The rain’s arrived, the horses are stepping up – Tizzard Racing’s Chris Wald is building towards Owners’ Day and dreaming of a Cheltenham contender
We’re back into the swing of the season now, and it all kicked off in style with our Open Day. The sun shone, around 500 people turned up, and we’ve raised an extra £4,000 for Breakthrough T1D the diabetes charity with the GoFundMe – it was a brilliant day. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and we had great feedback. The GoFundMe is still open, if anyone wants to add to the pot!
We’re not quite up and racing just yet – we’re still about a month away from having many runners. That said, it’s been good to see a bit of rain. We’ll need much more yet to get the winter tracks safe and soft enough, but you can finally start to feel the season coming.
The horses are stepping up their work now: there’s a real difference in the yard compared to a month ago. We’re approaching our Owners’ Day on 14th September, when they’ll parade and do some jumping work, and that’s always a big milestone for the yard. It marks the start of the serious build-up.
We’ve got lots of promising types coming through this year – we have 26 unraced horses, or those recently off the point-to-point scene. Most of our new ones are from the Irish point-to-points. Unlike a lot of the English P2P’s, the Irish ones are very commercially run, and they produce some real quality four- and five-year-olds. It’s a model we’ve had good success with previously. Last year we had nine individual novice hurdle winners and five bumper winners – that’s where the future stars start from.
We ended last season 10th in the Trainers’ Championship, with just over £1 million in prize money – it was a good year, but we had no Grade 1s. So that’s the target we’ve set: another million-plus season, and we’d love to land a Grade 1 too. From the very first runs, you’re always thinking ahead – “could this one be the Cheltenham horse?” We have plenty to look forward to.
