CHELTENHAM CHASER
Can Scots-based trainer get one over on the big boys? Aye Right!
Harriet’s dream
YOU learn not to take anything for granted when your long-held dream of taking a horse to the Cheltenham Festival ends with him dumping his jockey during a final training run round Prestbury Park, charging up the famous hill, jumping the rails and clattering around the grandstand before falling over and injuring himself.
That’s the living nightmare that consumed Jedburgh-based trainer Harriet Graham five years ago when she travelled south to compete at the cathedral of National Hunt racing with talented chaser Scotswell and found herself picking up the pieces after all hell broke loose.
Even so, against all odds, she’s back again this year. Ready to travel down tomorrow with her staff to have a go at making fantasy reality again with Aye Right, who is aiming for the threemile RSA Insurance Chase on Wednesday while still having an entry in the Marsh Novices’ Chase the following day.
Drinking tea and soaking in the enormity of it all with Graham, who only has six horses in training at her tiny, break-even operation in the Borders, her inner tension is never far from the surface.
The ever-present threat of coronavirus is pretty much the first topic of conversation. Even though the weather forecast is promising, the fact that heavy ground will scupper everything gets a mention.
Not until the flag goes up and Scots jockey Callum Bewley is safely in position will she actually believe one of her charges has made it to the greatest stage of all. Not after last time.
‘Cheltenham is the Holy Grail and, until we actually get there,
I’m refusing to get too excited,’ says Graham, who also works as clerk of the course at Musselburgh Racecourse.
‘I have been here before. Scotswell went down for the Cross Country race and couldn’t run in the end.
‘He was a sharp horse. He was schooling the day before and he was perfect, but, coming back into the stables, he threw the jockey off and shot up past the winning line.
‘He then proceeded to prove what a good jumper he was by leaping over the rail, jumping into the grandstand, on to the concrete and away.
‘We can say we’ve had a horse come up the winning straight at Cheltenham… but not with a jockey — and not in a race.
‘He fell over somewhere. We didn’t actually see him hurt himself, so that was the end of that.
‘We were down there, he was likely to get a run and the whole thing just turned into a nightmare.
‘Because we were there anyway we felt we might as well just stay, but we just couldn’t get into Cheltenham at all.
‘We know just how close you can get and that things can still go wrong even when you are there, so I won’t believe it’s actually happening until he gets to the start and the flag is coming down.
‘Having a horse which can take you to Cheltenham is always the dream. Plenty of times, I’ve sat in the car and dreamed about it.
‘When you only train six, the chance, statistically, of having one good enough to run in a Grade One is tiny. But it does happen and if we get there, he’ll be the proof that the dream sometimes happens.’
Brought up in Dartmoor, in the West Country, Cheltenham has weaved its way through Graham’s life from her earliest days riding ponies and eventing under the tutelage of her late mother Rane, who overcame polio in childhood to become both a jockey and trainer in the point-to-point scene.
‘I went there as a child, but never really understood what a big deal it was,’ recalls the 61-year-old.
‘We went to the Hunters’ Chase meeting because my mother had point-to-pointers and I remember everyone getting into a state because my brother Nick had fallen off and been taken to hospital one time.
‘I remember my mother saying: “We’ve got to get the horse home. Just leave him. He’ll be all right.”
‘She would push us as kids. Sometimes, it was a little too intense because you wanted to do other things, but it was a great childhood.
‘The fact she’d had polio made her extremely determined to push the boundaries as much as she could. Physically, she was a bit weak down one side, but that never stopped her.
‘I think she was in the first mixedsex race point-to-point race in the West Country and duly won it.
‘My grandfather was an oldfashioned major in the army — a gentleman, but very loud and not very PC. When she came back in after beating the men, he said to her: “Well, of course they allowed you to win, because you’re a woman and gentlemen always let
a lady go first”. That was my first memory of racing and I remember mum being devastated that her big moment had been taken away from her.
‘What would he say now about me training horses? Something like: “Well, it’s in her name, but it’s her husband doing it all”.’
Graham competed in point-topoints herself, but took a break from riding for about 15 years to become a TV producer in London, where she lived with her other half Rob, who works in IT and is now her assistant trainer. Again, though, Cheltenham would never quite leave her.
‘I worked for RaceTech on their outside broadcast units as a director and probably worked at about 10 meetings at Cheltenham for quite a few years,’ she says.
‘My abiding memory of Cheltenham is that you’re stone cold sober when you’re working and you’d be stepping over drunk Irishmen with pocketfuls of money.
‘I guess now people would nick it, but there was nobody nicking it back then — even though they were completely out of it.
‘My husband and I have gone down a couple of years as well. For me, though, the biggest treat is to get all your work done, get the fire lit, turn the phone off and sit on the sofa with the hot cross buns to watch the Festival on the TV at home with no interruptions.
‘Although the one thing that always happens is that someone will come to the door delivering something during the big races. You end up shouting: “It’s Cheltenham. Go away!”.’
Graham, despite her love of the sport, admits she actually ended up in racehorse training by accident. Having saved up enough money to buy a place with some land, she moved across the border with Rob in 1989 and bought a riding horse.
‘He was rubbish and a complete nutter, so we thought we’d better do something with him and had a go at point-to-points,’ recalls Graham. ‘After that, we bought another one, I got a permit and then my trainer’s licence — and that’s how it started. It wasn’t a career plan.’
Yet, here were are. Although a tiny operation up against the might of the likes of Willie Mullins and Gordon Elliott, the most important jumps meeting of all now beckons.
Bad weather has prevented Aye Right from getting back out on to the track since his tidy 15-length win over Mulcahy’s Hill at Newcastle in mid-January, only his second run over fences after unseating Bewley at Doncaster in December when going well alongside eventual winner Sam Spinner.
Graham, however, remains happy with the way the sevenyear-old’s build-up has gone.
‘Touch-wood, he’s a straightforward horse and easy to get fit,’ she says. ‘We have treated this exactly the same as we would if he was going to Kelso or Hexham.
‘He’s not that big and he’s not that flashy to look at, but he’s a competitive horse.
‘Even walking to the field, he hates anything being in front of him, so we always felt that was a good attitude.
‘You look at what Willie Mullins and Gordon Elliott have got entered and you consider that all our hopes are just on one little horse.
‘Having six horses in training works well for us, though, with us working in other jobs.
‘It doesn’t make any money, but I love it.’