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AMANDA PERRETT
Following in her father’s footsteps Guy Harwood trained Dancing Brave, one of the all-time great racehorses. Ten years after the horse’s dramatic Prix de L’Arc de Triomphe victory Harwood handed over the reins of his Coombelands Stables to the eldest of his three daughters. What Amanda Perrett inherited in 1996 was not just a prestigious operation; it was one of the most innovative and best-equipped training establishments that Europe had ever seen. By Sean Magee
D
ANCING Brave’s narrow defeat in the 1986 Derby did more than bruise that great horse’s reputation and set riders in the stand barracking jockey Greville Starkey for cutting things too fine when just failing to catch Shahrastani. It also brought sixteen-year-old Amanda Harwood, daughter of Dancing Brave’s trainer, a detention. “On Derby Day I was at school sitting an O-level,” she remembers, “and as soon as the exam was over I rushed into the common room to watch the race. There was another exam going on in the next room, and my yelling at the TV caused such a distraction that I was given a detention. They didn’t understand at all.” Ten years later in 1996 that schoolgirl – by then Amanda Perrett, as she had married
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