For Dan Skelton “hope is the easy bit, it is the expectation that is the challenge”. Those words were written a dozen years ago in the week before he saddled his first runner — it finished last. They echo strong as Skelton approaches the Cheltenham Festival, which starts on Tuesday, as Britain’s leading trainer.
To visit a top stable on the eve of a big event is always a life enhancer and to slide through the most rural of country lanes to reach Skelton’s Lodge Farm headquarters ten miles from the outskirts of Birmingham was something to light the soggiest wick. At 7.45am on Wednesday he was in the office talking to his brother Harry while three staff were beavering over their laptops. Next door three more were snatching a coffee before getting out into the yard where assistant trainer Tom Messenger was legging riders into the saddle.
This first yard has now spawned two others. What was a 90-acre estate has grown to 300, a 35-racehorse count to 140. Skelton, his genial face fuller than the cherubic 28-year-old of 2013, gets into a golf buggy and we push off down the lane to an extraordinary carousel of a scene. Horses are everywhere, files of them cantering around a large, deep white-sand circuit in the grassy middle of which pairs are schooling over hurdles while others spin into the sand arena closest to us. All the participants and the smiling man in charge seem to know what they are doing. OK, it was a sunny first day of spring, but in 60 years around this parish this was a buzz of special making.
• Cheltenham Gold Cup 2025 runners and riders: tips, odds and guide
The trainer is very clear that this is method, not madness, and the confidence glows out of him. “You must have a system and a structure in place so that people can trust you. It’s no good trying to micromanage,” he says in a manner of someone who got a 2:1 in design before the intervention of champion trainer Paul Nicholls and an offer he could not refuse.
The 1,500-winner climb has been an impressive one only imperilled by a long-running ownership dispute which Skelton had to settle out of court and accept a £6,000 fine for misleading the British Horseracing Authority. On Monday he takes a 20-strong team to the Festival, has 150 winners and £2.4 million in prize money on board for the season and is £600,000 clear of his rivals in a quest to match a trainers’ championship to the jockeys’ crown brother Harry won in 2021. There is massive expectation but it doesn’t hang heavy.
Endless previews and podcasts have honed the Cheltenham offer. “There’s Protektorat”, Skelton says of the ten-year-old who goes for a repeat victory in the Ryanair Chase on Thursday. “For whatever reason he’s in the best form I have ever seen him. It’s quite remarkable. All we need is a bit of rain on Wednesday night.”
The grey Unexpected Party and Langer Dan both return after victory last March and another grey, L’Eau Du Sud, will open the Skelton innings when his spring-heeled jumping may upset the fencing skills of Majborough, the Willie Mullins-trained Irish hotpot, in the Arkle Trophy on Tuesday.
“Be Aware is favourite for the Coral Cup [on Wednesday],” Skelton adds, “and there’s Fortune De Mer, who’s been overlooked in the Bumper [16-1]. He ran far too free last time but that will have got the froth out of him.”
Skelton’s views are equally honed on the need for a shake-up in racing’s leadership and a decision and review system, “we can’t committee ourselves into irrelevance”. But now he points across and says “there’s The New Lion”. At first sight the unbeaten and still unextended six-year-old is just another horse trotting round the ring. Not so, the trainer’s opinion.
“We liked him before he ran and he won his bumper well,” Skelton says of the elegant bay who leads the team in the Turners Novices’ Hurdle on Wednesday, “but it was when we jumped him that we had the epiphany. ‘Ooh,’ Harry said, ‘this could be different’. Yes, it’s a long road, but he could be the one.”
In the saddle the younger sibling is now a much-admired performer, yet at the outset many thought Harry might be a liability. The rookie trainer had the invaluable backing of his father, the double gold medal-winning show jumper Nick Skelton, and the unique grounding of being assistant to Nicholls in the Kauto Star and Denman years. But Harry’s early success, winning the Irish National at 19, had stalled and in 2013 he had logged just eight winners for the previous season.
“Yes,” Dan says, “Our first owners must take a lot of credit for I was a start-up and he was on the scrap heap. But we never had any doubts about Harry. We got a sneaky satisfaction of showing everyone what they had been missing.”
Even though family link-ups are common in the 24-hour nature of the training life, the Skeltons’ is peculiarly intricate and could now be ground-breaking. For besides the brothers, father Nick, and Harry’s wife Bridget Andrews, who landed two Cheltenham winners for the stable before having their son Rory last April, there is Dan’s solicitor wife, Grace. She is still a central part of the business but in the past four years has also transformed the paddocks in the centre of the estate into the Alne Park Stud, standing five stallions including Ascot Gold Cup winner Subjectivist and foaling up to 70 mares in the season.
Read more
Owner Julian Howl has joined us. In 2020 Skelton trained his mare Emma’s Joy to win a grade two race at Warwick and run well at the Festival, now she is in foal to Subjectivist and future offspring can one day join the Skelton carousel. “Owners keeping their good mares is the key,” the trainer says. “Of course it doesn’t always work out but if you breed good mares to good stallions you get good racehorses. This gives us the chance to produce proper horses at unit cost rather than compete for them at the sales. That is why the stud is so important to us going forward.”
Fresh ideas, no sense of defeatism in the face of racing’s problems and this week’s Irish onslaught. The highest peaks await and with them some of life’s wider traps. But 12 years ago I wrote that “no 28-year-old can ever have set out with such heady promise”. This week and this season look like being further steps in heady fulfilment.
