Newmarket rarity
Robin Oakley
Entering The Trainers House at Moulton Paddocks is a reminder that preparing racehorses is not a job but a way of life. In the cheerfully cluttered lobby and kitchen, framed pictures of Lucy Wadham’s winners vie for wall space with those of jodhpured infant Wadhams, either exhilarated or grimly determined, soaring over obstacles. Step up to admire the group photo of horses like Aspirant Dancer, Tealby, Pagan King and Triple Sharp, whose impressive strike rate won the yard the National Hunt Stable of the Year award for 2001–2, and you find yourself squelching in the paper loo just vacated by the latest puppy, who prefers the Racing Post to the lawn.
It is an enviable lifestyle based around a comfortably sized yard housing some 25 inmates. It also comes with useful security. The stables occupied by Lucy Wadham and her husband Justin, a solicitor specialising in racing issues, adjoin the historic second yard for Sheikh Mohammed’s vast Godolphin operation. To reach them you have to pass through Godolphin’s electric gates and security guards, behind whom blue-jacketed grooms bustle about boxes with polished brass plates recording the names of Group One winners like Lammtarra, Mark Of Esteem, Halling and Dubai Millennium which were trained there.
There are not, as yet, any Group One winners on the part of the premises that the Wadhams share with three teenage daughters, because Lucy is a rarity among Newmarket trainers. Though she has a dual licence she only trains jumpers. Neil King also operates a National Hunt yard. James Fanshawe and Mark Tompkins usually have a few hurdlers. But of the 2,000 horses at ‘Headquarters’ fewer than a hundred race over hurdles or fences.
So how did the Wadhams come to be training there rather than in, say, Lambourn or Middleham? Although Lucy was once a BBC researcher for The Money Programme the answer is more force of circumstance than careful planning. A self-taught trainer who began with point-to-pointers, Lucy started with just one horse in Surrey. Then work took Justin to Newmarket and they began expanding their pointers operation a few miles away. One year, Lucy had the champion point-to-pointer Fort Hall, winner of 29 races. Next came a permit to train for relatives, and included significant success with Sheriffmuir, and then, as the winners multiplied, she was encouraged to take out a public-trainer’s licence, which she did around ten years ago.
The Wadhams have seen no need to move from Newmarket, and now they have introduced me to what the late Tom Jones called ‘racing’s best kept secret’, I can see why. Behind the wedge-shaped hedges as you drive along the straight mile from the leaping horse roundabout to the High Street are first-class training grounds for jumpers. In the early morning sun I watched visiting jockey Dominic Elsworth and conditional Matty Roe school the horses, warming up over the full-size hurdles and then popping them over three fences. The Wadham horses, who included Heir to Be, Something’s Up, The Dark Lord and the mare Divine Wisdom, had no competition for the facilities.
Until now the jumpers have had to make do with a dirt track for cantering, but soon they will have their own all-weather Polytrack, too. In their season, Newmarket’s hardy jumping types virtually have the Heath to themselves. They may not have available the sort of precipice up which champion trainer Paul Nicholls readies his charges, but Long Hill and Warren Hill do well enough. Says Lucy, ‘The [Flat] trainers are all in Barbados and their horses in indoor schools.’ Dominic, who was with Sue and Harvey Smith in Yorkshire before moving south, adds with relish, ‘And there’s no mud either.’ The jockey’s visit from his Lambourn base was worthwhile. That day he pronounced Something’s Up ready for a run and the pair duly triumphed over hurdles at Folkestone last Tuesday. Then The Dark Lord won at Fakenham three days later and Blackbord, whom I had planned to offer you as one to watch, won a good Ascot prize on the Saturday.
Ask most trainers about their record and they will spray you with statistics as eagerly as a stripe-shirted time-share sales rep. Lucy, whom you could see in another incarnation as a popular games mistress, has difficulty remembering her winner total. But the strike rate is a good one. There have been Cheltenham winners, The Dark Lord among them, though not yet at the Festival. (Watch for him in the Scottish National this year.) Her biggest success so far was United’s victory in 2005 in Leopardstown’s Grade One Champion Juvenile Hurdle. Bought as a cheap and cheerful type to win a maresonly race, she has proved to have a real engine. But sadly United is out for this season with tendon trouble.
One of the advantages of Newmarket, say the Wadhams, is the quality of the vets available. But this season they have had to make too much use of them. ‘Sometimes training winners seems as easy as shelling peas,’ says Justin; ‘sometimes you wonder if you’ll ever have another.’ This year they have had a tough time with their profile horses and tragically this month they lost Desert Inferno with a broken leg when he was clear on the run-in at Ludlow. ‘He was,’ said Dominic Elsworth, in the jockey’s traditional expression of respect, ‘a proper horse.’ The Wadhams tend to buy tough German horses bred for stamina, but not ‘store horses’. ‘Too onerous turning lumps of lard into athletes,’ says Justin. Lucy has Sir Percy’s owners the Pakenhams as patrons, and such shrewd syndicates as Thurloe Thoroughbreds sending her horses, and hers is certainly now a stable in form. Look out for Special Day, and I wouldn’t take long odds against a Newmarket-trained Festival winner in the next year or two.
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