Former Newmarket trainer pens his story of his life in racing

When 18-year-old Gavin Pritchard-Gordon walked into the offices of the Daily Mail newspaper and said he wanted to be a racing journalist he was told he’d have to do three things first, get a job on a local newspaper, work in France, and spend some time in a racing stable.

A little over a decade later, after a spell as a reporter on a newspaper in his native Sussex and a spell across the Channel, that eager teenager was carving a career for himself as a trainer in Newmarket having trained 22 winners in his first season at Shalfleet stables in Bury Road, which he took over from his first boss, Harvey Leader.

But that was not before he just missed out on a job as a racing commentator for the BBC. He was one of six shortlisted, along with Michael Stoute, but the job eventually went to Julian Wilson.

Pritchard-Gordon went on to train for half a century at Newmarket and his racing life is detailed in his newly published memoir, Follow Your Leader, which is now available on Amazon.

Brough Scott, doyen of racing writers, in his foreword, called it a vivid and unique chronicle of an age that had gone. “The leading players who walk through these pages are described with loving and almost Dickensian detail and some very welcome wit,” he wrote. “The assorted triumphs and disasters did actually happen, including the brilliant early one when the when the euphoria of saddling a first winner was clouded by a major bollocking from the titled owner who wanted the horses to have a joey and wait for another day”.

Training racehorses, according to Pritchard-Gordon, was his passion and the book is full of stories of his triumphs and disasters, his owners and his staff, not least the late Billy Cahill, a well-known Newmarket character who worked for him as a stable lad and who he described as a constant thread throughout his memoirs.

“He was the most brilliant man with horses especially yearlings with whom he had a very special empathy,” he wrote.

But he also recalled when Limerick-born Billy was arrested having mistakenly been suspected of harbouring an IRA terrorist in the Doris Street house where he was living. “Sunday morning’s national papers are full of the story. Billy’s names and mine are plastered all over the pages,” he wrote.

But all proved to be well in the end. “There has been a big misunderstanding,” said Billy. “The police have apologised and everything is fine. And what is more I have made you even more famous than you were before. These stories in the papers were hysterical, and it was all a great craic.”

The best horses Pritchard-Gordon trained on the Flat were Group 1 winners Noalcoholic, Ardoon, and Record Run but one of his most exciting moments came when King Pele, ridden by the late David Nicholson, triumphed in the Gloucester Hurdle now the Sun Alliance, at the Cheltenham Festival in 1973.

He retired from training in 1995, spending a year with the British Horseracing Board in Portman Square before becoming chief executive of the Thoroughbred Breeders Association In Newmarket. He held that position for 14 years, prior to being appointed executive chairman of British Bloodstock marketing, and then retiring in 2010. He now lives in Leicestershire but makes the most of the opportunities to return and spend time in his beloved Newmarket, the town that will always hold a special place in his heart.