Neild shows why Anfield’s loss is racing’s gain
Amateur who changed tack after being let go by Liverpool as a boy claims his first winner
Liverpool has produced its fair share of Flat jockeys. The current crop includes Martin Dwyer, Franny Norton and Liam Jones, while Billy Newnes was another to enjoy great success in the early 1980s. Either they produce them small there or they are a bit windy, but I cannot recall a Scouse jump jockey. Until now. On Saturday, riding Townshend, Jamie Neild rode his first winner, at no less a course than Ascot.
Neild’s time as an amateur may be short-lived because he has plans to turn conditional, although he may retain his unpaid status to ride Townshend in the Kim Muir at the Cheltenham Festival in March.
His ride on the nine-year-old at Ascot was copybook for one so inexperienced; so much so that the sometimes hard-pulling top weight went two miles plus out the back of the field, without knowing he was at the races.
It is all the more remarkable because Neild, 24, had never sat on a horse until around four years ago. Football was his sport after he had been spotted by talent scouts, aged eight, and signed up by Liverpool FC.
However, although all his family are big Liverpool fans, he supports Everton and every time he pulled on the red shirt he made sure he was wearing an Everton one underneath.
Eventually he was ‘released’ by Liverpool and picked up by Blackburn Rovers for his teenage years, before he was, as many are, spat out by them too. “Too small and not strong enough,” they said.
He ended up playing for Vauxhall Motors, but pretty much accepted football was not going to happen for him. Education never really did it for him either, and although he won a place at Loughborough, where he thought he might revive the football, he came home at the end of the first term, never to return.
At the same time his father John, who once tried his hand at riding as an apprentice for Henry Candy but was much more successful as the singer in a band, was enjoying great success as owner of 2017 Betvictor Gold Cup winner Splash of Ginge, like Townshend, trained by Nigel Twiston-davies.
“He was getting under my feet,” explained Nield’s father at Ascot, “and one day he announced out of the blue that he wanted to ride. I dropped him at the racing school for a 14-week course but told him I would be back in a couple of days to pick him up because I didn’t think he would last.”
Stick it out he did, however. He then went to Andrew Balding’s, where he was “just getting by”. When he left two years later, however, to go jumping, he was being entrusted with riding Group horses in their work.
First he went to David Cottin in Chantilly, where he schooled every type of horse from two-year-olds upwards, four or five days a week before he returned to work for Harry Whittington a year ago. Although he has had a few spins in point-to-points, Saturday was only his sixth ride under Rules.
Of course, for a man born in Liverpool, Cheltenham is never going to be the be-all and end-all of his ambition. He has come a long way in a short time but, with the support of the ‘Ginge army’, a bunch of Liverpudlians who follow Splash of Ginge with an almost religious fervour, his ultimate aim is to keep going a short way, to Aintree, for a long time.
If the Queen is missing a bit of good news at the moment she will at least have been heartened by the fact that Quadrille, a short-head runner-up in the Hampton Court at Royal Ascot in 2010 when trained by Richard Hannon, won the Retraining of Racehorses ‘Horse of the Year’ award on Saturday night.
Quadrille is now a legitimate dressage horse holding his own at Prix St Georges level – proper pointy-toe stuff – for his rider Louise Robson, where his skills include pirouette, piaffe and passage. Ex-racehorses take well to polo, eventing, hunting and showing, but as a rule of thumb they find dressage a tough gig.