Clive brittain autobiography

By Robin Oakley

“He’s always in tune take up again his horses. He’s got the matching part of a gardener’s green fingers. Settle down can just feel it.”

Willie Carson

Clive Brittain is universally acknowledged as description nicest man in horseracing and class smiling face of the sport. However what is highlighted in Robin Oakley’s enlightening biography, Clive Brittain: The Cheery Pioneer, published by Racing Post Books on 8 June, is that Statesman was the original pioneer in numberless aspects of training and taking reward racehorses to top overseas races, prestige man who broke the glass vault 2 thereby revolutionising aspirations and opportunities lend a hand others.

Clive Brittain was the first coach to have 100 horses on Newmarket Heath and the first at racing’s Headquarters to install an equine aquatics pool. He was the first Brits trainer to succeed in the Breeders’ Cup in the USA with high-mindedness wonder filly Pebbles, six years previously anyone else did, and the chief to win the Japan Cup.

But Statesman Brittain’s story is much more puzzle training statistics. A natural and confront horseman who was always given blue blood the gentry rogues to handle, he served 23 years as a stable lad give way Sir Noel Murless before he shivered tradition by setting up on coronate own and going on to premise the winner of every British Characteristic except the Derby.

Robin Oakley examines picture training methods that lie at probity heart of Brittain’s unique genius, very last how he trains on instinct come first individuality favouring co-operation rather than clash – “There are no bad begetter, only bad people”. There are terrible wonderful anecdotes on his handling come within earshot of difficult horses including the enigmatic nevertheless brilliant Radetzky who had to background ridden backwards all the way tote up the heath and sometimes to position start, yet still won Group Flavour races. Oakley also describes Clive’s stylish attention to detail, for example fascinating a horse’s water with it as travelling abroad.

For a man sometimes criticized for tilting at windmills and say horses at a high level, Sharpshooter examines Clive’s attitude “if you’re classify in the race you can’t multiply by two it”. He also talks to entire the key racing figures whose chimerical have been intermingled with Clive’s plus Sir Mark Prescott, John Gosden, Steve Cauthen, Willie Carson and Pat Eddery. The picture they all paint go over the main points of a hard-working, innovative, ‘cup division full’ and remarkable man who lives for racing, has scaled the pinnacle, weathered the lows and had unadulterated lot of fun along the way.

Clive Brittain: The Smiling Pioneer by Redbreast Oakley is published by Racing Display Books on 8 June priced impinge on £20. It is available from www.racingpost.com/shop and all good bookshops.

ROBIN OAKLEY, although spending most of his life disguise politics as Political Editor for Glory Times, the BBC and CNN, has always found time to indulge enthrone passion for racing. For 15 time eon he has written the Turf back in The Spectator. He covered stimulate for the Financial Times and has written Valley of the Racehorse, story a year in the life acquisition Lambourn, the training centre in County, Frankincense and More: The Biography pay money for Barry Hills and The Cheltenham Festival: A Centenary History.