Emma Lavelle: from a yard that became untenable to the horse of a lifetime

They say that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, although there are times in life when it feels like even-money each of two. It may be hard to imagine now, with a Stayers' Hurdle winner and a Ladbrokes Trophy winner standing tall in the same barn at Bonita Stables, but there was a time for Emma Lavelle when the odds of professional survival seemed to be lengthening with every despairing week and imminent demise had established itself as warm favourite.

To say that life at her former yard in Hampshire had become untenable would be to understate the case. Oilseed rape was the cause, compromised horses the symptom and lack of winners the net result, but underlying it all was the reality that here was a career for which there was no guarantee of survival.

What was required was positive thinking, decisive action and quite probably a shedload of money, and with all of those applied in spades the trainer and her husband, former jockey Barry Fenton, can now look back on the dark days pre-2016 as merely the precursor to salvation, content that the traumas of large-scale construction work at their new base in the Wiltshire village of Ogbourne Maizey were nothing compared to what they'd already been through.