Betfair Official Blog

There are plenty of 'main things' when it come to training

The Assistant paints the real picture of life in the yard...

Fred Smith, the founder and CEO of FedEx, once said: "The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing."

It often strikes me that trainers are not only unable to keep the main thing the main thing, but that they can't even identify what their main thing should be in the first place.

Those not involved with the sport presumably have an image of a racehorse trainer spending the majority of their time working with horses - like 'Silent' Tom Smith does in the film, Seabiscuit.

The reality of course is that few trainers with more than ten horses are able to spend all their time directly engaged with the care and training of their charges.

In a previous article, I said there were two types of trainer - public and private. But this categorisation paints only a small part of the picture. A much bigger division lies between those trainers who see themselves first and foremost as horse people, and those who see themselves as business people.

And the most successful trainers (defined, albeit narrowly, as those that win the most prize money) are the ones who see themselves as the latter and spend only a fraction of their time doing horsey things.

Far more of their time is spent liaising with and entertaining owners, going to the races, going to sales, generating PR and performing the panoply of tasks that go in to running a business.

Not all trainers like how they spend their time. Some no doubt imagined their working lives would be much more like Tom Smith's also. But the fact is that once you have more than just a few horses, your main thing will be anything other than spending time with them.

Intriguingly, despite knowing the charade, trainers invest a lot of time in making people think the exact opposite is true; knowing that owners find it comforting too.

But think for a second. If a trainer has 150 horses, how much of their day do you think is devoted to them?

It's a bit like talking to the headmaster at your kids' school. Do you think they really know anything about them other than what the teachers have passed on? That the headmaster is spending time with you can only mean one of a few things (with the horse equivalent in parentheses after).

Your kid is in trouble (they're injured). Your kid has been successful at something (they have won a race). Your other kid is of school age and they want the extra fees (you get the picture).

I should be clear at this point: it's no bad thing that a trainer's main thing is anything but spending time with horses. Because the best trainers don't need to - they build a team around them with the talent to do it for them and their job becomes one of management and stewardship.