10, to get the best ground before other strings arrive. And there has been significant success, with a stream of winners at the prestige tracks and a number of Group 2 and Group 3 successes. Bobzao won the Hardwicke Stakes at Royal Ascot in 1994. Mitcham took the King's Stand Stakes there in 1999. This year Terry was especially pleased to win the Royal Hunt Cup with Norton, a 300,000 guineas son of Barathca, named after his late chum Bill Norton, with whom he used to go dog racing at New Cross in the days when they only had a few bob in their pockets. Where or When took a top mile race at Glorious Goodwood with ease.
They've been through the learning curve. At first they persevered with bad horses, trying to prove a point. Now they clear them out and start again. They used to buy a lot of quick sprinters (and have a good one in Boleyn Castle, a Group horse running in handicap races), but now they concentrate on buying quality horses. Terry, who has laid out £700,000 on yearlings this season and who tends to keep a leg in most of the yard's inmates 'because the owners seem to like it', has proved a shrewd purchaser with the aid of assistant Richard Ryan. Usaidit, bought for £10,000, won five races on the trot and was sold for £250,000. Bobzao was sold to Riyadh and All The Way, who was fifth in the Derby, went on to Singapore. Since his Goodwood victory offers have flooded in for Where or When, bought for just £24,000. But I suspect they will have to be very generous to tempt the Mills family, who have an especial affection for the horse, who ran in this year's Derby.
Winning the local Classic is, of course, the great aim and I am willing to lay odds that the next Epsom-trained winner of the Derby will come from Loretta Lodge. You could almost say they are owed one. Terry went to the sales one year looking for an Ahonoora colt. One went on sale in the morning, the other in the afternoon. So as not to miss out. Terry went for the morning one, who proved useless. The afternoon colt, bought for a similar price, was Dr Devious, who won the Derby in 1992.
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