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but he seems to be giving out about not getting/retaining owners....
Were Shadwell/Juddmonte not handed to him on a plate?? Whats he complaining about>
https://www.racingpost.com/news/features/the-big-read/charlie-hills-everybodys-hurting-at-the-moment-owners-and-horses-are-hard-to-come-by-al1dE4Y2yvEh/
but he seems to be giving out about not getting/retaining owners....
Were Shadwell/Juddmonte not handed to him on a plate?? Whats he complaining about>
https://www.racingpost.com/news/features/the-big-read/charlie-hills-everybodys-hurting-at-the-moment-owners-and-horses-are-hard-to-come-by-al1dE4Y2yvEh/
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It is just a throwaway line at the end with no obvious relationship to the rest of the article.
"Everybody's hurting at the moment and owners and horses are hard to come by, but surely we must be at the bottom by now, and hopefully it'll soon start getting better."
"Everybody's hurting at the moment and owners and horses are hard to come by, but surely we must be at the bottom by now, and hopefully it'll soon start getting better."
Charlie Hills: 'Everybody's hurting at the moment - owners and horses are hard to come by'
The top trainer talks to Peter Thomas about country music, super sprinters and million-dollar winners
No matter how vehemently racehorse trainers try to explain to us that what they do involves a gruelling physical contortion of keeping shoulder to the wheel and nose to the grindstone, while simultaneously manning the pumps and balancing the books, the belief persists they spend most of their time being driven to the races in their Bentley to drink champagne with owners and watch horses win.
Charlie Hills is having none of it. "It's tough," he assures me. "It may not look like it on the top of the downs on a lovely morning, but there would be easier ways for my boys [James, 15, and Eddie, 12] to make a living if they were thinking about going down this route."
Then he decides that attack is the best form of defence. "Anyway, how hard can it be to write a couple of thousand words about somebody?" he asks entirely rhetorically. "I bet AI could do it a lot quicker."
"Yes, but then AI could probably train a horse to win the Abbaye," I bristle, taking a pot shot at his recently stated ambition to bag the big French sprint with the fast-improving Equality.
It threatens to develop into a spiky exchange that might see me blacklisted by the National Trainers Federation, but we take a moment to reconsider and decide that AI is the enemy here, not each other. Charlie's nearly 45 and I'm at the posterior end of middle age, after all, so we need to stick together and align against the evils of so-called progress, otherwise we could both be out of a job.
Charlie mutters something about robots being s**t and I agree with him. After all, what we do is pretty tough, even up here on the downs on a lovely morning.
It has to be said, though, that Hills did make one major rick recently, although it was one that a robot would probably have made too, if that's any consolation. It concerned the recent transatlantic raid on the hugely valuable Mint Millions at Kentucky Downs.
It didn't involve the actual annexation of the prize, which was carried out with precision and aplomb, by the horse Ancient Rome, the bold owners Jim and Fitri Hay, the instigator Alex Cole [their racing manager], the jockey Jamie Spencer, the travelling staff and the trainer. The mistake was that the trainer himself opted to stay at home in Lambourn rather than embrace the spirit of the trip.
No doubt it was a decision born out of steely professionalism, but on reflection it must seem ill-advised.
"The only downside was not being in Kentucky," he confirms. "I love country music and it's only 40 miles from Nashville, so it was a great opportunity.
"I think Jamie got stuck there. He couldn't get a taxi from the track to the airport [which sounds like a highly unlikely story], so he had to stay a night in Nashville and he said he had a fantastic time. Hopefully we'll aim him at the same race next year and I'll do it properly."
Hills declares his love of Alan Jackson and Don Williams, George Strait and Randall King, and I swear I can hear the sound of plaintive steel guitars echoing round Faringdon Place stables while Barry Hills strolls past in a rhinestone suit.
