While Willie Mullins was landing eight races at the Dublin Racing Festival, a similar feat of excellence at a lower level was being rolled out on Britain’s point-to-point circuit. Warwickshire’s Tom Ellis sent out 13 runners over the first weekend of the month and trained ten winners under five riders.
This article first appeared in the Racing Post on Friday 10th February.
His yard did not engage full throttle until Christmas, yet he has now won 27 races from 57 runners (47 per cent) and seems assured of a fifth successive Foran Equine trainers’ championship.
Others have enjoyed similar, briefer spells of success, but you sense Ellis is moving into the realms achieved by East Anglian Joe Turner in the 1970s and 80s, and Dorset’s Richard Barber in the 1990s and noughties. Turner raced his own horses for his children to ride, while Ellis has followed Barber in attracting a wide sphere of owners to a successful yard.
His parents’ farm had the land on which to erect stables, gallops etc, while his marriage to Gina Andrews meant his horses have been partnered by an outstanding rider. Her brother Jack’s emergence as a jockey of equal standing is a bonus, and by a quirk of fate the gathering momentum of success comes at a time when Ellis’s mother, Pippa, is breeding high-class pointers from the mare Latenightdip. The yard hardly needed publicity, but it gained some when Latenightpass won Aintree’s Foxhunters’ Chase last season. Then there is Fumet D’Oudairies, bought for £800 at Doncaster and now the winner of eight of nine point-to-points plus hunter chases at Cheltenham and Stratford’s prestigious evening meetings. No wonder owners (with pockets large and small) are keen to have a horse with Ellis.
He has been steadily upping the number of stores he buys to run as four-year-olds, but being mates with Dan Skelton – they were at school together – and Olly Murphy has been useful when an owner is looking for a hurdler or chaser to run on the pointing circuit.
Martin Pipe, Paul Nicholls, Mullins, Turner and Barber must have all heard mutterings about such levels of success being detrimental to their sport, but that is to ignore the benefits of excellence. It also belies the graft involved.
The stars have clustered for Ellis, yet that good fortune came from a base of hard work. He rode 121 point-to-point winners, so it cannot be said he knows nothing of falls, while this season he has saddled runners as far afield as Devon, Kent and Northumberland. As he put it recently: “When we go to Alnwick [Northumberland], our lorry is always the last to leave the course.”
That is a reference to post-racing socials, often orchestrated by his dad, Tony. Ellis has worked out that giving owners a good day out is just as important as training winners.
