When Ben Pauling agreed last summer to train a couple of Flat horses for Andrew and Jane Megson who already had their string of jumpers with the Cotswolds-based 39-year-old, he had no idea what was coming.
Pauling says, “Harry Dunlop had told them that he wasn't going to be training next season. The conversation went along the lines of, 'We've got a nice, big, backward 2-year-old colt who needs gelding and then he should be lovely for next year. And we've got a little filly who has run well to win a maiden and a nursery; she's not overly big and has been relatively well-placed. Would you contemplate training them both for us? I said I'd love to.”
The filly, Polly Pott (GB) (Muhaarar {GB}) was due to run at Salisbury shortly afterwards, where she won again. Three weeks after that, she defied odds of 40-1 to take the G2 May Hill S. at Doncaster, and went on to finish fourth in the G1 Fillies' Mile at Newmarket, staying on despite meeting trouble in running. Just like that, the Megsons had a Classic prospect on their hands.
Pauling continues, “Andrew and Jane aren't in it as a business, it's very much their hobby, and they were offered some serious money from various different people for her. But it was never a question, they were not going to sell, because they'd told me I was going to train her next year. I said, 'You guys really can–if you want to sell her on and cash out, you must.' 'No no no, that is not an option, she cost us £21,000 and she owes us nothing, so let's just enjoy her', they said.
“A lot of people have said to me, 'Are you nervous–would you have taken her on if you had known how good she is?' Of course I would,” he says emphatically. “It doesn't matter whether you are training Flat or jumps horses, you want the best you can deal with. The better horses just make your job easier.
“It will be a lot of fun, but it will be taken very seriously. I already have a very detailed plan for her training regime. While we all know that the best-laid plans don't always come to fruition, we will try to follow a route towards having her ready to run in the Guineas. She may not have the speed for a quick-ground Guineas; if it came up soft I think she would, but I do think she will stay the mile and a half. She has done brilliantly well over the winter–she's grown and she's a lot stronger.
“We are very fortunate to be in this position. Some of my friends in the industry who train Flat horses probably can't quite believe that we've got her, but it's only a situation that has occurred. It isn't that I deserve a horse of this calibre or have produced results to get a horse of this calibre, but I have got a very loyal family in the Megsons who support me and believe in what we do, and that goes a long way.”
Pauling, a former assistant to Nicky Henderson, started training in 2013 and has an eye-catching career to date. He has three Cheltenham Festival winners to his credit, starting with the G1 Neptune Investment Management Novices' Hurdle victory of Willoughby Court (Ire) (Court Cave {GB}) in 2017. Le Breuil (Fr) (Anzillero {Fr}) took the National Hunt Chase in 2019 and last year Global Citizen (Ire) (Alkaadhem {Ire}) gave Andrew and Jane Megson their first Cheltenham victory in the G3 Grand Annual Chase, a race the 11-year-old will target again in March.
“That's the only time I have cried on a racecourse,” admits Andrew Megson, who came across Pauling when he was looking to change trainers around six years ago. “We actually got our daughter Lily to visit a few yards, and she went and met Ben at his old yard. She said, 'I really like this guy. He's young and on his way up. His yard [at the time] is not a palace, but he really looks after the horses.' Since then, we've got to know him and his team very well. We think Ben is a brilliant trainer, and we admire people who have ambition and take risks.”
If Global Citizen's Festival success brought him to tears, Polly Pott's May Hill win was equally mind-blowing.
“The world went mad that afternoon,” West Yorkshire-based Megson says, the joy audible in his voice. “We couldn't stay and celebrate because we had to attend a charity function in Manchester, but on the way there the phone rang off the hook. Everyone wanted to buy her, or to sell her for us–it was almost bizarre. But the bottom line is, we'll never have a Flat horse like her again. In racing terms, she's the needle in the haystack.”
Megson had already discussed the idea of having some runners on the Flat with Pauling; perhaps buying some breeze-up horses with staying pedigrees that might start on the Flat and then change codes. More fun than summer jumping, anyway.
“Then Harry Dunlop told us before the May Hill that he was retiring. Jane and I didn't really want to forge another relationship with a trainer, so I rang Ben and asked if he fancied taking them.”
As well as Polly Pott and the now-gelded “backward” Bingley Crocker (Ire) (Bungle Inthejungle {Ire}), whom Megson says has grown two inches over the winter, Pauling will also handle four-time winner Matty Too (GB) (Matt {GB}). The 4-year-old gelding bought from the Tattersalls Horses-In-Training Sale last autumn, largely to to be Polly Pott's lead horse although he will race as well, of course, and Wind River (Ire), a Sioux Nation 2-year-old the Megsons bought at Goffs last year. The owner thinks that, in total and including some stores, they have 23 horses, all with Pauling.