Charlie crosses the kitchen with intent. "Alexa, play Steve Earle," he commands, and it's as if we're transported from the Valley of the Racehorse to the Grand Ole Opry. The trainer seems happy with his plan for September 2024 and contents himself with the impact that the victory of Ancient Rome in the familiar pink and green silks had on his 2023 campaign.
"It's the kind of prize-money that changes everything about your season. You're earning a million in prize-money over here and then you go and double it in one hit over there in a Grade 3 race, which says it all. People see us at 12th in the table and it looks as though it's easy, but financially it's anything but."
In one sense, the Mint Millions success was a win 'against the tide' – prize-money flowing in from abroad rather than horses flowing out to overseas jurisdictions. We may find it hard to feel sorry for top-flight trainers, but the bigger picture is one that reflects poorly on the economics of British racing, which is why it should concern us all.
"It's a shame it's come to this," says Hills. "You go to the sales now and you're buying a horse, all the while looking for an angle on how to sell it. You should be trying to buy the horse you really like for its pedigree and for its racing potential over here, but you're buying into the idea of being able to move it on to Hong Kong or Australia or wherever, and that's a sad way to be."
Ancient Rome, meanwhile, has the Prix Dollar and the Joel Stakes as potential targets, and he may join the Hays on their annual winter sojourn in Dubai as part of the select team they're assembling for the carnival. He'll go where the pickings are richest, and hopefully where the music is the most country.
Barry Hills, the man who built Faringdon Place and established a dynasty, is still a reassuring presence around the yard and on the gallops. The empire is in safe hands, with Charlie at the helm, wife Pip wrangling owners, children and trainer with expert ease, James riding out through the summer, and Eddie honing his craft on the Equiciser ("he'd have a permanent whip ban if he was riding proper horses!").
It's a tight-knit family outfit but the truth remains that a set-up of this size "eats money" and is far from being immune to rising prices and financial downturns. It's lucky, then, that while Ancient Rome has mopped up in the US, Hills has managed to fine-tune stable star Khaadem back to his best, to the point where he not only landed the Group 1 Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Stakes but also has it in him to end the season with an autumnal flurry.
In less good news, it has gone public that poor Rockytherockstar has been awarded a rating of just ten after flopping for the third time in three runs at Windsor – I point out that even I'm rated nine, although this is a longstanding figure with precious little scope for improvement. But Hills says: "He looks a picture and there's obviously something not quite right, so we'll have to get to the bottom of it. I think we'll win with him and I view it as a challenge for me. Sometimes you get most enjoyment from the not-so-good horses."
There's no sense of throwing in the towel, no matter what the level of ability, and we quickly return to Khaadem, the 80-1 Royal Ascot hero who had clearly been written off by most punters before he enjoyed his finest hour. The trainer, thankfully, doesn't pretend to have planned it to a nicety, but he insists he had always kept the faith.
"We weren't expecting it, let's put it that way," he confesses, "but he's always been a really good horse, just a bit hard to work out.
"He loves going to Dubai for the winter, for example, but he runs terrible there, treats it as though he's only gone for a holiday to get a bit of sun on his back, then he comes back to Britain and finds another leg.
"Last year we were running him over five furlongs and he was winning. We put the blinkers on him and let him blitz, but I always knew he was a good horse, so I thought let's try something different, take the blinkers off and try to ride him like a proper good horse again. And Jamie gave him a beautiful ride."
Very much like Khaadem, Spencer has been misunderstood and written off prematurely throughout his career but, also like Khaadem, he has found a staunch ally in Hills, who knows talent when he sees it and isn't minded to give up on it.
"Jamie's been so lucky for me," he enthuses. "He's ridden me two Classic winners – Just The Judge and Phoenix Of Spain – and he rode Kiyoshi to win an Albany, so a lot of my big successes.
"He's in and out of fashion a little bit, I suppose that's the kind of jockey he is, but he's a great horseman, gives you proper feedback, and if you get him on the right horse in a big race, he's the right man for the job."
