A boozy conversation at a friend’s wedding, racing pigeons and a rookie trainer’s meticulous blueprint to strike gold with his first Festival runner. Scottish Sun columnist and Racing TV analyst Ed Watson goes inside the Minella Study story.
Picture the scene. Champagne glasses are being refilled. Toasts are being raised. And sunrise is dawning on the morning after the big day before; one that was long in the planning yet which is now a wondrous new reality.
It’s how Cheltenham Festival week may well end for connections of the north’s great white hope of a rare Grade 1 success in Friday’s JCB Triumph Hurdle. Neatly, it’s also how the story of Minella Study - one of the prime contenders for a David-conquering-Goliath moment this week - took off last summer.
Adam Nicol and Ryan Mania were weighing-room contemporaries for half-a-dozen seasons before the latter exited the sport in 2014; then for one more after Mania returned to the saddle in 2019 and the former then hung up his to set up as a trainer in the shadow of the bewitching Bamburgh Castle in his native Northumberland.
They were never particularly close. Nor did their paths cross other than with the exchange of a polite ‘Hello’ or ‘Well done’ at the races. But that changed when both were guests at conditional jockey Ed Austin’s wedding in the Scottish Borders last August.
“You could say it came down to a bit of Dutch courage,” Mania, 37, laughs. “I’d had a couple of drinks by that point of the evening and I spotted Adam at the bar, so I went over. I hadn’t ridden a single horse for him before. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something along the lines of: ‘What’s going on, Adam? How come you never use me?’.
"Adam had driven up for the evening reception because he’d been working that day. He was sober. You know what it’s like, when you’ve had a drink or two you think you’re making perfect sense. At the time I thought I’d got my point across quite well, but looking back I dread to think what Adam made of it! Then again, it can’t have been that bad or else he wouldn’t have invited me in."
Looking for continuity on the track to supplement a small yet close-knit team of staff he says he couldn’t do the job without, Nicol took Mania up on his offer. “Ryan and I chatted at the bar for a bit,” he explains. “We’re about the same age and he said he had at least another four good years in him. He’d recently started working with Paul Robson, who trains just on the other side of the A1 at Hazelrigg, and asked if he could come in and ride out here too. He didn’t even want to be paid for it.
“I went away and thought about it and felt we would benefit from having someone to ride the horses regularly. Because of their other commitments, it’s not easy to get the likes Brian Hughes, Jamie Hamilton or Danny McMenamin when you want them. I have to say I’ve been very impressed with Ryan. He comes in once a week and has never missed a day since we started working together. Along with Josh Thompson, who we also use a lot, it’s brought consistency and continuity to what we do. You can see that in our results this season.”
Mania’s first ride for Nicol was on Speiriuil at Carlisle in the middle of October. His second was on Minella Study in the Listed Wensleydale Hurdle at Wetherby a fortnight later. Sent off an 8/1 shot, the duo survived a momentum-stopping mistake at the second-last to defeat 2/5 favourite Ammes (who’s towards the head of the betting for Tuesday’s McCoy Contractors Juvenile Handicap Hurdle) with more up his sleeve than the official winning margin implies.
“When Adam told me he was aiming Minella Study at the Wensleydale, I thought he was mad,” Mania confesses. “He’d won a maiden hurdle at Tipperary in July for John Nallen but the Wensleydale was going to be his first run over hurdles for Adam.
“I said would it not be better to start a bit more low-key, but he was adamant that was where we were going. Fair play to Adam because I was wrong and he was right. That’s the thing with Adam, everything is so well thought through. He’s extremely detailed in his approach. Every winner he has, there’s always a plan behind it."
Fourteen so far, comfortably surpassing last season’s personal best of eight, at a healthy strike-rate of 18 per cent attest to that. Friday will see Nicol break more new ground with his first Festival runner, but that doesn’t mean the 36-year-old is succumbing to imposter syndrome at going head to head with messrs Mullins, Elliott, Henderson and Skelton in the rarefied air of a Festival Grade 1.
Not when he’s long been used to competing at an elite level in another sport - pigeon racing. “I’ve kept pigeons since I was eight,” reveals Nicol, as our conversation takes an unexpected twist. “I have around 150 of them in a loft here.
“There are two categories of pigeon racing. For the older birds, there are approximately 16 races in the season. The first one is coming up soon, on April 4. The other category is for younger birds, which are hatching now. There are eight races starting in the middle of August. Last season I won seven of those eight races, including as far away as Maidstone in Kent and Eastbourne in East Sussex.
