An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
Make no mistake, Ed Bethell is a young man going places in the racing world. He is talented trainer, charming with it and he knows how to place his horses to great advantage. Since taking over the trainer’s licence from his father James at the start of 2021, Bethell has nearly doubled the number of
Fresh from plundering many of the major jumping prizes last season, Irish trainer Willie Mullins will head to Royal Ascot next week with plenty of chances in the big staying races on the flat. Predictably, the bookmakers are taking no chances and his most fancied horses for the two Tuesday staying handicaps are short-priced favourites:
Like everyone else I’m enjoying the boozy antics of Man City’s Jack Grealish. He’s spent the last few days partying following Man City’s victory in the Champions League, behaving exactly how a 27-year-old who earns £15 million a year should behave. He’s having a ball and who can blame him? But there’s a difference between
Last weekend, Ferrari contested the top category at the Le Mans 24 Hours for the first time in 50 years, and they took me along for the ride. The greatest endurance race in the world celebrated its centenary, and the grandstands and campsites were even more packed than usual – 325,000 fans descended on France’s
You can take a jockey who has ridden there out of Hong Kong; it’s a lot harder, I reflected, after a chat at Newbury with Neil Callan, taking Hong Kong out of the jockey. Even though this is his second season back on home territory after spending ten years in that racing pressure cooker, Neil
You don’t need to be a genius to know that if you are training for HM The King and HM The Queen, then it would be a shrewd career move to land a Royal Ascot winner for them later this month. This is, of course, the first time that the King and Queen will be
If you couldn’t watch the Europa League final between Sevilla and Roma, then you should count yourself fortunate. It was a nasty, bitter and forgettable excursion, blighted by fouls and time-wasting, that should make anyone connected with it ashamed, apart from the doughty English referee Anthony Taylor, who had a fairly good game. But for
It is usually the Grand National at Aintree that throws up a delightful human interest story for the media to relish. Think Devon Loch throwing away the race when poised to win for the Queen Mother in 1956, Foinavon’s 100-1 victory in 1967, Red Rum winning his third National in 1977 and former crock Aldaniti
I’ve been following Luton Town FC since the singer Helen Shapiro was ‘walking back to happiness’ in the 1960s. Luton is the bungee club of English football. Since reaching the 1959 FA Cup final, they’ve been boldly bouncing up and down the leagues. It’s only now that Helen’s words are coming true. ‘Say goodbye to
It’s unnerving being surrounded by a crowd in the woods. You can hear people but only glimpse their limbs or faces through the leaves. It triggers something primordial, similar to the feeling of being watched. Ideally, someone with a big strimmer would have given Cooper’s Hill a good going over before the cheese rolling. But
James Tate is an accomplished young trainer who has won several top races in his time but landing a Group 1 contest is still missing from his CV. That will undoubtedly change at some point and the horse currently in his care most likely to achieve it for him is ROYAL ACCLAIM. Aged four, this likeable
It’s not clear how many readers of this journal will be affected, but anyone planning a stag weekend in Prague ought to steer clear of the first week of June. That’s when the city hosts the Uefa Conference League final at the 20,000-capacity Eden Arena, home to Slavia Prague. The finalists are West Ham –
All-weather racing is usually not for me: it too often serves up poor quality fare featuring either horses past their prime or horses who are simply never going to have a prime worth mentioning. However, the one all-weather race that I do study in depth each year is the Jenningsbet Northumberland Plate and that is because, with prize money of more than £80,000 for the winner, it attracts entries
Wrexham had never seen anything like it: thousands of fans cheering their team as an open-top bus made its way through the city’s streets. On board, Wrexham’s footballers celebrated their side’s promotion back to the English football league. The club’s star owners, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, were there too – and with them, as
Although it could hardly be less woke, the racing world is an excellent example of the diversity and inclusiveness we are all constantly urged to practise. Racecourses attract people of all classes, ages, creeds and economic status, some drawn by the spectacle, others by a love of horses or betting, and many just by the
Lambourn trainer Dominic Ffrench Davis has started the Flat season in fine form with nine winners from just 37 runners for a winning per cent to races of 24 per cent. This year he has undoubtedly benefitted from an influx of more than 20 horses from high-spending owners, Amo Racing, but he is a trainer
Who can turn lying on a hospital gurney into a photo op? Emma Raducanu can, of course – beaming as she showed off her bandaged wrist and arm, in a photo of such quality it didn’t look like it was snapped by a passing nurse’s iPhone. It left me with a renewed sense of foreboding
Master trainer Aidan O’Brien provides a quandary for punters by sending over two very different horses from Ireland to contest tomorrow’s Qipco 2000 Guineas Stakes. Little Big Bear is officially the highest rated horse in the race (Newmarket 4.40 p.m.) after four impressive wins last season but he has never raced over further than six
The bet365 Gold Cup, that’s the former Whitbread Gold Cup, remains one of my favourite big race handicaps of the jumps season and I am pleased to say that I have a good tipping record in the race. A quick, slick jumper who stays well is required as the fences come thick and fast on
It was one of the most visually striking events of the interwar years and one of the first times that moving footage captured a major news event clearly. A vast crowd poured onto a football pitch, only restrained from covering it completely by a single mounted policeman and his white horse holding them at bay. In
What’s not to love about David de Gea? Manchester United’s goalkeeper might appear to have it all: a humongous salary, a lovely family, a sensationally beautiful wife, Edurne Garcia, who is a star in her own right in Spain, and a pleasing ability to behave like a complete berk. He is a mix of utter
Scottish trainer Lucinda Russell has her string in such fine form that she might win a race at Ayr this weekend if she entered the stable cat. From her five runners at Aintree last weekend, she ended up with two wins, two seconds and a sixth – quite an achievement. Pride of place went, of
When jockey Derek Fox came over from Ireland to join the Scottish stable run by Lucinda Russell and her partner, Peter Scudamore, the long-time champion rider, he was teaching himself to read via texts on his phone. Now he discusses books with Scu. Cleverness comes in different shapes and it was a supremely intelligent ride
My late father, who was the kindest man I have ever encountered, introduced me to horse racing when I was a small boy. Although he died all of 33 years ago, I still remember his advice to me when betting on the world’s most famous horse race: ‘The best form for the Grand National is…
It would take a brave man to pick a fight with Roy Keane, and nobody could quarrel with his view of Liverpool’s Scotland fullback Andy Robertson after a skirmish at Anfield. Robertson appeared to be feebly elbowed in the face as he approached linesman Constantine Hatzidakis at half time. The Scotland captain reacted in the
A dark cloud has descended over Queens Park Rangers, my beloved football club. On 22 October last year, when we beat Wigan Athletic 2-1 at home, we were top of the Championship table. Under our new manager, Michael Beale, we had won nine of our first 16 games, drawn three and lost four. Since then,
Fans of long-form sport, rejoice. April is here, and it is our month. Not only does it see the first four-day matches of the county cricket season, it’s also when snooker stages its world championship. Long-form sport is always the best. A four-day cricket match (five for Tests) has way more scope for drama than
The new flat season and the Pertemps Network Lincoln at Doncaster (tomorrow 3.35 p.m.) will dominate the racing pages this weekend, and rightly so. The bookmakers have the correct horses at the head of the market for the Lincoln: two improving four-year-olds, Al Mubhir and Awaal, but both at cramped odds. I largely stay clear
It’s been quite a while since we celebrated any of Sharron Davies’s considerable achievements in the pool – well, a bronze and a silver in 1990 at Auckland was the last time – but I would bet a box full of brand-new Speedos to a secondhand pair of goggles that nothing has made her prouder
