PAUL NICHOLLS
Racehorse Trainer
Paul Nicholls has never known anything like it and neither has anyone else. When the 2019-2020 season was brought to an abrupt end in March by the Coronavirus, he, like everyone else explained the difficulty he found in adjusting to the new ‘norm’ of life on lock down and managing his huge operation under very different circumstances to usual.
A campaign that promised a thrilling climax at Aintree, Cheltenham, Ayr and Sandown was abandoned prematurely just as he was marshalling his in form troops for a late flourish that he was optimistic would end in him once again competing to add to his already incredible eleven trainer’s titles.
Suddenly horse racing, like all sports, was an irrelevance as the government introduced emergency powers to tackle the pandemic.
Nicholls’ immediate concern was for his hard working team of 55 staff along with the horses in their care and he was determined to keep things ticking over in a familiar routine until they could be turned out to grass at the end of April.
Planning ahead with meticulous attention to detail has always been one of his greatest assets and with jump racing at a standstill at least until July 1 he began assessing the prospects for Team Ditcheat once the core season gets under way early in October.
A glance at past results suggest he has good reason to anticipate another rewarding season when things finally return to normal. The statistics are compelling.
Paul Nicholls has been champion trainer eleven times, has trained upwards of 3,100 winners, 125 of them at Grade 1 level, and has won many of the races that matter most in the calendar including four Gold Cups, a Grand National, ten Tingle Creeks and the King George V1 Chase an astonishing eleven times.
He has maintained a strike rate of 20% or more for the past 25 years and passed the £2 million mark in prize money for the 18th consecutive time in March.
Early in October Nicholls will celebrate his 29th year as a racehorse trainer at Ditcheat. He began in racing as an eager rider in point-to-points, before progressing to ride over 100 winners over jumps in a career limited by a constant battle with the scales.
The lure of training was irresistible, and destiny called when he replied to an advertisement placed in the Sporting Life by Paul Barber, farmer, businessman and notably enthusiastic supporter of National Hunt Racing.
It was in October 1991, that Nicholls arrived at Manor Farm Stables with eight horses, a bucketful of dreams and an unshakeable belief that he would be successful.
Yet no-one at the time could possibly have predicted that he would dominate the sport in the years ahead though there was a clue when he met his future landlord for the first time.
Barber recalls: “Paul was easily the outstanding candidate from the dozen or so people who applied to rent the yard. The minute we began talking I could see he was mad keen to get started, totally positive and focused.”
Fast forward to 2020 and Nicholls has dominated his sport for much of the past twenty years. Statistics alone tell only half the story. What they cannot fully show is his God given talent, his boundless enthusiasm every day he steps into the yard and his uncanny skill at keeping the same horses in a rich vein of form year on year. No one does it better.
Then there is his almost tangible will to win which encourages those who work with him to strive for success every bit as hard as he does.
That was never more evident than in April, 2016 when Nicholls delivered a conveyor belt of winners in the final weeks of the season to retain his title just as it seemed the crown was about to on its way to Willie Mullins in Ireland.
Nicholls’ immediate reaction on the final day of the season was to emphasise that this success was entirely down to Team Ditcheat. But he is the driver and given that Willie Mullins delivered 14 Grade 1 winners to his two, Nicholls is surely entitled to believe that his 10th championship was his finest hour.
More recently Nicky Henderson has proved to be a formidable rival and it was entirely fitting that both men were awarded the OBE last year for their services to racing.
Paul Nicholls has enjoyed so many highlights in a glittering career and you could almost reach out and touch the pride on his face as he played host to the Queen during a visit that brought Ditcheat to a halt late in March 2019.
She chatted to his family, key members of the team and Paul and Marianne Barber and clearly enjoyed inspecting at close quarters some of his stable stars that helped deliver his eleventh trainers’ championship.
More recently a frustrating conclusion to the 2019-2020 season left him wondering what might have been.
He explains “Nicky held a lead of £190,000 when racing came to a halt, but our horses were in excellent form at the time and we had saved a lot of ammunition for the closing weeks of the campaign. It was all to play for and may have gone down to the last day which would have been great for racing.
“It was a disappointing way for things to finish but there is a much bigger picture out there with so many people’s lives turned upside down by the coronavirus, congratulations to Nicky and his team however for another excellent campaign, I thoroughly look forward to competing with him once against next season”.
Restlessly energetic, he is already focusing on the challenges ahead, plotting and planning for the future, seeking to enhance his excellent facilities and enthusing about the prospects of his latest group of young horses coming through the system.
Rust never sleeps and neither, it seems, does Paul Nicholls.
IN THE PRESS
Paul’s garden at Highbridge House was featured in July’s edition of The English Garden Magazine.
