captain ryan price; there'll never be another.

​I must confess, I have a fondness for Captain Ryan Price, a man, I suggest, more misunderstood than any other racing trainer of the last hundred-years. I never knew him, knew no one who knew him and doubtless would have been frightened of him if I worked for him or had a horse trained by him. But he was hard-done by at times by both racing hierarchy and press and yet he kept on bouncing back just as good at his job as ever.
As many reporters, jockeys and I dare say staff, could testify, he had a good old bark on him when the mood took him. He was no diplomat, that is for sure. Yet behind the gruff, regimental exterior was an animal lover, a trainer who gave his good horses an honourable retirement and whose stable jockeys were as loyal to him as he was to them. Why stewards of the Jockey Club had it in for him is a story largely untold.
I very much doubt if Captain Price was squeaky-clean. You wouldn’t really want him to be. I dare say he ‘fiddled about on occasion with horses in order to hoodwink bookmakers, giving horses ‘educational’ runs as most trainers were prone to do back in the days prior to the phalanx of cameras used today on racecourses. He nursed the horses in his care to give them longevity and he won many a race with ageing horses. He won the 1966 Cesarewitch with the eight-year-old Persian Lancer, five-years after the horse first ran in the race. Captain Price had previously won the Cesarewitch with Utrillo in 1963. If you have John Hughes & Peter Watson’s book ‘My Greatest Training Triumph’ on your bookshelf (a good read, by the way) you will find a photo of Captain Price with Persian Lancer taken sixteen-years after his Cesarewitch triumph.
Of course, the great man, he died in 1986, is really only known today for his association with the early years of the Schweppes Gold Trophy, the big 2-mile handicap hurdle run at Newbury in February. The inaugural running was at Aintree during the Grand National meeting which he won with the novice Rosyth. Nothing controversial that year but the race the following year has become a racing cause celebre.
Rosyth was prone to break blood vessels, which he did in most of his races up to the second running of the Schweppes. He was also a Spring horse, as some horses mysteriously can be. Having run unplaced all season, the Newbury stewards were suspicious that Price had ‘kept’ Rosyth for this one day and asked him to explain the improvement in form. He told them about the breaking blood vessels and how the horse waited for the spring to bloom but the Jockey Club did not believe him and he had his licence removed for 4-months, with no guarantee he would get it back. Josh Gifford also received a similar suspension.
His horses were dispersed to other trainers for the duration, some were never returned to him. Anglo went to Fred Winter, for instance, won the Grand National and stayed with Winter.
Having won the first two Schweppes Trophies, he was in no position to stop someone else winning it in 1965, though Rosyth, trained during Price’s suspension by Tom Masson, proving that the horse was indeed a spring horse, finished second. In 1966 he won it again with Le Vermontois and again in 1967, this time with Hill House, who had finished ‘only’ fourth at Sandown seven-days before. Again, the Newbury stewards were disgruntled with Price, this time, it seemed with greater reason as Hill House failed a dope test, testing positive for the steroid cortisol.
Press and punters, as I recall, labelled Price a ‘wrong ‘un’ and were forced to eat humble pie when after exhaustive examination by Newmarket vets, the whole affair rambled on for six-months, Hill House was found to have a naturally high occurrence of cortisol in his system. In effect, he was doping himself. Price was exonerated of wrong-doing and added to his achievements over jumps, he won the Grand National with Kilmore and the Cheltenham Gold Cup with old-timer What a Myth, by being just as successful on the flat, winning amongst other major races the Oaks and the St.Leger.
Captain Price was a Marmite character; I suspect as many people loved and respected him as did not. But his two stable jockeys when he was a jumps trainer were Fred Winter and Josh Gifford and you would be hard-pushed to find anyone with a harsh word to say about either of them and that tells me that Captain Henry Ryan Price was far more a saint than he ever was a sinner.
In remuneration to his memory, as acceptance that he was wrongly found guilty of not running a horse on its merits by the sport’s then governing body, there should be some kind of memorial to Ryan Price, if only a handicap hurdle at Fontwell or novice chase at Plumpton.