FROM £4.50-A-WEEK STABLE LAD TO SHOT AT GOLD CUP GLORY
Ellison’s Red is big hope after tough ride to top
Trainer Brian ellison coped better than most with last week’s icy blasts. He learned early how to keep going when the Siberian winds are whistling around your ears.
The man who trains Cheltenham Gold Cup hope Definitly red was 15 when he got his first job as a stable lad in the late 1960s with trainer Harry Blackshaw in the north Yorkshire training centre Middleham, where conditions on the High and Loww Moors can at times be as bleak as the arctic tundra.a.
‘ He never let us wear gloves whenn we were riding out,’ recalls ellison, now 65, of the Blackshaw regime. ‘We’d have to circle around at the gallops before we did anything and he’d make us wait.t. Your hands werere numb. it was to toughen us up.’
‘i was 4ft 9in and six-and-anda-half stone when i got the job,’ says ellison. ‘i never sat on a horse for six months. i got all the dirty jobs before i started riding out.’
Pay was £4.50 a week and £4 of that went on his accommodation. ellison pocketed more by babysitting for Blackshaw on a Saturday night and that came with the bonus of a fish-and-chip supper.
it must have been a sobering introduction to the sport for ellison, one of eight children whose late father John was a Tyneside shipyard worker and mother Mary a cleaner at newcastle Hospital.
ellison had watched his father place bets on the old iTV Seven. Then, with his older brothers, JoJohn and alan, he would ‘stand outside tthe betting sshop and ask the blokes to put the bets on for us’. WhatW happened penhappened in the inteintervening 50 years iis not a scenario narioscenario mamany punters wouldld hhave put much cash on. The odds of the Geordie teenager training a Gold Cup hope would have been a lot longer than Definitly red’s 16-1 price to win the race in 11 days’ time.
a jockey for 21 years largely operating outside the limelight, ellison looked destined to follow the same path as a trainer after starting with three horses in a leased stable in County Durham.
He almost gave up in 1995 but through hard graft and a string of increasingly important successes has a reputation as a trainer who delivers. The turning point came when he moved back to Malton and purchased derelict Spring Cottage stables in 2000. He brought 18 moderate horses and now has 130 good ones and a record of more than 1,000 wins.
ellison, who is assisted by wife Claire and daughter Jess, said: ‘i remember when i was first at Malton. i had 500- quid horses and was being sent rubbish. i would walk around the yard looking at the horses, thinking, “Can’t win, can’t win, can’t win”. now you’d be disappointed if you couldn’t win with most of them.’
Since Definitly red, one of 35 horses in the stable owned by Phil Martin, arrived with him he has won nine times. ellison rates the gelding’s Cotswold Chase eightlength victory from american and Bristol De Mai at Cheltenham on Trials day in January as the most important of his career.
Twelve months ago, Definitly red’s Grand national bid was sunk when a rival fell in front of him, causing jockey Danny Cook’s saddle to slip underneath his mount. Both trainer and rider insisted then that their maturing chaser would be a Gold Cup contender. ellison, who has had six wins from his last 12 runners, including Grand annual Chase hope Forest Bihan at newcastle on Saturday, said: ‘We have always rated him. He shows a lot more speed compared to when he was a dour stayer. now he could work with anything over six furlongs. He is as hard as nails.’
That Cotswold Chase win was ellison’s first at Cheltenham since Latalomne won there in november 2001. That horse provided some painful Festival memories.
in 2002 and 2003, he jumped the penultimate fence in the Queen Mother Champion Chase in front only to crumple on landing.
‘That was agony,’ ellison admits. ‘it is even worse when you go there and every year they show the replay on the big screen.’
in his perfect world, ellison would have been pulling on a newcastle United shirt at St James’s Park. ‘i was inside left or outside left and quite quick,’ he recalls of the schoolboy dream quashed by the teacher who told him he was too small to make it.
ellison’s dream was black and white back then. now it is definitely red.