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The weekender fawning over him again today and then inadvertently signalling why he’s a bit of a nothing trainer
Ok. He gets on my nerves with his creepy manner and weird love of bloodsports as well as the methods but C4 used to be embarrassing sitting at his feet listening to the non achieving great man pontificating away and now weekender drool
About his “status” as a trainer.What status is that exactly ??
Sir Mark is an extremely good talker and the media loves a good talker.
Value Is EverythingWhen you’re getting 2yos with middle-distance pedigrees, running them three times over 6f as juveniles, starting their 3yo year with form figures of “000” and an opening handicap mark of 50 and running up a sequence of 111s, especially under the old three-week entry system, I suppose if you’re the only one doing it you can look “shrooooood.”
But fast forward to 2022, everyone’s at it, and it’s a different entry system, and its basically the equivalent of turning for Glastonbury with your old Gary Glitter LPs – the world has definitely moved on!
I don’t actually mind him as much as I should – he gave a cracking, prescient interview once about the direction UK racing was heading in – but he’s operating in a different world now.
Didn’t stop him winning the Grand Prix De Saint-Cloud though!
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"He has trained a few Group 1 winners, so he is not exactly a non achiever.
And he is arguably the best trainer of bad horses ever.
OK, that involved exploiting the handicap system – but what are trainers supposed to do? Be completely stupid and ensure their horses are on ratings they cannot win from?
I’m not knocking it, as I agree he simply worked a system he didn’t create, but I would slightly take issue with the “bad horses” bit as quite a few of those 3yo starting off on platers’ marks had nice middle-distance pedigrees.
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"They were “bad” because he made them look bad perhaps?
He’s been training 52 years. A few group winners over that time is not unusual at his level?
Did notice that his strike rate is pretty decent though
But I still find him creepy
Understandably disliked for some of his interests but a fine raconteur.
I think there is an element of Terry-Thomas and Dick Dastardly in there.His hypothetical Desert Island Disc selections made me smile. I think the top one was He Who Would Valiant Be.
He’s a good trainer in my view, done it at the top level as well as with more mediocre (if well bred) horses. Yes, he’s been well supported, but not like he goes to the yearling sales himself and buys top lots or anything. The game has moved on, but he hasn’t exactly fallen off a cliff in terms of winners. 1 bad year (we presume 2022 will be) does not a bad trainer make.
He used to be the Starter at Cottenham Point-to-Point.
Colin Tizzard just the same at Charlton Horethorne.
They’re fully immersed in the game right down to the grassroots.
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"The bit he did on the History of Newmarket for Racing TV was fascinating with all the old stories/anecdotes of the various places and people in and around the town itselfs – could have listened to him for a lot longer.
I think he may have been pigeon-holed somewhat with only one type of horses people belive he trains – he doesn’t get the fashionable horses very often and is a bit of a throw back in that he still has a long term owner breeder (Miss K Rausing) that supplies him over the years with most of his best horses (Alpinista and her granddam Albanova and her full sister Alborada who are all multiple G1 winners to name a few) and he also has as an association with Cheveley Park for whom he trained Pivotal and French Oaks winner Confidential Lady..
He has had an awful year this season (6 wins from just 49 runners) but I do think people forget what a good trainer he is especially for the number he trains (never more than 50 horses) and outside of his handicap plots he has been responsible for the likes of Pivotal (King’s Stand & Nunthorpe), Marsha (Abbaye & Nunthorpe), Alborada (2 Champion Stakes & Nassau), Confidential Lady (French Oaks), Albanova (3 G1 wins) & Alpinista (4 G1 wins).
This is also the man who in 1980, had a two-year-old Spindrifter win 13 races in a season, equalling the record for juveniles. Between 1981 and 1985, he trained Misty Halo to 21 wins from 42 starts, a post-war record for a mare. In 2004, he got seven victories from three-year-old Masafi – in 12 days, at six different racecourses, covering 2,500 miles by horse box.
Yes his hobbies are very distasteful but that doesn’t detrack from the fact that he us a very good trainer when given the ammunition to work with and to think he has been training now for over 5 decades is mind blowing especially considering it started off following on from him breaking his back in a steeplechase.
I think the interview you can find on YouTube with John McCririck is excellent, but I totally get any aversion to him.
He’s definitely a “Throwback,” and I’m not referring to an old Tom Sharpe novel.
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"The title of this thread from our departed Wetherspoons fan was a bit ridiculous really, wasn’t it?
Can’t knock a bloke who gives up his Sunday afternoons to be a Starter at East Anglian point-to-points.
As unreconstructed right-wing throwbacks go, I rather like him.
He certainly talks a lot of incisive sense about racing.
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"Nice, if brief, interview here.
2,000 + winners with max 50 horse stable (a number that most trainers wouldn’t make a viable living from) and some very high class ones among them. You can hardly crab his abilities to get them fit or to win multiple races with moderate horses that others might get one win out of if they were lucky, through both intelligent application of the form book and training nous.
He is a little eccentric rather than weird I’d say Clive.
I’ll be cheering Alpinista on Sunday. May they have the very best of luck.
I hope no one likens TRF’s owner conversing here with someone who has reportedly self excluded from the forum to Joe Biden allegedly forgetting someone had died!
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"
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