Pipe and Nicholls: rivals and record breakers

Horse Racing

Sun November 15, 2026 · 1h ago

John Ingles looks at the rivalry between multiple champion trainers Martin Pipe and Paul Nicholls and the records they have set.

It’s now twenty years since Martin Pipe retired at the end of a hugely successful training career which brought him fifteen titles as champion jumps trainer between 1988/89 and 2004/05. His dominance in that period was challenged only by David Nicholson for a couple of seasons. Those fifteen titles constitute just one of the many records which Pipe set during his career. Two more of his records still stood at the start of the current season – the most winners trained over jumps in Britain and the most winners trained in a jumps season – but the first of those was equalled on Saturday when Fasol won at Windsor for Paul Nicholls and the second is also on the way to being beaten.

Reigning champion trainer Dan Skelton announced his intention to make an assault on Pipe’s record number of winners in a season at the start of the current campaign. Skelton trained 194 winners when becoming champion for the first time last season, though had already become the only trainer other than Pipe to break the double century barrier back in 2018/19 when training 205 winners but finishing only third in the trainers’ championship, which is decided by prize money, behind Nicholls and Nicky Henderson.

Pipe trained more than two hundred winners in a season on eight occasions, including when becoming champion for the first time, and set his record of 243 in the 1999/2000 campaign despite the season not running for a full twelve months as it does now. Skelton is already well over halfway towards that target with 145 wins on the board and broke his own record for the fastest century on October 13. That was 13 days ahead of his previous best set in 2018/19 when he had broken Pipe’s fastest century which had come on November 3.

From modest beginnings starting with Hit Parade’s win in a selling hurdle at Taunton in May 1975 Pipe’s success eventually gathered considerable momentum. All those double centuries began to add up, so that when Bamapour became winner number 2,645 in a claiming hurdle at Newton Abbot in August 1999, Pipe passed the existing record set by Arthur Stephenson to become the most successful jumps trainer in Britain.

Martin Pipe

The son of a bookmaker, Pipe had no training background, but far from that being a handicap, it became the key to his success. Free from following conventions and traditions, he innovated with such newfangled ideas as blood testing and interval training which have since become widely adopted, while he was at the forefront of importing young horses from France, a source which has been important to the success of champion trainers ever since.

But there too was the problem. Ultimately, Pipe became a victim of his own success. As trainer Ted Walsh put it after Pipe’s retirement: "He showed all the young fellows coming up what to do and the old fellows what they were doing wrong."

Pipe's retirement came as a surprise when he announced his intention to step down on Channel 4’s Morning Line on the final day of the 2005/06 season. Some suggested it was timed to steal the headlines from Paul Nicholls who finally succeeded in toppling Pipe to become champion for the first time. In fact, Pipe finished only third in the trainers’ table in 2005/06, with Philip Hobbs taking the second spot on the final day at Sandown.

Pipe’s final career total of jumps winners in Britain, which Nicholls has now equalled, totalled 3,930. Pipe’s last two winners, Westender and Acambo at Haydock (the latter in the Swinton Handicap Hurdle), actually came early in the 2006/07 season before the licence at Pond House was officially taken up by son David.

Nicholls was foremost among the ‘young fellows coming up’ that Walsh had referred to, though he had been made to wait for his first championship having finished runner-up to Pipe for seven seasons in a row. Theirs was a local rivalry too, with their respective Somerset yards being not much more than thirty miles apart.

Paul Nicholls congratulates Dan Skelton on his first trainers' title

Dan Skelton and Paul Nicholls both have Pipe records in their sights

Nicholls had gone very close to getting the better of Pipe for the first time in 1998/99, a season when Nicholls registered his first Cheltenham Festival winners, notably See More Business in the Gold Cup. That moved Nicholls ahead of Pipe in the title race and he was still in front and 1/4 to take the title with less than three weeks until the end of the season which, for the final time, ended in late May. However, Pipe retained his title by little more than £50,000 after going all out in the final weeks and had effectively wrapped things up by the time he sent out eight winners on Spring Bank Holiday Monday, the penultimate day of the season.

