The turf
Less is more
Robin Oakley
Jeremy Noseda did not have long to talk after saddling Indian Warrior to finish a promising second to Godolphin's Ishtihar at Lingfield. He had owners to talk to, some gallops to see, and he needed to be back at his Newmarket yard in time for evening stables .. . There was just the wry comment that the way the horse had jumped a path indicated promise as a hur- dler and the reflection that he was very green and would probably take three more runs to learn the business.
There are not many in Jeremy Noseda's string which are destined to go jumping and there is not much he needs to learn about the business. Technically a 35-year- old first-season trainer in Britain, he has worked in racing around the world, and as a former key member of the Godolphin team he played a significant role in the production of more Group One winners than most trainers can hope to see in their lifetime. He passes career milestones like a boy rattling a stick along a fence.
Without a racing background, but having fallen in love with the turf when as a seven- year-old he watched Nijinsky on television, Jeremy Noseda worked in his school holi- days for Brian Swift and Jeremy Tree. Spurning university, he served as an assis- tant to John Dunlop for six years and then did a similar spell with John Gosden before Sheikh Mohammed, on Arc day in 1993, invited him to join the Godolphin operation with Hilal Ibrahim and then Saeed bin Suroor. In two seasons they won six Classics and in the second year, running 20 horses, they won 14 Group One races. 'I don't think we shall ever see that again,' he says. Sheikh Mohammed offered to set him up as a trainer in France but that was not what he wanted. He left Godolphin, whose suc- cess rate dropped significantly on his departure, to set up on his own in Califor- nia, with the bulk of his initial team of 14 owned by the Sheikh. There he had three winners from his first three horses to run, eight winners from the first 16 entries. But despite his strike rate, the owners did not multiply. He was short of ammunition for the long term. So, after 20 months, and a year's negotiation with Paul Kelleway, he bought Shalfleet Stables from 'Pattern Race Paul' and set up in Newmarket instead. His first runner was Nautical Warning, who won on the all-weather at Lingfield on 21 January. Last week he scored his first Group success in his own right when the appropriately named Wannabe Grand, his first entrant in a race of that class, won the Heidsieck Cham- pagne Cherry Hinton Stakes at Newmarket.
With horses in the yard owned by the likes of Michal Tabor and Peter Savill (although no Maktoum horses), Jeremy Noseda, who tends to talk about himself in the third person, admits he has set himself some stiff targets. He wants to be up there with the 150-horsepower stables of Henry Cecil, Michael Stoute and the like. 'Ideally, I would like to be training 80 hand-picked horses. But until you are extremely success- ful you cannot streamline without upsetting people. If a big owner comes and offers you seven, eight or nine horses, you can't say, "I only like two of them, forget the rest." To be really successful seems to require along the way that you train in excess of a hundred horses and if that's what's needed Jeremy Noseda will do it.'
For now there are 43 horses in his 56 boxes, of which 38 are two-year-olds. 'By and large they won't reach their full poten- tial until next season,' he says, despite hav- ing had around a dozen winners already. But there are another couple with whom he hopes to make an impact this year, including an unraced colt which he reckons to be better than Wannabe Grand. (No, he wouldn't give me the name. It sounds as though the bookies will feel that one.) What is encouraging for British racing, with its tendency to talk doom and gloom, is that a talented young handler like Jere- my Noseda, who might have been training in grand style for Sheikh Mohammed in France or who could have stayed in the Californian sun, has chosen to make his career here. 'I have been lucky enough to race in every major racing country in the world except Australia, and ours is the best racing in the world. With places like Ascot, York, Goodwood, Sandown, Chester and Newmarket we have facilities and courses unrivalled anywhere. We have the best bloodstock too. It is sad that the prize money is so poor but the upside is that more people are going racing.
`We have a product appealing to the leisure market. In America you've got good prize money but no one wants to go racing. It has no appeal to the young or to the middle-aged. America would die for an Ascot or a Cheltenham where you are actu- ally having to limit the crowds.'
He approves of the profile which Peter Savill is supplying but says that racing has to put its own house in order, appealing not just to the die-hards who will go racing anyway. The chance to get rid of the book- makers, he argues, was lost 30 years ago. They are too strong now and anyway they do racing a service in the advertising they provide. 'Most young people first learn about racing, apart from the papers, not from the BHB but from going into a bet- ting shop. The profit on turnover is not big for bookmakers and they do us a service.'
Once the equine equivalent of the ghost- writer, now scoring successes under his own name, Jeremy Noseda subscribes to the too much racing, too many bad tracks and too many bad horses school. What will bring people into racing, he believes, is a quality day out at a first-class track. 'We need less but better racing. We need a good image, a good product. We shouldn't saturate the market. We have to streamline and keep what is healthy then let it grow again. If that carries the risk that some courses, some breeders, maybe Jeremy Noseda, go out of business then so be it.' Somehow I don't think he will.
Robin Oakley is political editor of the BBC.
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