"The stars seemed to align," adds Hills on the resurgence of Khaadem, and he's hoping that the mercurial talents of horse and rider will help bring to fruition one or more of the plans the ambitious trainer has for the seven-year-old, starting with the Champions Sprint and moving on to the Breeders' Cup.
Like a true naysayer, I put it to him that the tightest of tight and twisty tests at Santa Anita may not be an ideal fit for a horse who stayed on stoutly at the end of a gruelling examination at Ascot, but Hills has a plan and he's honing it already.
"You could say it might not suit a hold-up horse," he smiles enigmatically, "but then we could ride him differently again. He made the running when he was winning over five furlongs last year and he was up with the pace at Haydock last time, so why not? He's certainly got the pace and he's pretty versatile. We'll keep them guessing."
Khaadem's revival came along at a good time for the Hills team. The brilliant four-time Group 1 winner Battaash had departed the scene in 2021 and a yawning chasm appeared in the roster, but only briefly, as had been the case when Muhaarar also retired as the winner of four Group 1s in 2015. Hills, although he wasn't left bereft, still looks back on his lifetime best horses with a mix of awe, appreciation and loss.
"They were very different horses," he remembers. "Muhaarar had great stamina and used to win his sprints at the end of the race.
"I really thought he was a miler and ran him over seven furlongs as a two-year-old, but then I thought that if we went down the mile route we'd have to take on Gleneagles all year, so as he'd won the Gimcrack as a two-year-old and he clearly had speed – and the Commonwealth Cup had just come on the scene – we decided to drop him back to six.
"I suppose we reinvented him. I'm sure we could have taught him to be a miler, no problem at all, to be ridden a different way, but we went down the other route and his great combination of speed and stamina meant he could outstay the top sprinters."
Battaash, meanwhile, was a different kettle of fish entirely and probably rather too combustible to be reinvented.
"When you watched him work on the gallops it was like nothing you'd ever seen," recalls Hills, still breathless at the memory. "I think he clocked 55mph, which was crazy, but with him it was about channelling all that raw speed.
"At the beginning, he definitely wasn't one of those good horses that's easy to train. He was just a ball of energy who wanted to take everything on, but by the end he became an absolute pony, a very professional racehorse.
"He's a perfect example of what a knife edge you live on with a horse like him, though. He was in the sales as a two-year-old but we had him in the Cornwallis [a Group 3 at Newmarket] beforehand and, thank God, he finished third, because that meant we kept him. He could just as easily have been sold, but he went on to become a part of the furniture here.
"Yes, we still miss Batty."
The scaling down of Shadwell's operation trimmed a few from the numbers at Faringdon Place, and Hills reckons another 30 horses would make the business plan work a little better, but things are ticking over nicely, with a 15 per cent strike-rate, more than £1.5 million in prize-money and another nice young prospect emerging in Saturday's Champagne Stakes winner Iberian. And the year is far from over.
The next cab off the rank is the four-year-old Orazio, who heads for Saturday's Ayr Gold Cup with what looks like a favourite's chance, and Hills wouldn't put you off.
"He's been a bit unlucky," he explains. "He had a really good spring [winning handicaps at Newmarket and Ascot] and then the ground was probably a bit firm for him when he was sixth in the Wokingham, from a really bad draw, and then the Stewards' Cup was a disaster on heavy ground.
"Since then Ayr has been the plan. All we need now is good to soft ground and a good draw, because he's on a mark he can win off and I'd like to think he could be a Group horse one day."
Then there's the aforementioned Equality, the five-year-old who was third in Group 1 company at the Curragh last weekend and will be trained by human hand, not artificial intelligence, for the Abbaye.
"He's been a bit of a slow burner," ponders the trainer. "He's always shown me he's a nice horse, but mentally he's been a bit fragile and could never put his races together. He's started to do that now, though, and he's certainly got a lot of speed.
"I think he'll probably go to France because he seems to handle a bit of cut in the ground and with a good draw he could be another shock winner of the race."
