Henrietta Knight: racecourses should help trainers, not be out for themselves

Henrietta Knight has called upon British racecourses to do more to help the country's jump trainers redress the balance with their Irish counterparts instead of being "out for themselves".

British handlers won twice as many races at last week's Cheltenham Festival as they had in 2021, but that still meant an 18-10 defeat to Irish trainers, who also enjoyed an unprecedented clean sweep of victories on the final day of the meeting.

And Knight was typically forthright this week as she spelled out where she believes British racing is going wrong as part of a major interview with the Racing Post in Sunday's newspaper, including the greater role that could be played by racecourses.

"Ireland have parts of the country that are dedicated to letting the trainers use their facilities to bring on their horses, which we don't have here," Knight said.

"I bemoan the fact that we have so few places where trainers can take their horses out for a day, for a schooling bumper or a schooling hurdle, or a point-to-point course where they can go and keep educating them. The Irish point-to-pointers that won last week have had so much more opportunity.

"There must be places in Britain where this could be done. There are courses that we don't use in the winter, like Worcester, Newton Abbot, Stratford, which are shut up in the autumn when the weather gets bad."

'Why can't we do what Tipperary does?'

Knight pointed to Tipperary in Ireland as an example of what could be done to help.

"Why can't we do what Tipperary does and use those courses for schooling days before they're shut up?" she said.

"Tipperary has two days of schooling bumpers, hurdles and chases, it works out at about £100 a horse, and they'd have probably 600 horses going through there. Our courses complain that they're short of money, so wouldn't that be a good source of income for them? Afterwards, they've got time to put the ground back before the weather gets really bad, and then it will be untouched until the spring.

"All of which means that British trainers simply don't have the same opportunities to prepare and bring through a raw three-year-old, and I wish the racecourses would lend themselves more to helping trainers produce good horses rather than simply being out for themselves."

Read more from Henrietta Knight in The Big Read, available online for Members' Club Ultimate subscribers from 6pm on Saturday or in Sunday's Racing Post newspaper. Click here to sign up.

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