by On Friday, racing returns to the future at Wincanton when Henrietta Knight, the trainer of three-time Gold Cup winner Best Mate, saddles her first rider since ‘retiring’ to care for her late husband Terry Biddlecome in 2012.
In the intervening 11 years, Knight also lost her sister Cici and Cici’s husband Lord Vestey, prominent owners when she was first training, and Ballywalter, owned by Knight’s niece Mary, will carry Cici Vestey’s silks.
“It will be a family affair,” he says. “It will be very touching to see my sister’s colors on my first runner.”
She, however, does not stop at that, but feels some uneasiness about her return to the training ranks. “This time I’m really afraid of my first runner,” she says. “When I started in 1989, my first runner was a winner. A lot has been written since I announced my return, everyone is watching and waiting. Back then we just went to Bangor with a pointer that fell off most of the time and no one expected anything.
“I hope he runs well, he is a good horse but not a star of the future, although we will have fun with him. He is not very fast, he won an Irish point to point about nine weeks ago, but he will love the mud.”
Knight, 77, returns, he believes, knowing more about training than when he retired after writing The Jumping Game, which gave him unprecedented access to 30 trainers to write about their methods.
Additionally, she is being “assisted” by Brendan Powell, a successful former coach who has spent the last five years assisting Joseph O’Brien.
“Brendan is a great asset,” he says. “He was telling someone that he wished he had known what he learned from Joseph when he was training. It’s like skinning a cat; There are many ways to train a horse and horses respond differently to different methods.
“I don’t think Best Mate would have responded well to being in a large yard. We pampered him, wrapped him in cotton, and I’m not sure how he would have managed to be just another number on a big chain.”
Even a septuagenarian can dream and if the chances of another Best Mate arriving at West Lockinge are slim, she is clear about her goals. “Tell me if lightning can strike twice?” she asks rhetorically. “I want a small group of horses capable of winning races, if a good one comes out of the group, that is an advantage.
“If it’s good enough to perform at the Cheltenham Festival, it’s a double bonus and if it’s good enough for first place, it’s a triple bonus. I would love to cross that paddock again with a winner; It’s not a feeling you can explain or describe.
“Of course we have to win races and make it pay. “We have some good four-year-olds that will win big prizes in the spring, but we are missing older horses and the time to get them is not now, but at the end of the season.”
At a time of great uncertainty in sports, you can either think she’s angry or tip your hat to her for playing again.
“I could have continued doing what I was doing, essentially running a corral and teaching other people’s horses to jump,” he continues. “I like busy, bustling yards, but I was sending the horses back and they were winning for other people. You don’t do it, someone else does. There is some satisfaction in that, but I would like to continue with them.”
There are a lot of superstitions in racing (many trainers don’t wear green to races), but the first time around, Knight took idiosyncrasy to a new level and that, it seems, won’t change anytime soon.
“If you enter a house through a door, you have to leave through that door,” he begins. “You should never go down the stairs, if you say goodbye and have forgotten something and come back into the house you have to sit down before going out again. I don’t like magpies, I hate black cats that cross the street, a robin in the house is an omen of death. But I don’t mind going under a ladder, 13 or green.
“It was written that when Best Mate ran in the Gold Cup I hid in the bathroom, but that was a myth. Sometimes I watched or walked away, but since I watched their entire first Gold Cup in 2002, I had to watch them all and do everything the same way.
“I used to support all the other horses in the race except Best Mate, because I wanted some pleasure if he had been beaten. That cost me between £800 and £900 a year!
“However, the biggest one was hay and straw. Seeing a pile of hay on the way to the races is good luck, but hay is horrible. With straw you draw, with hay you pay. Before the 2004 Gold Cup, I asked the straw merchant to deliver it to the yard that morning!
There’s not much Knight hasn’t done in his 76 years; from being a delight to Deb, earning a teaching degree from Oxford (she has a BA in Education), teaching history and biology at a local girls’ convent school, to finishing 12th in the three-day badminton event, raising award-winning connemaras and train. the only horse since Arkle to win three Gold Cups.
As a friend of royalty, for 11 years running she was invited to the Royal Lodge by the late Queen Mother for the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes weekend in July. “I’m not much for pageantry, so I was starting to worry about it after three weeks,” she recalls.
“They prepared your bath, you had breakfast in bed and when you arrived they took your suitcase away so a maid could unpack it. She was so worried about someone else unpacking for me that every year before I left she would go to M&S to buy new underwear to make sure they were spotless. But she was a wonderful host and I loved talking to her about racing and life.”
The Racing Life of Henrietta Knight, Part II probably produces as many anecdotes as winners. Terry Biddlecome, she’s adamant, would have approved. “She HATED that she gave him the license to take care of him,” she says.
