The 14-time champion trainer and Betfair Ambassador Paul Nicholls talks us through some of his horses to follow for the campaign, and how Team Ditcheat have got on throughout the summer as they build up to a busy season.
I am chasing 4000 winners and Martin Pipe’s British winners record this season.
The summer has been a good one for us. I’ve invested a lot in new facilities at Ditcheat, so we have a new Wexford sand canter, a new schooling facility which has already been useful. I’ve bought lots of nice new young horses and recruited some good new owners, or they’ve recruited me, depending on how you want to look at it. It’s exciting to look forward to a new season.
We have just got to be a bit careful with the lack of rain we have had. With the all-weather gallops we’ve got, it’s never a problem cracking on with them, but you don’t want to get horses too ready and then not be able to run them. We’ve already seen Wincanton, Warwick, Kempton, and Exeter meetings called off and there are going to be issues if it doesn’t rain soon for upcoming other meetings.
This year we are all going to need to be more patient. At Chepstow this weekend (October 9-11), for example, I will have four runners. Normally, I would have a dozen running there. The chase races at Chepstow were cancelled and may go elsewhere.
The lack of rain makes life tricky but at this time of year we are always on a knife-edge, worrying about the ground and hoping for rain. Hopefully we can get the rain that means we can crack on in November, December and January, get plenty of experience and find out what we’ve got.
I think I’m eight short of beating Martin Pipe’s record of GB National Hunt winners and need 48 winners to have 4000 across all codes. Those are great milestones and it would be nice to think we could crack both this season. If so, I will be looking forward to reaching 5000 winners!! In the meantime, we will definitely take the staff out and have a good time celebrating when we get it done.
When I started as a trainer, I never thought we’d get near these sorts of numbers. We have been incredibly lucky. It shows what a fantastic place Ditcheat is and that when it works it works very well. A lot of our success is about the players we have in our team and hopefully we are building up a nice team again over the next few years.
We have earned over £2m in prize money for the owners over the last 24 seasons and hope to do so again this year. I always like to get 100 winners for the season but that is just a number and really what we want to do is just keep winning and training young horses who might be the future.
Chasers to follow
It is a shame that he missed last season with an injury, but it won’t be lost on him and a bit of time off the track has not done him any harm. I love winning the Betfair Chase, I’ve won it six times and would love to win it again. I don’t think I’ll have him ready to win the Betfair Chase this season, but I may start him off in it, because he needs to go left-handed, and he should be ready to run. We’ve done a lot with him already and have still got plenty of time.
In the spring there are targets and, whether he ends up being a Cheltenham Gold Cup horse or a Ryanair horse, he will tell us by then. Or whether we run him in something like the Cotswold Chase, that again will tell us if he truly is a stayer.
I will enter him in Ireland over Christmas, or in February. Three miles at Leopardstown, where he’s won before, would suit him, even though those races are ultra-competitive, because there’s nothing much for him in the UK at the time. I just want to get him back on track as he is a hugely exciting horse.
There is a lot of improvement to come from him. We haven’t seen the best of him, mentally as much as anything, and physically he was always going to take a while. I think he was struggling with his breathing, in fact I know he was, so he had a wind-op in the summer which helped him mentally and he’s a much more relaxed horse this year. He’s grown up.
I’ve always thought a good second season novice has a chance in something like the Coral Gold Cup so he might have one run somewhere before, in something like the Colin Parker Memorial Intermediate Chase, or he could go straight to the Coral Gold Cup, which we have won four times and twice as a jockey.
There is more to come from him. The Grand National is not on the cards for him this year, although maybe one day, and to be a Cheltenham Gold Cup horses he must improve a lot. But you never know.
I always thought he would get three miles, and I probably should’ve run him in the Albert Bartlett at the Cheltenham Festival, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. He’s won a Challow Hurdle, probably not the strongest one but he won it very well. The horses with which I’ve won the Challow have been fantastic chasers like Denman, Bravemansgame, Stage Star etc so I’d like to think No Drama This End might follow down that route and be a better chaser than hurdler. He won’t run until the ground gets soft or easy as he needs plenty of cut.
