Bustle and happiness
Robin Oakley
Newmarket it isn’t. Forget clipped hedges, purring security gates and decorated dovecotes. At Gary Moore’s yard in Woodingdean there isn’t even a name over the stables the other side of the road from the ten-furlong start on Brighton’s racetrack. I’ve seen grander allotment huts than the cluster of wooden and breezeblock stables stretching down the hillside, the rails chewed to a fretwork by equine nibblers. A number of the horses are clad in hand-me-downs, some still bearing the initials of former handlers. Forget the Tidy Britain competition, all the effort goes into the horses who, by contrast, look a picture. It is all about energy, bustle and the sheer happiness of a stable where everybody mucks in. H.E. Bates’s Larkin family would have loved it.
Searching amid wandering Labradors for the master of the yard, I found him washing down the six-year-old Zimbabwe. Son Jamie, one of our most talented National Hunt jockeys, was tacking up New Entic. Gary’s mother Lorna, widow of the stable’s founder, the one-time end-ofthe-pier entertainer and used-car dealer Charlie Moore (who once landed a massive gamble at the old Wye racecourse with Senegal, a horse he acquired in exchange for five lorry tyres and wheels), still takes round the feed buckets. Everybody does their bit, the trainer more than most. A fortnight before, Gary and wife Jayne, who rides out and does the books, had been on a rare break in Barbados. ‘They were due to leave for the airport at 7.00 a.m.,’ says assistant trainer David Wilson, ‘and at 7.15 Gary was still carting feed nets.’ The Moore–Wilson partnership, too, is part of the success of the Woodingdean yard. The canny David is not one of those slickhaired young assistants straight out of agricultural college. At 60-plus he is himself a former Epsom trainer who knows the entry books, the feed balances and the pleasures and pitfalls of stable life inside out.
As for Gary, he never stops running, bringing results to what is probably one of the last of the truly dual-purpose yards in the country. Only a dozen trainers saddled more winners than his 59 on the Flat last year. Over the jumps, thanks to Heathcote’s recent win in the Totesport Trophy at Newbury, the richest handicap hurdle in Europe, he is currently in 13th place so far this season, which he regards as something of a failure. In addition, Gary is second in the winter season on the all-weather tracks.
Squeezed with three owners into Gary’s straw-strewn Daihatsu, we slithered across the high downland alongside his 1m 3f allweather gallop. How many of his string, I asked, go over jumps? ‘Seventy five per cent, I guess. If they can jump, they will,’ came the no-nonsense reply. Only one or two of the more expensive purchases with Flat-oriented owners are excused obstacles, which may have something to do with the Woodingdean yard’s more than respectable record in top handicap hurdles. You ignore a Moore-trained candidate in those at your peril. Apart from Heathcote’s big-money success, Verasi won Kempton’s Intercasino Lanzarote Hurdle in January. Out on the gallops was Nation State, whom his trainer describes as ‘not the best of movers’ but whose second to the classy Overstrand at Ascot recently in the £50,000 Betfair Hurdle suggests he will be collecting soon. And among the juvenile hurdlers Or Jaune has won nicely at Sandown.
But Gary, once one of the most fearless riders of his generation, doesn’t just train racehorses, he trains riders, too. Jamie Moore, who looks to be emerging from a quiet patch since leaving the Pipe yard, is one of the best of the younger-generation jump jockeys and his brother Ryan in November became champion jockey on the Flat at the age of only 23. Ask their father what he taught them and he insists they were naturals. What he does say, as the rider of 150 winners in much harder times, is, ‘I wouldn’t want Ryan or Jamie riding the sort of horses I had to ride.’ In those days there were no agents, and jockeys outside the top flight took anything they were given.
Loquacious about his sons’ achievements, monosyllabic about his own, Gary agrees he is training with better facilities than his father and with better horses, though still not up to the standard he would like. There are more of them, too. ‘What we had out at first lot would have been the whole thing in Dad’s day. And they are a lot fitter now. You were always expecting them to need the first run then.’ Would he now consider moving to one of the big training centres like Newmarket or Lambourn? ‘Yes, I would. It’s easier to train out of a training centre where a lot is provided for you. I have to look after it all here myself. But it wouldn’t be easy in a training centre to get the facilities I want.’ It is, he says, all about happy horses. ‘I’ve got to have a lot of turnout area. If a horse goes stale on me here, I can go out of the yard and take him left or right, back or forward. There’s no need for him to get bored. I can send him over the valleys for a few days or I can send him to the beach.’ They haven’t as yet got Arab owners or Derby-winning potential in Woodingdean. But later that afternoon I watched Cusoon (C.U. Soon — get it?) streak to victory in the Winter Derby trial on Lingfield’s allweather track, lowering his own course record in the process. That was a happy horse, all right. And a Winter Derby victory on 24 March looks a real possibility.
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