‘Is he about to be overthrown?’ asked Chasers & Hurdlers at the beginning of Tiutchev’s essay in the 2003/04 annual at the end of a season when Nicholls was odds on to take the title from Pipe for much of its duration. Nicholls overtook Pipe before the turn of the year before Pipe went back in front in March, though with the score 4-2 in Nicholls’ favour at the Cheltenham Festival, where his winners included Azertyuiop in the Queen Mother Champion Chase, Pipe lost the lead again. After more swapping of the lead during Aintree (where Tiutchev did his bit for Pipe by winning the Martell Cognac Cup), Pipe emerged on top and held on after saddling three winners on the final day of the season at Sandown. They included Puntal in the Betfred Gold Cup who beat the Nicholls-trained Royal Auclair, a former Pond House inmate, by a short head.

But the fact that Pipe won the 2003/04 championship with his lowest total of winners in his last nine championships (except when foot and mouth intervened in 2000/01) was an indication that it might only be a matter of time before the trainers’ championship changed hands. Another blow to Pipe’s future dominance was that stable jockey Tony McCoy left to join J. P. McManus and Jonjo O’Neill at the end of that season.

Even so, Pipe held on as champion for one more season in 2004/05 though it was another close, not to say desperate, finish to the campaign. On the penultimate day of the season, Pipe ran 34 horses and Nicholls 14, and the title was still up for grabs on the final day. Pipe ran seven in the handicap hurdle at Sandown (he declared ten, three being non-runners), though one who did take his chance was Commercial Flyer who was racing for the third day running having won on consecutive days at Perth. Pipe ran another seven in the Betfred Gold Cup (Nicholls had three), but the decisive race proved to be a remarkable Celebration Chase in which the two trainers were responsible for the entire nine-runner field. Azertyuiop was sent off the 11/10 favourite but had to give best to Well Chief who was the main hope among Pipe’s five.

Pipe had downplayed his bid to win the title that season, but Nicholls was having none of it, saying ‘He’ll have double the amount of runners I’ve got in every race, trying to cancel us out’. Nicholls also revealed that one of his owners had glimpsed Pipe’s Racing Post one day with the Nicholls runners highlighted in yellow!

That same season, Nicholls had sent out his thousandth winner in Britain, a significant milestone on the way to his imminent breaking of Pipe’s record. Without coming close to the two-hundred mark in a season – his best total was 176 in 2020/21 – the Ditcheat winners have kept clocking up and he reached his 3,000th winner over jumps in Britain when the mare Kupatana won a listed contest over fences at Cheltenham’s April meeting in 2019. Since Pipe, Nicky Henderson is the only other trainer to have reached the same landmark, doing so earlier that same season, taking 40 seasons to do so against Nicholls’ 28.

Kupatana was Paul Nicholls' 3,000th jumps winner in Britain

Not content with that, though, Nicholls stated as long ago as December 2021, on the thirtieth anniversary of sending out his very first winner, that he wants to become the first to train 4,000 winners over jumps in Britain. That too is something he may well achieve by the end of the current season.

Whether Nicholls can trouble another of Pipe’s records – fifteen championships – is looking less certain now than it did at one time. After being champion for seven straight seasons after the Pipe era ended, Nicholls looked well on course, but it hasn’t been such plain sailing since. Yes, Nicholls has won another seven titles since to leave him one behind Pipe, but Henderson has prevented Nicholls from dominating completely over the last twenty years. Then there have been the most recent challengers, with Willie Mullins launching a couple of successful bids from Ireland and now Skelton’s inexorable rise to the top.

Just as Pipe cleared a path for Nicholls to follow, the boot is now on the other foot and it’s Nicholls who has shown Skelton the way, all the more so given Skelton’s former role as Nicholls’ assistant. Skelton is only 41, so if he does beat Pipe’s record for number of winners in a season, maybe it will be he who also challenges Pipe’s fifteen championships at some distant point in the future.

Safer gambling

We are committed in our support of safer gambling. Recommended bets are advised to over-18s and we strongly encourage readers to wager only what they can afford to lose.

If you are concerned about your gambling, please call the National Gambling Helpline / GamCare on 0808 8020 133.

Further support and information can be found at begambleaware.org and gamblingtherapy.org.

Like what you've read?