Betfair Official Blog

Owning a Race Horse - A quick guide

The Assistant continues to answer your queries - this time she runs through how to find a trainer for the four-legged wonder that you hope will be the next Shergar or Dessie...

Timothy asks a host of questions regarding how the relationship between an owner and trainer works.

The questions include: "Does an owner need to have stables, or do they buy a horse at auction, arrange a deal with a stable such as Coolmore, and then send the horse off for training?" and, "Does the stable take a percentage of winnings or is their fee fixed?"

Trainers typically fall into two broad categories: private and public.

Private trainers are typically paid a salary by a large owner, who employs them to work in their training establishment and train their own horses.

This type of relationship was quite common a hundred years ago, where wealthy landowning individuals were able to afford large numbers of their own racehorses and have them trained on their own property.

A great description of the life of a private trainer in the early 20th Century (along with great tales of punting and general skulduggery) can be read in Paul Mathieu's The Druid's Lodge Confederacy, available second-hand on Amazon for anyone who is interested - click here.

However, it's increasingly rare to find trainers who operate on an exclusively private basis. Even those who have one dominating owner - who owns the majority of a stable's horses and perhaps the property on which they are trained - will usually have other clients who provide horses for them to train.

The far more common scenario these days is for a trainer to operate on a public basis - taking horses from whoever is prepared to buy the horse and pay its bills.

Public trainers typically charge a weekly fee to train a horse, adding on other costs such as veterinary bills and transport to and from the racecourse. Depending on the trainer, it costs an owner between £10,000 and £18,000 to keep a horse in training for a year. These figures are very rough and will depend on the location of a chosen trainer, the number of times a horse runs and whether there are any significant veterinary bills to account for.

So if someone decides they want to venture into racehorse ownership, all they need do is buy a horse, then send it to a trainer they like. Advice on which horse to buy can be got from trainers or bloodstock agents, who will often arrange the whole purchase on behalf of an owner.

A public trainer earns their keep from the training fees they charge. But on top of this they receive ten per cent of all prize money won by horses in their care - a kind of performance incentive. And of course they can arrange other bonuses on an individual basis - for example, if training a horse that goes on to be a sire, they might ask that they are given a share in that sire.

If you're interested in racehorse ownership Timothy, or anyone else for that matter, the British Horseracing Authority website is the best starting point - Click here.