The battle of the racehorse trainers

A famous American horse-handler – after seeing an English trainer who had been his assistant starting to win races back in the UK – declared: ‘I taught him everything he knows.’ He then added: ‘But not everything I know.’ With a friendly but intense end-of-season battle this year for the Jump Trainers’ Championship between Paul Nicholls and his former assistant Dan Skelton, I suspect that Paul is secretly hoping that he too has retained an edge despite their successful years together.

Paul has been telling us that it would mean more to him this year for his stable jockey Harry Cobden to win his first Jump Jockeys’ Championship than for him to clinch his 15th trainers’ title, but I think he is kidding himself. A 15th title would bring Nicholls level with Martin Pipe, with whom his past battles were not always amicable. There is no chance of the Nicholls size 11 (I’m guessing, but his father was a policeman) easing off even a fraction on the accelerator until he has not just 15 but 16 trainers’ titles clocked up on his CV to make him the outright all-time champion.

Skelton is very much in the Nicholls mode: he has the same kind of intense coiled-wire energy, the same all-encompassing desire to analyse and win every race and the same exuberance in celebrating victories.