Is he my potential Grand National horse? He could be. He likes soft ground but whether it is a year to soon for him we will see. We will run him in the Welsh National if there is cut in the ground and there’s a race that the Barber family are sponsoring at Taunton that we would like to go for over three and a half miles.
In the spring, we will decide whether to train him for Aintree or go to the Midlands National and the Scottish National again. He will tell us but, whether it is this year that he runs in the Grand National or the year after, he will have an entry. He is a really exciting stayer on soft ground.
He goes chasing this season. He’s only a four-year-old so will get a handy bit of allowance at the start of the season. He jumps nicely and will ultimately get two-and-a-half but you need a good two-and-a-half miler to be a good two-mile chaser. He will leave his hurdling form behind him and be a better chasing horse.
I’d like to think he can be a better chaser than hurdler. As mentioned, that is often the way with a lot of our horses. He needs some experience, we have schooled him a lot already this season and he’s jumping nicely, but he needs to do it on the track, and he will have an entry at Ffos Las on Wednesday.
Ultimately, he could be a very nice chaser. In terms of what he wants, let’s see what happens with his first run and then we’ll decide what trip he wants. Nothing is set in stone yet.
He is a novice for the season which is a bonus. He may start off in the intermediate chase at Newton Abbot on the 17 October and he will have an entry in the Paddy Power Gold Cup. We will also keep an eye on all the novice chases for him.
There are lots of options for him and he could be a very exciting horse this season. He doesn’t want the ground too soft.
Hurdlers to follow
He’s on pretty much the same mark as Tutti Quanti was last year and I’d like to go down the same sort of route by entering Minella Yoga in the Gerry Feilden Hurdle at Newbury, possibly after a run at Ascot if it rains at the end of this month. If the Gerry Feilden goes well for him then we could enter him in the old Betfair Handicap Hurdle in February. If he ran in the Gerry Feilden and didn’t look like he was well handicapped, he could always switch to chasing. But I’ve got in my mind that he will progress this season and go chasing next year.
In terms of where the ceiling lies for Minella Yoga, look at Tutti Quanti last year. He started off the same mark and ended up in the 150s, so who knows what will happen with Minella Yoga. He is only a young horse and is entitled to improve.
He won his only bumper at Chepstow, and we thought he would win that day. He runs in the Maiden Hurdle on Saturday at Chepstow which is the same meeting in which Bravemansgame made his debut over hurdles and went on to win the Grade 1 Challow Novices’ Hurdle that same season.
Who knows how good Stick To The Board might be? We like him and hopefully he’ll win us plenty of novice hurdles. I’ve worked out that he wants two-and-a-half miles. He’s a galloper.
He’s a big baby and has taken plenty of time to mature and was a bit green when he ran, but he has definitely improved a lot for being older and stronger. He jumps very nicely. He still needs more practice to get that where we want it. He won’t run until November, but he is an exciting horse. What did he beat and where will he end up? Who knows but we like him. He’d get two-and-a-half without a shadow of a doubt. He’s not slow though.
It is difficult at this stage to know where horses will end up. There are four or five that could be my Challow Hurdle horse this year but, until they run, we don’t know.
He was second in his only point to point to a good horse named Tendoo. He won nicely at Chepstow in April when we thought he would win. He’s got a bit more speed than some of the others and could perhaps start off over two miles. Again, after he has run, he will tell us what he wants but he is another exciting type for us.
I like him. He’s yet to win but Bravemansgame never won in any of his bumpers then improved for a summer and I think this horse has improved too. He’s one I’ve always liked and physically I think you will see improvement when he jumps over hurdles.
New Rules is a Walk In The Park. He won his only point to point last year but again, you never know what he beat, but he was impressive and we liked what we saw in the spring. The ground was always too fast to run him in a bumper, and he is not a bumper horse. A two-and-a-half maiden hurdle somewhere in mid-November, on soft ground, would be ideal and then we will make a plan for the future.
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