WHY ARE RACEHORSE TRAINERS' BAD TEMPERED?

​This, I realise, is an unfair and an overly generalised statement, though in my limited and by now historical experience racehorse, trainers are either short tempered or downright eccentric to the point of madness.
What has stirred the memory is John Budden’s biography of the late, and I must say great, Gordon W. Richards. From no personal experience the master of Greystoke was always a favoured trainer of mine, as his son Nicky is nowadays. The W, by the way, stood for Waugh and was undreamed-of by his father who simply wanted to name his son in honour of the champion flat jockey Sir Gordon Richards. Of course when Gordon Richards the Jack Waugh apprentice first appeared at the weigh scales he was told he could not call himself Gordon Richards as it might cause confusion given that the champion jockey carried the same name. Someone suggested the initial W for Waugh and the legend that was to become Gordon W. Richards began.
‘The Boss’. The title of John Budden’s biography, is a trip down memory lane for someone of my vintage. Not only the names of G.W.R.’s good horses, Playlord, Titus Oates, Man Alive, Twin Oaks, The Grey Monk, Lord Greystoke, Noddy’s Ryde and so many others but rival horses such as Cockle Strand, Brawny Scot, Arcturus, Fearless Fred, What A Myth – the list is positively endless. And that is without listing the jockeys of the era.
The two aspects of G.W.R’s character that are emphasised in the book is his love and understanding of horses and the quickness of his temper when he thought one of his jockeys had either disobeyed orders or rode a poor race. He was never wrong, it seems, though he would listen to the thoughts of those around him. But his dictum in life was ‘doing the job his way’, a governing thought process learned from his apprenticeships with the flat trainer Jack Waugh and the trainer of Brown Jack, Ivor Anthony, two men that G.W.R. admired and respected.
It seems that in one way or another G.W.R. sacked every stable jockey he employed, including Ron Barry, perhaps the favourite of all his jockeys. It is significant, and reflects the respect he engendered, that at his funeral Ron Barry rode Better Times Ahead, one of Gordon’s last good horses, at the head of the cortege.
Although I say G.W.R. sacked his stable jockeys some claim it was just a natural parting of the waves, as when Neale Doughty took over from Ron Barry. And of course once he had ‘blown his top’, which occasionally, and some would claim unforgivably, could be in the unsaddling enclosure and in public view, he would never mention the ‘discretion’ again. Letting sleeping dogs lie was never a mantra close to his heart.
In defence of trainers they are in the difficult situation of being both the boss and the hired hand, their loyalties stretched in opposite directions. In one way you can say a trainer is only middle management, even the likes of Mullins, Elliot, Henderson and Nicholls, with owners dispensing likes, preferences and orders, which, to paraphrase the incomparable Sir Mark Prescott, 99% of his staff and horses are trying to make impossible to bring to fruition. Being a racehorse trainer must be one of the most stressful self-employed occupations there is. I used to question why top trainers employ so many assistants but without a team of underlings to delegate to the job would send a lone commander to the nearest asylum. Horses will injure themselves anyway they can; in their stable, in a paddock, walking down the road, whilst being shod, eating its food, and riders can aid and abet them by falling off, by allowing them to stand on a stone, by riding too close to a known kicker or bucker, by being run away with – again the list of possible calamity is endless. And to add to the stress and worry a trainer must be diplomatic with owners who appear without warning or who phone at inappropriate moments, often with ideas that go against sense or the long term well-being of their horse.
When a jockey riding an expensive horse, owned by someone (or a syndicate) who is giving grief on a daily basis to the trainer, is unseated at the last when ten lengths clear or is beaten in a photo-finish due in no small way to being squeezed on the run-in or because he made his effort too early or too late, someone I suppose will have to take what comes out of the fan. It must be as impossible as trying to whistle the national anthem whilst walking on shards of glass to take defeat with good grace when your business and future relies so heavily on winning races for owners who want a return on their ‘investment’. And if that is the name of the game for the top trainers, it must be as cutting as a racial slur for the trainer struggling with a dozen horses of limited ability to watch certain victory ripped from his or her grasp.
Racehorse trainers are the way they are for a reason. When you invest all of your finances, the future of your family, I would suggest, in a venture that though as close to the heart as family is at best like skating on thin ice, it must affect the mind when calamity small and large visits.
When next you are being told by a red-cheeked employer that you are ‘a useless addition to the human race’ smile and turn the other cheek and show pity and understanding as you might just be a sounding board to a man (or woman) staring into the abyss of financial disaster or mental disorder.