None of this is easy, of course. The financial climate is hard on us all and the Gambling Commission is doing its best to ruin the game, but although Hills would tell his boys that there are easier ways to earn a living than training racehorses, he wouldn't put them off it, either.
"They absolutely love it," he reassures us, "and Dad's made a wonderful place up here, so it'd be nice to keep it going.
"Everybody's hurting at the moment and owners and horses are hard to come by, but surely we must be at the bottom by now, and hopefully it'll soon start getting better."
Up here on the Lambourn downs on a lovely morning, it's hard to imagine that it won't.
The top trainer talks to Peter Thomas about country music, super sprinters and million-dollar winners
No matter how vehemently racehorse trainers try to explain to us that what they do involves a gruelling physical contortion of keeping shoulder to the wheel and nose to the grindstone, while simultaneously manning the pumps and balancing the books, the belief persists they spend most of their time being driven to the races in their Bentley to drink champagne with owners and watch horses win.
Charlie Hills is having none of it. "It's tough," he assures me. "It may not look like it on the top of the downs on a lovely morning, but there would be easier ways for my boys [James, 15, and Eddie, 12] to make a living if they were thinking about going down this route."
Then he decides that attack is the best form of defence. "Anyway, how hard can it be to write a couple of thousand words about somebody?" he asks entirely rhetorically. "I bet AI could do it a lot quicker."
"Yes, but then AI could probably train a horse to win the Abbaye," I bristle, taking a pot shot at his recently stated ambition to bag the big French sprint with the fast-improving Equality.
It threatens to develop into a spiky exchange that might see me blacklisted by the National Trainers Federation, but we take a moment to reconsider and decide that AI is the enemy here, not each other. Charlie's nearly 45 and I'm at the posterior end of middle age, after all, so we need to stick together and align against the evils of so-called progress, otherwise we could both be out of a job.
Charlie mutters something about robots being s**t and I agree with him. After all, what we do is pretty tough, even up here on the downs on a lovely morning.
It has to be said, though, that Hills did make one major rick recently, although it was one that a robot would probably have made too, if that's any consolation. It concerned the recent transatlantic raid on the hugely valuable Mint Millions at Kentucky Downs.
It didn't involve the actual annexation of the prize, which was carried out with precision and aplomb, by the horse Ancient Rome, the bold owners Jim and Fitri Hay, the instigator Alex Cole [their racing manager], the jockey Jamie Spencer, the travelling staff and the trainer. The mistake was that the trainer himself opted to stay at home in Lambourn rather than embrace the spirit of the trip.
No doubt it was a decision born out of steely professionalism, but on reflection it must seem ill-advised.
"The only downside was not being in Kentucky," he confirms. "I love country music and it's only 40 miles from Nashville, so it was a great opportunity.
"I think Jamie got stuck there. He couldn't get a taxi from the track to the airport [which sounds like a highly unlikely story], so he had to stay a night in Nashville and he said he had a fantastic time. Hopefully we'll aim him at the same race next year and I'll do it properly."
Hills declares his love of Alan Jackson and Don Williams, George Strait and Randall King, and I swear I can hear the sound of plaintive steel guitars echoing round Faringdon Place stables while Barry Hills strolls past in a rhinestone suit.
Charlie crosses the kitchen with intent. "Alexa, play Steve Earle," he commands, and it's as if we're transported from the Valley of the Racehorse to the Grand Ole Opry. The trainer seems happy with his plan for September 2024 and contents himself with the impact that the victory of Ancient Rome in the familiar pink and green silks had on his 2023 campaign.
"It's the kind of prize-money that changes everything about your season. You're earning a million in prize-money over here and then you go and double it in one hit over there in a Grade 3 race, which says it all. People see us at 12th in the table and it looks as though it's easy, but financially it's anything but."
