'the jumping game'.

​I dare say it is because at heart I am unromantic and cynical, an all-round miserable sod, that my surname namesake, Henrietta Knight, has never really tickled my fancy. She was, and may prove to remain, a top-class trainer of steeplechasers and I admire and respect her allegiance to the sport. Yet I have never warmed to her, which is doubtless my loss, not her loss.
I do though warm to her as a writer of racing books and I particularly enjoyed ‘Starting From Scratch’ (Inspired To Be A Jump Jockey), which sits next to Terry Biddlecombe’s autobiography ‘Winner’s Disclosure’ on the bookshelf here. Her 2018 publication ‘The Jumping Game’ will also sit next to her late husband’s book, which will require displacing one other book and attempting to find room for it on another shelf as it is unthinkable for Henrietta’s two books not to stand either side of Terry’s book.
I have come late to ‘The Jumping Game’ and should have purchased it when it first came out. Why I erred, I cannot say. Sometimes important matters either pass me by or slip my memory. ‘The Jumping Game’ is an accompaniment to ‘Starting From Scratch’, with the theme of ‘How National Hunt Trainers Work and What Makes Them Tick’. As with most sporting books when as soon as they are published, they gradually become more and more out-of-date and reading ‘The Jumping Game five-years after publication is akin to reading a history book.
In 2018, for instance, Willie Mullins had not trained a Cheltenham Gold Cup winner, whereas in 2024 he has bagged three, with a fourth most likely waiting on the horizon for him. Paul Nicholls and Nicky Henderson remain the top two trainers of National Hunt horses in Britain, with no one coming out of the pack to challenge their supremacy, though as he has done since 2018, Dan Skelton continues to strive to close the gap.
What Henrietta skilfully achieved in this book, is that though she is happy to give her opinion, she doesn’t directly challenge the training principles of the trainers she visited. For instance, she is a proponent of loose schooling horses, sending around a barn jumping without a rider on their backs. Other trainers do not loose school their horses, and yet every trainer she visited is equally successful if you take into account the differences in number or quality of the horses under their care.
She only mentions Best Mate five-times and her late husband Terry 7-times, which displayed great restraint. It would have been very easy to boast about her past achievements and compared herself to the trainers who consented to be interviewed for the book. It is obvious that she is greatly respected in the racing world and would be a vaunted visitor to any racing yard. What would be interesting, given she did give the slightest of hints in the book that she had not entirely ruled out returning to the training ranks, is how she might have changed her approach to training after inspecting all the different training surfaces, stable routines and thoughts of the participants who comprise the book.
Though she definitely has her own long-held opinions, augmented by the wisdom imparted by Terry during their partnership, she is a thoughtful woman and would not be slow to change tack if she considered improvement could be found in adopting someone else’s methods.
I thought the chapter on Peter Bowen was the most enlightening and that the two principles most top trainers adhere to are air-flow through stables and barns and turning horses out into paddocks during the day, both with the aim of horses getting as much clean air into their lungs as possible. What surprised me the most – Venetia Williams does not believe in grooming horses, which flies in the face of everything I have believed in and what all the great trainers of the past believed in and what is advocated in all the horse management books I have read. Grooming, I have always believed, stimulated the oils in the skin to produce a shiny coat. Apparently, though, it can make horses grumpy. We live and learn, and in this case, dispute. Not that I would dare challenge Venetia on the subject as I suspect she would eat me alive.