The best racing yards combine experience and tradition with youthful energy. Walk into Park House Stables, Kingsclere with the blackbirds swooping about their brood-raising business and you feel the vibes immediately.
There is grandeur and solidity about the red-brick Victorian yards built by the great John Porter, trainer of 23 Classic winners, with their turrets and chimneys. But there is, too, under Andrew Balding a modern, cheerful informality. What was in Porter’s day the lads’ chapel, missed at your peril, is now the colours room for owners’ silks, prominent among them the Queen’s purple.
Racing takes note of a good pedigree, and pedigrees don’t come much better than Andrew’s. His great-grandfather Aubrey Hastings trained four Grand National winners, his uncle Toby Balding two more. His other uncle William (Lord) Huntingdon trained three Ascot Gold Cup winners. Andrew’s father Ian, the all-round sportsman, not only sent out more than 2,000 winners from Kingsclere but also handled the incomparable Mill Reef to win the Derby, Eclipse, King George VI and Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.
That put the pressure on Andrew from the start eight years ago, a pressure swiftly met as he won the Oaks with Casual Look within months of taking over.
In fact, he had started earlier. Having knocked about at Uncle Toby’s with the likes of A.P. McCoy, Berry Fenton and Emma Lavelle and ridden 20 winners under Rules, including the Moët and Chandon ‘Amateurs’ Derby’ on a horse of the Queen’s, Andrew spent two years in Yorkshire with Jack and Lynda Ramsden, as good an education as anybody could have in placing horses. He brought their handicapper Top Cees back to Kingsclere with him and, taking charge of two yards under his father, won the Cesarewitch with him.
Still only 37, he has a young man’s clear objectives coupled with patience and perspective — one reason perhaps why his authority is clear in the yard, without the need for forelock-tugging.
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