In one sense, the Mint Millions success was a win 'against the tide' – prize-money flowing in from abroad rather than horses flowing out to overseas jurisdictions. We may find it hard to feel sorry for top-flight trainers, but the bigger picture is one that reflects poorly on the economics of British racing, which is why it should concern us all.
"It's a shame it's come to this," says Hills. "You go to the sales now and you're buying a horse, all the while looking for an angle on how to sell it. You should be trying to buy the horse you really like for its pedigree and for its racing potential over here, but you're buying into the idea of being able to move it on to Hong Kong or Australia or wherever, and that's a sad way to be."
Ancient Rome, meanwhile, has the Prix Dollar and the Joel Stakes as potential targets, and he may join the Hays on their annual winter sojourn in Dubai as part of the select team they're assembling for the carnival. He'll go where the pickings are richest, and hopefully where the music is the most country.
Barry Hills, the man who built Faringdon Place and established a dynasty, is still a reassuring presence around the yard and on the gallops. The empire is in safe hands, with Charlie at the helm, wife Pip wrangling owners, children and trainer with expert ease, James riding out through the summer, and Eddie honing his craft on the Equiciser ("he'd have a permanent whip ban if he was riding proper horses!").
It's a tight-knit family outfit but the truth remains that a set-up of this size "eats money" and is far from being immune to rising prices and financial downturns. It's lucky, then, that while Ancient Rome has mopped up in the US, Hills has managed to fine-tune stable star Khaadem back to his best, to the point where he not only landed the Group 1 Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Stakes but also has it in him to end the season with an autumnal flurry.
In less good news, it has gone public that poor Rockytherockstar has been awarded a rating of just ten after flopping for the third time in three runs at Windsor – I point out that even I'm rated nine, although this is a longstanding figure with precious little scope for improvement. But Hills says: "He looks a picture and there's obviously something not quite right, so we'll have to get to the bottom of it. I think we'll win with him and I view it as a challenge for me. Sometimes you get most enjoyment from the not-so-good horses."
There's no sense of throwing in the towel, no matter what the level of ability, and we quickly return to Khaadem, the 80-1 Royal Ascot hero who had clearly been written off by most punters before he enjoyed his finest hour. The trainer, thankfully, doesn't pretend to have planned it to a nicety, but he insists he had always kept the faith.
"We weren't expecting it, let's put it that way," he confesses, "but he's always been a really good horse, just a bit hard to work out.
"He loves going to Dubai for the winter, for example, but he runs terrible there, treats it as though he's only gone for a holiday to get a bit of sun on his back, then he comes back to Britain and finds another leg.
"Last year we were running him over five furlongs and he was winning. We put the blinkers on him and let him blitz, but I always knew he was a good horse, so I thought let's try something different, take the blinkers off and try to ride him like a proper good horse again. And Jamie gave him a beautiful ride."
Very much like Khaadem, Spencer has been misunderstood and written off prematurely throughout his career but, also like Khaadem, he has found a staunch ally in Hills, who knows talent when he sees it and isn't minded to give up on it.
"Jamie's been so lucky for me," he enthuses. "He's ridden me two Classic winners – Just The Judge and Phoenix Of Spain – and he rode Kiyoshi to win an Albany, so a lot of my big successes.
"He's in and out of fashion a little bit, I suppose that's the kind of jockey he is, but he's a great horseman, gives you proper feedback, and if you get him on the right horse in a big race, he's the right man for the job."
"The stars seemed to align," adds Hills on the resurgence of Khaadem, and he's hoping that the mercurial talents of horse and rider will help bring to fruition one or more of the plans the ambitious trainer has for the seven-year-old, starting with the Champions Sprint and moving on to the Breeders' Cup.
Like a true naysayer, I put it to him that the tightest of tight and twisty tests at Santa Anita may not be an ideal fit for a horse who stayed on stoutly at the end of a gruelling examination at Ascot, but Hills has a plan and he's honing it already.