“I look after them in between the horses. I get up at 5am to feed the horses, then it’s on to feed and exercise the pigeons before the staff come in to ride out at 7.30am. That takes us through to about 12.30pm. Then there’s all the other stuff to do after that if we’re not away racing. My partner Jennie and I also have a five-year-old daughter. We’re never short of things to do.”
Timing is very much of the essence for Team Nicol. Come Friday, it will be three months to the day since Minella Study last set hoof on a racecourse. That was on December Gold Cup day at Cheltenham, when he stormed home six-and-a-half lengths clear of Winston Junior (also one of the market leaders for the McCoy Contractors Hurdle) in the Triumph Trial over the same New course and distance as Friday’s curtain-raiser.
Stats geeks will point to a trend that shows 26 of the last 27 Triumph winners had their final run in an 18 to 55-day window prior to the big day. Just like talk over his lack of Festival experience, however, Nicol remains completely unfazed.
"Minella Study’s preparation has gone perfectly,” he says confidently. “We haven’t missed a day with him. We decided not to go to Musselburgh for their Trials Weekend, but we took him there with some of our other horses for a schooling day last week. He was exactly the same weight going there as he was when he won at Cheltenham. So it’s not like he needed that gallop to improve his fitness or that we’re chasing our tail with him to get him ready for the Triumph. He’s exactly where we want him.
“He’s an experienced horse for a juvenile already. He ran twice at the backend of his two-year-old season. He won his maiden hurdle in July and is unbeaten in three runs over hurdles now, so he’s got plenty of race experience under his belt. He has a great constitution too.
“There are many ways to skin a cat and I’d much rather he was a fresh horse going to Cheltenham, than give him another run just for the sake of it. I’m not at all worried he’s not run since December. It’s something we’ve done deliberately. We took him to Bamburgh Beach the other day for a canter and to let him dip his legs in the water. He’s as fit as a flea.”
All of which leaves Nicol and Mania - who’s also chasing a breakthrough Grade 1 victory to complete a professional bucket list that includes Grand National glory on Auroras Encore in 2013 and a Festival success aboard Vintage Clouds in the 2021 Ultima Chase - counting down the hours and minutes until tape rise.
Nicol is a creature of habit. He believes horses are too. “I’m big on that,” says Nicol, who rode the inimitable Lady Buttons to 12 of her 15 career wins. “Minella Study has already proven himself on the New Course, which I think is a massive positive, especially for a juvenile. Not all horses handle Cheltenham. Lady Buttons was the best horse I ever rode, and one of the best horses to come out of the north in the last 15-odd years, but she didn’t handle it.
“Because of that, I was keen to test the water to see if Minella Study would by going for the Triumph Trial. To see how well he handled not only the track, but the whole experience of travelling down there, staying away overnight and then producing a performance like that is very reassuring.”
If it ain’t broke, don’t attempt to fix it then? “Precisely,” Nicol adds. “We’re going to do exactly the same this week as we did in December. We’ll leave here around 8.30am on Thursday morning so that we can get to Cheltenham during the racing and miss most of the traffic. We’ll then just follow the same routine that worked so well in December.”
Nicol is still pinching himself that he managed to get hold of a horse like Minella Study. “I keep saying he slipped through Ireland’s back pocket,” he chuckles. “My best guess is some folk thought ‘it’s only a maiden hurdle at Tipperary in the summer’ that he won and passed him over because of that. But he’s a very well-bred horse, by Study Of Man and imposing with it. When Marcus Collie, the bloodstock agent who also found us Wise Eagle, sent me some photos of Minella Study, I knew we had to get him.”
Fate also played its part. Malcolm Humble, a local businessman, had contacted Nicol earlier last summer about how he and wife Carol could take their first steps into ownership. Nicol was still trying to source them the right horse when Minella Study came on to the market.
“Malcolm and I went down to Doncaster Sales a couple of months earlier to try to find him something,” Nicol explains. “We looked at two or three horses, but I didn’t feel they were quite right, so we left them and drove back up the road with an empty horsebox. Malcolm was a bit deflated, but I think he also realised I wasn’t going to spend his money just for the sake of it.”
The wait was worth it. Six months on, the Humbles are heading to the Festival with a genuine chance of winning a Grade 1. “It’s amazing to think this is Malcolm and Carol’s first horse,” Nicol says, almost shaking his head in disbelief. “Minella Study’s first run for us was on the Flat at Musselburgh in October, two-and-a-half weeks before Wetherby as it turned out. Malcolm and Carol were away in Greece for their 20th wedding anniversary, but I said I really needed to get a run into him. So the first time they went to see him run in person was at Wetherby. The second was at Cheltenham before Christmas."
Bringing up the hat-trick on Friday would be some Triumph.
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