Down in his canal field on a damp November morning, Paul Webber’s horses were working in threes, hooves thudding into the resilient turf. This time it was Gift Voucher, Off Spin and Star Shot. ‘It’s such a lovely sound, horses galloping on good ground;’ declared the trainer, adding, ‘they can look good on the all-weather, but you get a much better idea whether a horse will stay on winter ground working it on grass.’
Paul’s wife Fiona watched on old Flying Instructor, once the stable star and winner of races like the Red Rum Martell Chase at Aintree, now the nearly white hack leading the string. Astride one Thelwell-style pony on a leading rein was five-year-old Hugo. Seven-year-old Sophie, self-announced as a future trainer, turned hers amid the wet tussocks of marsh grass. Work done, the horses circled the trainer for assessments before heading back over his sister’s farm to Cropredy Lawn, the training yard clustered around a 1780s farmhouse amid the rolling Oxfordshire countryside.
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