"You could say it might not suit a hold-up horse," he smiles enigmatically, "but then we could ride him differently again. He made the running when he was winning over five furlongs last year and he was up with the pace at Haydock last time, so why not? He's certainly got the pace and he's pretty versatile. We'll keep them guessing."
Khaadem's revival came along at a good time for the Hills team. The brilliant four-time Group 1 winner Battaash had departed the scene in 2021 and a yawning chasm appeared in the roster, but only briefly, as had been the case when Muhaarar also retired as the winner of four Group 1s in 2015. Hills, although he wasn't left bereft, still looks back on his lifetime best horses with a mix of awe, appreciation and loss.
"They were very different horses," he remembers. "Muhaarar had great stamina and used to win his sprints at the end of the race.
"I really thought he was a miler and ran him over seven furlongs as a two-year-old, but then I thought that if we went down the mile route we'd have to take on Gleneagles all year, so as he'd won the Gimcrack as a two-year-old and he clearly had speed – and the Commonwealth Cup had just come on the scene – we decided to drop him back to six.
"I suppose we reinvented him. I'm sure we could have taught him to be a miler, no problem at all, to be ridden a different way, but we went down the other route and his great combination of speed and stamina meant he could outstay the top sprinters."
Battaash, meanwhile, was a different kettle of fish entirely and probably rather too combustible to be reinvented.
"When you watched him work on the gallops it was like nothing you'd ever seen," recalls Hills, still breathless at the memory. "I think he clocked 55mph, which was crazy, but with him it was about channelling all that raw speed.
"At the beginning, he definitely wasn't one of those good horses that's easy to train. He was just a ball of energy who wanted to take everything on, but by the end he became an absolute pony, a very professional racehorse.
"He's a perfect example of what a knife edge you live on with a horse like him, though. He was in the sales as a two-year-old but we had him in the Cornwallis [a Group 3 at Newmarket] beforehand and, thank God, he finished third, because that meant we kept him. He could just as easily have been sold, but he went on to become a part of the furniture here.
"Yes, we still miss Batty."
The scaling down of Shadwell's operation trimmed a few from the numbers at Faringdon Place, and Hills reckons another 30 horses would make the business plan work a little better, but things are ticking over nicely, with a 15 per cent strike-rate, more than £1.5 million in prize-money and another nice young prospect emerging in Saturday's Champagne Stakes winner Iberian. And the year is far from over.
The next cab off the rank is the four-year-old Orazio, who heads for Saturday's Ayr Gold Cup with what looks like a favourite's chance, and Hills wouldn't put you off.
"He's been a bit unlucky," he explains. "He had a really good spring [winning handicaps at Newmarket and Ascot] and then the ground was probably a bit firm for him when he was sixth in the Wokingham, from a really bad draw, and then the Stewards' Cup was a disaster on heavy ground.
"Since then Ayr has been the plan. All we need now is good to soft ground and a good draw, because he's on a mark he can win off and I'd like to think he could be a Group horse one day."
Then there's the aforementioned Equality, the five-year-old who was third in Group 1 company at the Curragh last weekend and will be trained by human hand, not artificial intelligence, for the Abbaye.
"He's been a bit of a slow burner," ponders the trainer. "He's always shown me he's a nice horse, but mentally he's been a bit fragile and could never put his races together. He's started to do that now, though, and he's certainly got a lot of speed.
"I think he'll probably go to France because he seems to handle a bit of cut in the ground and with a good draw he could be another shock winner of the race."
None of this is easy, of course. The financial climate is hard on us all and the Gambling Commission is doing its best to ruin the game, but although Hills would tell his boys that there are easier ways to earn a living than training racehorses, he wouldn't put them off it, either.
"They absolutely love it," he reassures us, "and Dad's made a wonderful place up here, so it'd be nice to keep it going.
"Everybody's hurting at the moment and owners and horses are hard to come by, but surely we must be at the bottom by now, and hopefully it'll soon start getting better."
Up here on the Lambourn downs on a lovely morning, it's hard to imagine that it won't.
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