John Ingles charts Gavin Cromwell's career from shoeing Cheltenham Festival winners to training them.
Until last week, five trainers had trained both a Champion Hurdle and a Gold Cup winner this century. But just six years after Espoir d’Allen won the Champion Hurdle, Inothewayurthinkin’s victory in the Gold Cup meant that his trainer Gavin Cromwell joined Nicky Henderson, Willie Mullins, Paul Nicholls, Jessica Harrington and Henry de Bromhead in achieving the same feat.
Cromwell, though, is a newcomer compared with the other trainers in that list, at least at the top table; De Bromhead started training in 2000 while the rest all began their training careers before the millennium. Cromwell had his first runners in the 2005/06 season but trained one or two winners at most each year until around ten years ago and it’s only in the last seven seasons that his career has taken off.
In fact, Espoir d’Allen, who was a surprise winner of the Champion Hurdle when successful at 16/1 in 2019, was Cromwell’s very first Festival winner just two years after sending his first runners to Cheltenham. The common factor in Cromwell’s Champion Hurdle and Gold Cup winners is JP McManus – both were also ridden by Mark Walsh – and patronage from jumping’s biggest owner goes a long way to explaining Cromwell’s rapid rise in the training ranks in recent seasons.
He therefore has plenty to thank the mare Jer’s Girl for. As a juvenile, she won her first two starts over hurdles, including a listed contest at Aintree, in her breeder’s colours before she attracted the attention of the McManus team. Her first run for her new owner was a successful one against older rivals in the Grade 1 mares’ novice hurdle at Fairyhouse and she promptly followed up with another Grade 1 win, this time against older geldings, in the Tattersalls Ireland Champion Novice Hurdle at Punchestown.
While Jer’s Girl didn’t win any more races, she did run in a couple of Mares’ Hurdles at Cheltenham, just getting into the race when falling three out in 2017 and not disgraced when fifth a year later.
On the back of Jer’s Girl’s success, McManus sent Cromwell the three-year-old Espoir d’Allen who had won his only start in a French bumper. He proceeded to win eight of his nine starts over hurdles but tragically never got to build on his top-class Champion Hurdle performance at the age of just five as he failed to recover from a freak injury sustained when rearing over shortly after his return to training later the same year.
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Other horses advertised Cromwell’s training skills around the same time, though, including Raz de Maree at the other end of the age scale. Formerly trained by Dessie Hughes, whom Cromwell had worked for in his school holidays, Raz de Maree was 11 by the time Cromwell took him on and had just turned 13 when winning the postponed Welsh Grand National in the 2017/18 season.
Although still best known for his jumpers, Cromwell began to make his mark on the Flat too and in 2018 won the Group 2 Prix de Royallieu at Longchamp on Arc weekend with the smart filly Princess Yaiza. More recently, a couple of Royal Ascot two-year-old winners, Quick Suzy in the 2021 Queen Mary and Snellen in the 2023 Chesham, have been sprinkled among the stable’s big-race winners over jumps, while Mighty Eriu went close at 50/1 in last season’s Queen Mary.
Cromwell had ambitions to be a jockey at one time but became a farrier by trade. Alongside that, training was little more than a hobby to begin with which explains the few winners in his early years with a licence after 25/1 winner Dodder Walk had got him off the mark from bottom weight in a handicap hurdle at Cork in April 2007.
When Cromwell shod the 2015 Gold Cup winner Don Cossack for his County Meath neighbour Gordon Elliott, he probably couldn’t have imagined he’d be training the winner of the same race ten years later. Likewise, he was also responsible for shoeing Apple’s Jade, Elliott’s favourite for the Champion Hurdle that Espoir d’Allen ended up winning.
Even though he’d trained a Champion Hurdle winner, Cromwell said at the time that he had no plans to give up farriery, not least because it helped pay the bills for his string which by then numbered 45. ‘You’d need to train 145 horses to make a decent living’ Cromwell claimed. Well, six years later, his expanded Danestown stables can now accommodate 150 horses, and the farriery has gradually given way to full-time training.
Until the latest season, Cromwell’s Cheltenham Festival raiding parties remained in single figures, in contrast to likes of Mullins and Elliott, but punched above their weight. Two more Grade 1 wins followed in 2021 when Flooring Porter won the Stayers’ Hurdle and Vanillier the Albert Bartlett, with Flooring Porter repeating his victory a year later. Last season, Inothewayurthinkin gained his first Festival win in the Fulke Walwyn Kim Muir while his sister Limerick Lace landed the Mares’ Chase.
Cromwell’s runners in Britain in general, not just at the Festival, need respecting. The stable had 14 winners over jumps in Britain during the 2023/24 season at a 23% strike rate, when highlights away from Cheltenham included Yeah Man winning the Grand National Trial at Haydock and Inothewayurthinkin going on to win the Mildmay Novices’ Chase at Aintree.
This term, the stable has already passed its previous best total for an Irish jumps season of 72 (as recently as 2017/18 that total stood at just eight), including wins in a couple of Ireland’s most valuable handicap chases, with Flooring Porter winning the Kerry National and Perceval Legallois the Paddy Power Chase. The latter also won a valuable handicap hurdle at the Dublin Racing Festival where Hello Neighbour won the Grade 1 juvenile hurdle.
The stable had much greater representation at this year’s Cheltenham Festival with 26 runners, and while Stumptown in the Cross Country Chase was the only other winner besides Inothewayurthinkin, five more were runner-up and three finished third.
While Cromwell hasn’t been tempted to turn out Inothewayurthinkin quickly in a bid to capitalise on what would have been a very lenient weight in the Grand National, he still looks to have the strongest hand of any trainer at Aintree with Stumptown and Vanillier (runner-up in 2023 and third to his stablemate in the Cross Country despite nearly taking the wrong course) both leading contenders in addition to the McManus-owned Perceval Legallois.
Success at Aintree, of course, would put Cromwell among the still smaller group of trainers to have added a Grand National to their Champion Hurdle/Gold Cup wins this century.
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