Five a.m. on the second day of BST and I was still uncertain what to write about. It was tempting to go along with the thought that John Gosden, 70, on his own was never as potent a trainer as he has become with the addition of son Thady, 25, as joint-licence-holder, writes Tony Stafford. […]
As one trainer told me on Saturday morning: “It’s just a question of money”, as he explained his view of the Irish domination of the 2021 Cheltenham Festival, writes Tony Stafford. They’ve dominated a few but never like this. Just a quick look at the last two years reveals that the home team had ten […]
In previous years – the last 50 of them anyway – I would have been spending the last couple of weeks building up for Cheltenham, not always to attend every day as for the first half of that time anyway I was required in the Telegraph office in Fleet Street, writes Tony Stafford. This time […]
Sometime between Monday and Friday last week they got together and decided “Gordon’s not really a bad fella, so let’s not be too hard on him”, writes Tony Stafford. You could discern it in the columns of the Racing Post by his day-to-day journalist pals on the racecourse in Ireland as the original abhorrence to […]
I was speaking to Micky Hammond a couple of weeks ago and he declared: “Winter has finished!”. I thought maybe he was rather precipitous as there were still great drifts of snow around much of the North of England and points further on, but he must have had divine inspiration from somewhere, writes Tony Stafford. […]
In the latter half of last week’s missive I took you back to June 1989, writes Tony Stafford. Today I’m going another year, all but two days, and the eve of day one of Royal Ascot. The feature and only Group 1 event of the day, and in those days carrying more than double the […]
The Hollie Doyle/ Tom Marquand bubble will be stretched by a few thousand miles for the next two months, writes Tony Stafford. While Hollie contemplates a trip to Saudi Arabia for that kingdom’s big race, the multi-million-dollar Saudi Cup at the end of the month, fiancé Tom is bound for a return trip to Australia […]
The Dublin Racing Festival, two days of the best jump racing in Ireland and perfectly placed five weeks before Cheltenham to offer definitive clues about the likely destination of many of its major prizes, did its job this weekend, writes Tony Stafford. It also made the more than considerable likelihood that Willie Mullins will see […]
It was good to see that Denise Coates, boss and joint founder of Bet 365, was still smiling (ish!) in the picture accompanying the story that she is once again the highest taxpayer in the UK, writes Tony Stafford. Not just the leader, but the Stoke-on-Trent based magnate has more than doubled her 2018-19 payment […]
At the age of 25 back in 1978 Kim Bailey took over the training licence from his father Ken at their family farm in Brackley, Northamptonshire, with the experience of having learnt his trade from three training greats, Humphrey Cottrill, Tim Forster and Fred Rimell, writes Tony Stafford. In 1995 he enjoyed the almost unthinkable […]
Eight weeks tomorrow and the Cheltenham Festival 2021 will start as late as it can be, and almost a week later than last year. So it will be more than a year since I last went racing and, by the look of things, a good while longer than that yet, writes Tony Stafford. My guess […]
The frost relented at three of Paul Nicholls’ most productive racecourses on Saturday morning and the 11-times champion National Hunt trainer took heavy toll with a remarkable seven winners, writes Tony Stafford. Kempton, Chepstow and above all Wincanton are the three. At the same time he was emphatically (albeit inwardly) announcing that his re-building of […]
For decades they said it. The north needs an all-weather track. Just over six years ago the announcement that Newcastle racecourse would indeed be tearing up its turf and replacing it with an all-weather circuit which would include a straight mile was greeted incredulously, writes Tony Stafford. At the forefront of the criticism were some […]
Yes, it was brilliant stuff for the first two days of Christmas at Kempton, Wetherby and Leopardstown, not to mention the other venues that none of us could go to, writes Tony Stafford. Shock results abounded in the big races and over two days at Kempton, Dan and Harry Skelton had the type of magical […]
So Hollie Doyle finished third in the new-look BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2020 showing that technology can mix with the old-style modesty and courtesy which Ms Doyle, Jordan Henderson and Stuart Broad showed by bothering to turn up on a Sunday night in Manchester, writes Tony Stafford. Henderson, the genuinely-likeable captain of Liverpool […]