He says, “We think Ben's a top, top trainer. He cares for the horses and I can't see how anyone could get more out of Polly than Ben. His new yard is stunning. You can see how happy the horses are–and they are winning.”
Pauling's lanky, baseball-capped form is folded into a sofa in the first-floor office overlooking his yard at Naunton Downs, into which he moved in April 2022. It is late afternoon and the stable lights glow through the steady rain as dusk falls. It has everything you'd expect from a training establishment: 94 stables, walker, trotting ring, school, round gallop, hill gallop, tack rooms, rug rooms, canteen, and so on. However, it looks more like Soho Farmhouse for horses than, say, the yard belonging to Nigel Twiston-Davies a mile away across the valley. Everything is new, everything is high-spec and everything is designed and built exactly to Ben and his wife Sophie's specifications. When his highly efficient secretary Hannah Vowles shows me around, she points out the flooring in the boxes, which feel like walking on a memory-foam mattress–which is what they are.
“They were developed in Ireland for cattle parlours, and when our assistant trainer Tom David spent some time at Henry de Bromhead's a few years ago, who has them, he came back raving about them. In short, they consist of a rubber-filled lilo layered with rubber crumb to level it, topped with 20mm of memory-foam mattress and then a high-tensile runner sheet which is sealed to the floors and walls. We think we are the only big establishment in the UK to have them. The horses seem much warmer and definitely lie down more,” explains Hannah.
All the stables have a double vista, so the horses can see out of the back as well as the front of their boxes, and 30 of them have an outside pen in which to mooch about if they choose, and there are many more interesting and carefully-thought out details. If the rented yard a few miles away in which he spent the first nine years of his training career wasn't a palace, this is about as close to one as it gets.
Pauling explains, “Sophie and I were looking for somewhere to buy, because we had been renting and we knew we wanted to own our own yard. We tried to buy various farms in the area and kept losing out, mainly to London money. A few years back an owner of mine had said that if I ever had designs on owning my own yard, that she was sure that the Naunton Downs Golf Course was a fabulous place and probably wasn't going to last forever as a golf course and that I should keep an eye on it.
“One night, four years later, Sophie Googled Naunton Downs Golf Course, and there it was for sale. So we bought it with the view that if we couldn't get a yard here we'd run it as a golf course and a separate business, and down the line it would be a nice investment for our children to have.
“But it all came about quite quickly. Through Covid we put plans in to the planning department and so on, and it all went through in a relatively straightforward way because it is another commercial business on a currently commercial property. From an environmental perspective it was already not a natural canvas, because being a golf course it has already been moved and moulded and what have you. We bought it in January 2020, got planning permission by December 2020, started work in January 2021 and moved in in April 2022. The whole thing came to life much quicker than we thought it was going to.”
As well as Sophie, Hannah, Tom and the rest of Pauling's team, he gives great credit to Ed Hoddell of Hartpury Construction for “putting our plans into bricks and mortar.”
The 18-hole course is dropping to nine holes this autumn, to be more financially viable, but the two businesses–racing and golf–run happily side by side. The clubhouse has been glamorously refurbished and is now the Fitzdares Club in the Cotswolds (Fitzdares are Pauling's yard sponsors).
Pauling has trained 60 jumps winners so far this season; easily his best numerically to date.
“Our strike-rate has been 25%, which is amazing and I hope we can keep it going, because once you've set a standard, you don't want to drop from it,” Pauling says. “It's been the dream start from the new yard.”
Does he see himself “doing an Alan King” and eventually having as many Flat horses as jumpers?
“I was chatting to an owner yesterday about a couple of 2-year-olds who might come this way,” he says. “But, no, we are not going out there this season to try to build a massive Flat string. While I would love to see the Flat side progress, whether or not we want to be training 60, 70 Flat horses in the summer, I don't know yet. It would be lovely if we had a nice bunch of Flat horses to run through the summer, then we wouldn't necessarily have to have a big team of summer jumpers.
“The days when you could empty the yard and all have six weeks off with not a horse in sight are long gone, because the whole place has to be financially viable, and as much as I have enjoyed my summer jumping recently I don't have any ambition to train 30, 40 summer jumpers either, so if I could have 15 Flat horses and 15 summer jumpers, I'd be a very happy man. We've never pretended we are going to reinvent the wheel–we will train the horses which are here to the best of their ability and do what is right for their owners.
“We won't do anything overly different–we'll use the same gallops. I was intrigued when Harry Dunlop came the other day to look round and have a chat that he said that his brother Ed had a circular deep sand round gallop that he lobs the Flat horses round for conditioning. Our hill gallop wouldn't be the steepest, so it might be suited more to speed and a few Flat horses, so the whole place hopefully lends itself to both. We're just looking forward to the challenge; there'll be a lot of excitement if it goes well, and if it doesn't we'll have to have a rethink and see where we are going wrong and how we can improve.”
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