CONFESSIONS OF A SLOW TWO-MILER A Horse Racing Memoir by Matt Sheppard
CONTENTS Foreword
7
Preface
9
1
Early Days (and Thank God I Escaped Farming!)
13
2
The Quality of Mercy and Life-Saving in Corfu
19
3
Flat Racing at Whatcombe and a Lucky Escape!
25
4
Mind Reading in Kildare (and Moore Experience)
28
5
The Only Way is Eastnor
41
6
The Golden Age of Point-to-Points
44
7
Matt Sheppard: Racehorse Trainer
48
8
Gone With The Wind & Other Equine Issues
56
9
Staying on the Carousel: Surviving the Business of Training
61
10
Training Owners
68
11
Horses for Courses: A ‘Who’s Who’ of Eastnor’s Hall of Fame
77
12
Jockeys, Then and Now
95
13
Staff
102
14
The Owner from Hell
105
15
The Owner from Heaven
115
16
Some Thoughts on Gamblers and Greed
127
17
My Race Riding Career (A Short Chapter!)
130
18
Media
132
19
How to Become a Racehorse Trainer in the 2020s
135
20
Covid-19 2020-22 Lockdown (and Post-Lockdown) Diary
145
21
Killer Chairs and ‘The Slow Two-Miler’
165
Appendix 1 – Eastnor winners
173
Acknowledgements
184
CHAPTER 1 EARLY DAYS (AND THANK GOD I ESCAPED FARMING!) I was born in Wells, Somerset in March 1965, where we lived until I was seven. Then my family upped sticks in search of a bigger farm to Llangorse in Breconshire in Wales. Our East Horrington dairy farm of 130 acres was OK to milk 40 cows, but to milk 60 cows cheaper land in Wales meant that 220 acres could be purchased. I was the eldest of four children (three English born and one Welsh born). My father was a dairy farmer. Now that IS hard work – and all of the Work Hard with none of the Play Hard! Luckily for me and my siblings, he could see there was no future for us in farming at that scale. In fact he did everything he could to put me off! He sold his herd and set up a very successful holiday cottage business. I did go to the Welsh Agricultural College in Aberystwyth, but after six months of my gap year spent in New Zealand, I never returned. We always had horses and ponies as kids. Pony Club and hunting was my background. My parents always had loads of ponies and it was in a golden era when every village had an agricultural show with a horse and pony section. We would arrive in time for the first classes of the day in our old Bedford TK wooden horsebox with about nine ponies squeezed in the back. They would be unloaded, bridled up and tied to a rope around the lorry and we would switch the saddles between mounts as they were required for specific classes. Very often father would get to the beer tent and as we gave him envelopes with our winning prize money he would supply more cash to enter and have another cider. Toni, my sister, and I thought we were amazing. We just turned up at the weekend, jumped on these semi-feral ponies and would sweep the board. Much later in life it dawned on me that our parents employed Terry, an older strong teenager who spent the week days nagging and schooling up the ponies whilst we were at school, ready to perform at the shows. I rode in my first point-to-point ride on my sixteenth birthday. I fell off. Mainly my riding ability was very moderate. It was in March 1981 at the Brecon Point-to-Point, a rearranged midweek fixture. I went to school in the morning and then rode Hecho in the maiden race. 13
Given an opportunity to work as an unpaid pupil assistant to Mercy Rimell in 1986, I was lucky enough to embark on a fabulous journey of thrills and spills, highs and lows, and everything in between. I spent a summer flat racing at Classic winning trainer Paul Cole’s, then three years in Kildare as head lad to Arthur Moore when he was Irish champion jumps trainer, and was then head-hunted to work a brief spell in Wiltshire for Martyn Meade before he became a big name. I set myself up in Eastnor, Herefordshire in 1993, where I have been training ever since. This account is the reality of what it’s like to be a bit player in the Sport of Kings.
I’ve heard plenty of good stories about Matt over the years, some of which couldn’t possibly be true - could they?! Well, in these action-packed pages I found out... Cornelius Lysaght
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