Robin Dickin says he will try not to cry if Restless Harry wins at Cheltenham on Friday week, but we should not hold him to it. This, after all, is the horse that has saved his training career and his health inside a year. A few tears of joy would be fitting.
Last spring, Dickin was at a low ebb. Down to a dozen horses, he had trained three winners all season and the strain was evident, even before he collapsed in his Warwickshire yard. “My doctor thought it must be heart-related but it was just stress,” he recalled.
“I'd begun using savings to support a business that wasn't working. Syndicates were losing members who just couldn't afford it any more in the recession. Because I didn't want to let the others down, I would finance them. The overdraft was getting bigger and I couldn't fix it.
“Normally, I sleep for England but I was waking up in a muck sweat, then pacing the house worrying. I'd already given up ten boxes and a cottage and I didn't know what to do next. I was depressed at the very idea of not being able to carry on training.Richard Whitehead, friend and long-standing owner, did not waste words on sympathy. “He said, come on, let's get going and buy a horse.” So they went to the Cheltenham sale and acquired ‘Harry', a West Country point-to-point winner, with their first bid of £12,000.
Dickin, 56, spent the next 24 hours regretting it so vividly he might easily have ended up back in hospital. “He went mad in the lorry taking him home and, next morning, he'd wrecked his stable and was galloping round it like a motor bike on the wall of death. An agent then rang to tell me the horse was known to be nuts.”
He considered sending him back. Life may have taken a bleaker course had he done so. Instead, Dickin surveyed his purchase across the quaint yard he shares with a vintage car garage and a Victorian bathroom builder, then rode him over the fields himself and changed his mind. “He was so wonderfully athletic,” he said.
Yesterday, placidly munching his food, you would not have known ‘Harry' had been restless, let alone nuts. A mirror in his stable helped - “an idea I borrowed from Martin Pipe” - but natural ability conquered temperament. He is a strong second favourite for the Albert Bartlett Novices Hurdle, immediately before the Gold Cup.
One good horse really can transform a stable. “We've had 13 winners this season. Having such an athlete in the yard raises everybody's game. I haven't been through the books with an accountant, and I know we've got a way to go, but I'm feeling very positive.”
If Dickin gets his Festival winner, it will not be out of turn. He has been trying for 40 years, as jockey and trainer, since leaving the Shropshire of his childhood to join the fledgeling training regime of the late David Nicholson.
“I spent 11 happy years there. David was a verbal bully but under that bark, there was no bite. I was just a farmer's son without much education but I got an honours degree in life from the Nicholsons.”
Dickin recalls how Nicholson would arrange for his staff to attend Cheltenham each Gold Cup day. He will be there in his own right this year, still reminiscing. “I miss him still. I always thought he felt I'd be no good at training. I wish he could be there next week.
“I'm hoping, if 'Harry' wins, I'll have the composure not to bawl my eyes out. But I wear my heart on my sleeve. I promise I'll do a lot of laughing, too.”
Source:The Times
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