CHANGING TACK – FROM NAILS TO HOOVES
Beautician quit her business of 20 years to follow her dream and train racehorses
NOT many people can say it, but Sheila Lewis is among those fortunate souls who are living their dream every single day. For 20 years, the beautician balanced running her beauty and nail salon with her other passion: horses.
Her days would start at 6.30am with feeding and riding the horses in her charge, before a quick outfit change and dash to open her salon by 11am, completing back-to-back appointments to get her clients glammed up. Then it was back to the stables in the evening to tend to the horses once more.
It had been like that for eight years, since Sheila, 54, got her licence to train racehorses. But, little more than 18 months ago, Sheila took the plunge and hung up her beautician’s tunic for the last time to make a go of it as a full-time racehorse trainer.
It would appear a career in racing has always been the mother-of-two’s destiny. Brought up on a farm in Sennybridge, Powys, the majestic fourlegged creatures have always been a big part of Sheila’s life, but before she could achieve her dreams on the track, Sheila was forced to reconcile with the financial realities of life off it.
“Growing up on the farm I was always told that horses weren’t money-makers so I was told to keep them as a hobby because they won’t make you any money,” Sheila said.
“So, I went into the beauty industry, and I worked on board cruise ships for a few years before I came back and married my husband Peter and settled here in – oh God, I never like saying the village’s name because it’s a bit embarrassing! Well, it’s Three Cocks!
“Looking back, I don’t know how the hell I did it! I had the beauty salon for about 20 years, and I’ve had my trainer’s licence for eight, so I suppose I just tried my best to balance the two, really.
“I did it because I had to. I only started with three or four horses and the income coming from these wasn’t going to make me any money, so I had to balance it with the salon.”
Riding from a young age, her horse trainer/breeder dad Brian Davies (whose shearing of 609 sheep in nine hours earned him a Guinness world record in the 1970s) got her into harness racing as a youngster, for which he bred horses and trained around 300 winners during his career.
Sheila was later permitted to train horses who had been rejected by professional trainers.
She said: “Dad always had a couple of thoroughbreds in training with good friend, former Grand Nationalwinning trainer Steve Brookshaw, and then at some point I was given one of those horses to train.”
First, it was for point-to-pointing (amateur horse racing over fences) and in four years self-taught Sheila had 12 winners. Then it was time for a permit to train a few horses for herself, overseeing four more wins, before getting her full licence to train for other owners in 2015, with the salon The Beauty Mill propping up the horse-training from then on.
A full licence costs around £1,000 and has to be renewed every year.
As luck would have it, it was a pedicure which Sheila performed which led to her meeting the owner of her current stable star, Straw Fan Jack.
Sheila and owner Graham Wilson were put in touch by the customer, and they took a chance on the 2019 Irish point-to-point runner-up.
Sheila – mum to Jersey Reds rugby player Tomi and London-based nurse Jody – switched the now eightyear-old from predominantly smaller hurdle obstacles to the bigger fences last year, with the move paying off.
After success at Ffos Las in October, Straw Fan Jack won at Cheltenham’s Showcase meeting later that month, finished fourth in The Arkle Novices’ Chase at the Cheltenham Festival in March at 50-1, and came fourth in a race at Aintree during the Grand National Festival.
As for her decision to step away from her business of more than 20 years, Sheila doesn’t regret a thing.
“Like many other businesses, the salon had to close to customers at various stages during Covid lockdowns, but horseracing was permitted to go ahead behind closed doors.
“Because of Covid, I couldn’t work in the salon, and everything was closed, but we could continue racing. I had six horses at the time, and I had 12 winners in that season which is the biggest tally I’ve had so far.” That included a treble at Hereford.
“Whether it was because of the fact that I spent more time with the horses, or because I had a better class of horses, I don’t know but they all started winning.
“So then it was just the natural progression because then it opened all back up again and I started back in the salon, but a lot of my clients stopped coming because they still were nervous. In that period after Covid, it didn’t go back to normal straight away. It never quite went back to as it was, which made the decision to go back to the stables and expand them even easier.
“So, I finished the salon, and I rented it out to a couple of girls.
“I’m a firm believer that when you agonise over a decision, something will happen that makes the decision for you, and I suppose that’s what happened to me.”
Sheila’s stables are now home to 17 horses in training.
“My day starts at 6.30am when I get up to feed the horses. I have a lad, Andrew from the village, who helps me clean out the stables, and I have two girls that come and ride the horses with me. We ride between four and five horses a day and then we come back around lunchtime to give them their lunch.
“After that we clean the stables out again and then in the evening I’ll come back and feed the horses again and clean out their stables ready for the night.”
It can sometimes all seem a bit surreal for Sheila, who could only have dreamed of that type of success a few years ago.
“I think that I’ve been very lucky because I’ve had a Cheltenham and an Aintree winner,” she said.
“I remember once I had the BBC come down for a story for when I first started, and I remember they filmed me going around the field that I’ve got and the intro said, ‘With Sheila Lewis, who is dreaming of Aintree and Cheltenham winners’. I remember looking at it and thinking, ‘Oh my God, how deluded did I sound?!’
“There I am trotting around a muddy field looking so unprofessional, but you know what, I have had a Cheltenham winner and last Thursday we went to Aintree and our horse won fourth there so you can’t get any higher than that.”
The trainer very rarely has any time to herself but she has found some time out to celebrate in the party capital of the world.
“It’s coming to the end of the season now at the end of the month and
then summer season starts a couple of weeks after. But before then me and a couple of the girls who work at the stable are going to Vegas!
“I promised my staff we would go to Vegas if we had a Cheltenham winner. Then it unbelievably happened with Straw Fan Jack [in October]. So I’ve followed it through and we’re all booked up for May for four days.”
The group of six, boarding for the 10-hour flight, include the stable’s amateur jockey Katie Powell and Sheila’s 77-year-old mother Megan.
Then it will soon be straight into a new season, alongside fellow trainers who have welcomed Sheila into the horse racing community with open arms.
“They’re all very professional and very kind. I think sometimes that maybe you get a few owners that perhaps wouldn’t want to go with you because you’re a woman. But on the whole, I’ve found it to be fine. I think both men and women can do it. You have to be very resilient.
“The best thing about training horses is obviously seeing them do well, seeing their confidence grow, and seeing the way they love racing. I just enjoy the challenge of it all, really.
“I love my horses: I love getting to be with them and getting to know them inside and out.
“The difficult thing is the disappointment because you can have what you think is a really good horse and then you take it racing and for whatever reason it goes awful. And then you have to deal with the owners that have paid lots of money and sometimes you just don’t know what to say to them.
“Dealing with the injuries, as well, can be hard because they’re top athletes and they do get injured and that’s frustrating when you’ve got a nice horse that’s got an injury and it’s going to take a year for them to get back to full fitness.”
As for the secret to her horses’ success, it’s put down to a well-planned training programme and a healthy diet, like any good athlete.
“They have a racehorse mix, there’s so much stuff in it. They get hay as well, as much hay as they want. So, they get fed three times a day. It’s a high-protein diet, just like a bodybuilder!”
As for spotting potential, Sheila said: “You can usually tell if they’ve got a good attitude which is important. And then obviously speed is the most important thing. They need to be nicely balanced but usually you can tell. But sometimes they can take a few runs for the penny to drop.
“For starters, you just train them all the same. They’ll have three months from start to finish.
“The first two to three weeks is road work, getting them to ride on the road and harden their tendons. And they start cantering away and that will take about six weeks. Then they start doing fast work two to three times a week and then after about 12 weeks they’re usually ready to go.”