Barry Hills with Haafhd following his 2000 Guineas win

Barry Hills: From Rheingold to Further Flight

By John Ingles

Horse Racing

Sun June 29, 2025 · 6M ago

John Ingles recalls some of the highlights of the late Barry Hills' remarkable training career.

If attracting top owners is any measure of a trainer’s standing, then Barry Hills was up with the best in his profession. In the course of his career which spanned seven decades, Hills’ owners included Robert Sangster, Khalid Abdulla and members of the Maktoum family, along with Timeform founder Phil Bull.

‘Training, as I have always said, is the critical factor’ said Bull in a letter to Vincent O’Brien in 1973. ‘I’m very happy with Barry Hills. I regard him as one of the very best trainers over here, and he is a most acceptable and agreeable person.’

Bull never won a Classic as an owner, but Hills went closer than most to fulfilling that ambition for him, with Aureoletta finishing third in the Oaks in 1973. It’s not hard to see why renowned punter Bull held Hills in such high esteem.

After all, Hills had bankrolled the start of his training career from a successful gamble on the 1968 Lincoln winner. Working at the time as travelling head lad to Newmarket trainer John Oxley, Hills and his associates began backing Frankincense for the Lincoln after he started beating the stable’s other entry, Copper’s Evidence, on the gallops.

‘Copper’s Evidence was a pretty good horse – he eventually finished fifth in the race – but I went out and started backing Frankincense at 66/1’ Hills said in his biography Frankincense and More. ‘We backed him from 66/1 to 5/1 favourite, though he drifted back on the day. He was a certainty. He worked on Side Hill in Newmarket one day and beat the others out of sight. You didn’t need to see any more. We toured round bookmakers’ shops putting small bets on everywhere.’

Hills was to train the Lincoln winner himself in 2003, with Pablo, while several other top handicaps featured among his career total of more than 3,000 winners. They included the Royal Hunt Cup, Ebor, Cambridgeshire and Cesarewitch, while his four wins in the Chester Cup constitutes a record, with both of his twin sons Michael and Richard riding a winner for their father in that race. When Hills retired in 2011, only four other trainers had reached the 3,000 mark on the Flat in Britain.

Hills’ best horse actually came along very early in his career and must have played a large part in attracting those top owners. In the same year that Aureoletta was third in the Oaks, four-year-old stablemate Rheingold (Timeform rating 137) won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe to provide Lester Piggott with his first win in the race.

The year before, Rheingold had finished second in the Derby (ironically, beaten a head by the Piggott-ridden Roberto) and the Derby remained a race Hills was destined never to win despite saddling the runner-up on three more occasions.

He enjoyed classic success elsewhere, though, with Enstone Spark winning the 1000 Guineas in 1978 and Tap On Wood the 2000 Guineas a year later. Sheikh Mohammed’s Moonax sprung a 40/1 shock in the St Leger (son John trained the runner-up Broadway Flyer ridden by his brother Michael), while Sheikh Hamdan was the owner of Hills’ last two classic winners, Haafhd in the 2004 2000 Guineas – he went to win the Champion Stakes – and Ghanaati, who had only won a maiden at Kempton beforehand, in the 2009 1000 Guineas.

Hills described Haafhd’s 2000 Guineas win – with son Richard riding in his capacity as Sheikh Hamdan’s first jockey – as ‘the sweetest day since Rheingold won the Arc in 1973.’ But the rider of Hills’ much earlier 2000 Guineas winner Tap On Wood had been significant too.

Steve Cauthen went on to become champion jockey for Henry Cecil’s stable, but it was for Hills that he made an immediate impact on his arrival from America as the ‘Kentucky Kid’. Cauthen’s very first ride in Britain, on the Hills-trained Marquee Universal at Salisbury, was a winning one, with Tap On Wood’s classic victory coming just weeks later.

Cauthen also won the 1984 Gold Cup for Hills on Gildoran in the colours of Robert Sangster who had been instrumental in bringing the teenager to Britain. Based at Lambourn for most of his training career, Hills trained at Sangster’s Manton establishment for a short time.

A couple of other top winners Hills trained for Sangster show that he could get the best out of horses with very diverse distance requirements. On the one hand there was high-class sprinter Handsome Sailor, who was one of Hills’ two Nunthorpe winners, and was awarded the Prix de l’Abbaye, and on the other there was Stayers’ Hurdle winner Nomadic Way who had won the Cesarewitch earlier in his career.

Two other performers at opposite ends of the spectrum are also worth mentioning when it comes to Hills’ training achievements. The filly Nagwa won 13 races as a two-year-old in 1975, also finishing runner-up five times from a total of 20 starts that year. And then there was popular grey stayer Further Flight who won 24 of his 70 races in a career spanning ten years. The 1990 Ebor winner also counted two Goodwood Cups and a Doncaster Cup among his many wins, but it was Newmarket’s Jockey Club Cup which he made his own, becoming the first horse to win the same pattern race five times with his victories coming between 1991 and 1995.

Apart from leaving behind memories of some fine horses, Barry Hills also founded his own dynasty in the sport. Further Flight’s regular jockey Michael Hills, twin Richard and their late brother John who died in 2014 (after which his father briefly took up a licence again) have all been mentioned, and it’s another son, Charlie, who is now successfully keeping the Hills name to the fore in the training ranks.

Barry Hills: From Rheingold to Further Flight

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