5 minute read
Flat Trainer of the Year
from 2021 HWPA
by Weatherbys
THE NOMINATIONS
BY MIKE VINCE
CHARLIE APPLEBY
Even before Charlie Appleby’s glorious veni vidi vici to claim three winners at last month’s Breeders’ Cup at Del Mar, it had been an unforgettable season for the Moulton Paddocks team, and it will come as no surprise if the carpenters are already building a new trophy cabinet in that part of Newmarket.
The list is impressive to say the least, with the top prizes won in Europe including the Derby, the St Leger, the Irish Derby, the King George and the Grand Prix de Paris from the three-year-olds alone, while a Dewhurst win by the unbeaten Native Trail - just one of a host of good juveniles - ensures that Classic dreams are very much alive for 2022.
It’s amazing to think that it was only in the summer of 2013 - a turbulent time for Godolphin - that Appleby was promoted from relative obscurity to become one of its two trainers. However, he soon showed he could walk the walk, and he is a former finalist in this category as well as a past winner of the IRB’s International Trainer of the Year Award.
That he has seemed to do it all with a smile and an unfailingly helpful demeanour towards the racing media, never tiring of stressing that any success is down to the entire Godolphin team, has won him the respect and admiration of us all.
As he heads to his winter base in Dubai he can look back on 2021 with immense satisfaction, while planning for a 2022 which could be every bit as good.
He is, to put it mildly, a very worthy nominee for this prestigious award.
ANDREW BALDING
Pressure, they say, is for tyres, but if Andrew Balding does feel pressure at training at the iconic Kingsclere stables from which his father Ian enjoyed success at the top table for decades, you’d be very hard pressed to spot it.
Fourth place in the trainers’ table in 2020 with domestic prize money of more than £2.1m was an impressive achievement, but he has taken things to a different level this year with double those earnings and second place by the end of the turf campaign.
Alcohol Free contributed well over £800,000 to that total thanks to her wins in the Coronation Stakes at Royal Ascot and the Sussex Stakes at Goodwood, and there were further Group wins from across the board, including from older horses Bangkok, Spanish Mission and Foxes Tales, and from the juveniles Sandrine and Berkshire Shadow, who both won at Royal Ascot. As ever, Kingsclere also sent out the winners of more than its share of valuable handicaps.
It has also been a memorable 2021 for jockey graduates of the Balding Academy, with Oisin Murphy crowned champion jockey for a third time, William Buick chasing him hard to the line before enjoying the consolation of no fewer than three Breeders’ Cup winners, and David Probert smashing his own previous best by riding more than 150 winners.
Always helpful, supportive and understanding of the media, Andrew is a more than worthy nominee for this award.
TIM EASTERBY
This has been a real year of celebration for Tim Easterby. His sixtieth birthday, 25 years as a licence holder, a fastest ever century of winners, and now this richly deserved nomination for Flat Trainer of the Year.
At the end of the turf season the master of Habton Grange had won just short of £2 milllion - and he has clearly enjoyed every moment.
The name ‘Easterby’ has been at the forefront of the sport in the White Rose County for decades thanks to the exploits of Tim’s father Peter and his uncle Mick, but Tim’s class of 2021 has stretched the boundaries of success to new heights.
Top of the list is his Coolmore Nunthorpe hero Winter Power, who won three times in 2021 on the Knavesmire, where Tim regained the Top Trainer award. The equally speedy Art Power was in the frame in three Group 1 sprints and also made a winning sortie to Ireland for a second year running.
A great many of Tim’s winners are sprinters. There is nobody better with them, whatever the level, and alongside Winter Power and Art Power in 2021 there was another headline maker in Copper Knight, who is typical of the type with which the stable excels.
Bought for just 5,000 guineas from a leading Newmarket stable at the end of a modest juvenile campaign, Copper Knight contested just about every decent five-furlong handicap run in the north and was successful twice at York, where he has now won six times, and also at Doncaster.
His York victories made a significant contribution to Tim’s outstanding 12 wins on the track in 2021, a total exceeded incidentally at Ripon, where he enjoyed no fewer than 17 wins.
JOHN & THADY GOSDEN
“He is a chip off the old block and has been around the place for years” said John Gosden as he revealed shortly before the start of the turf season that his son Thady was to join him on a joint licence.
A year on - and despite not having a serious Classic contender to go to war with - the end of term report on Team Gosden is pretty much ‘business as usual’, the pair having continued the traditions we have become accustomed to at Clarehaven in seamless fashion, and in the process earning the first ever nomination at these Derby Awards for joint licence holders.
Regent, at Lingfield at end of March, ensured a winning start to the partnership, and it went from strength to strength afterwards.
Mishriff was once again a headline act, his win the Juddmonte International at York following enormously lucrative Middle Eastern wins in the Saudi Cup and Sheema Classic. Last year’s champion miler Palace Pier was another star for the older brigade, for while he was beaten again on Champions Day, although only just, he had earlier won a Lockinge, a Queen Anne and a Prix Jacques Le Marois.
Then of course there was Stradivarius, as popular as ever, if a little more vulnerable, his 2021 highlight that thrilling and successful battle with Spanish Mission at York.
Encouragingly, among a two-year-old crop which has more class and depth than last year’s there are Classic prospects of both sexes, including the unbeaten Cheveley Park Stud filly Inspiral, who is already a Group 1 winner, and the Queen’s home-bred colt Reach For The Moon, who was just touched off in a Group 2 and is already a Group 3 winner.
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