It is around 3 a.m. in Northern Ireland in the early 2000s as two British soldiers share a dank ditch waiting for the dawn. ‘What will you do when you leave the army, Sir?’ asks Corporal Jordan Wylie. ‘I’m going to train racehorses,’ says Captain Jamie Snowden. ‘And I’m going to make some money and send you a horse to win the Grand Military Gold Cup.’ As an in-demand amateur rider starting with point-to-points at 16, Jamie had already won Sandown’s trophy for services riders. At Sandhurst in 2002 on a day when his platoon were due to endure the rigours of gas attack training, he was booked out instead to ride Folly Road in the historic race when the originally booked rider couldn’t make it following a mortar attack. The pair scored at 14-1 and Jamie went on to partner three more Grand Military Gold Cup winners along with four winners of the other coveted military trophy, the Royal Artillery Gold Cup, all seven of them trained by Paul Nicholls.
At one stage there was a conversation between three young officer friends and a King’s Royal Hussars Colonel: ‘What do you three want out of life?’ The first said he wanted in time to command the regiment. So did the second. Captain Snowden declared: ‘I’ve just won a Grand Military Gold Cup for the Royal Irish Regiment and I want to win one next time in the colours of the KRH.’ Colonel and Captain agreed a plan and so Jamie Snowden, on an army wage, was despatched to spend a year as a pupil assistant to Nicholls.
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