A vision for victory - six-time champion trainer Nicky Henderson on his forty-seven seasons at the top of the National Hunt table
Article by Alysen Miller
“Of course, they’d never let me have a driving licence,” chortles Nicky Henderson. We are in his jeep hurtling across the Lambourn Downs on our way to watch first lot get put through their paces. I reach reflexively for my seatbelt. “I drive around here [‘here’ being, naturally, the historic Seven Barrows] but I wouldn't see a car coming until it's 50 yards away. Which is not a very safe way of driving,” he admits.
Henderson suffers from macular degeneration – an eye disease that affects central vision. People with macular degeneration can't see things that are directly in front of them. Henderson started experiencing blurred vision 10 years ago. Since then, his eyesight has become progressively worse. “When you lose those these things gradually, you don't notice it to start with,” he says.
While living with the condition certainly comes with challenges, it cannot be said that Henderson’s failing eyesight has dulled the six-time champion trainer’s enthusiasm for the game. “There are a lot of things I can't do, and there are definitely things that I miss,” he explains. “The worst thing is not being able to see people's faces. I can't really read without putting it in great big letters [on his iPad], and even then it still doesn't work particularly well. I read what I have to read.”
This includes reading the Racing Post cover to cover every day. “Well, the greyhounds get a miss,” he says. “But I don't read a daily newspaper. I’m probably the only person you’ve ever written an article about who will never read it,” he quips. “But I can see horses. That’s the one thing I can see. Once they're out, I know exactly who's who and what’s where. If that was a human, I couldn't tell you who it was if I didn't know them at that distance. But I can see the whole horse.”
There is little that hasn’t already been written about Nicholas John Henderson LVO OBE, obviating the need for him to read my humble contribution to the canon. He is the son of Johnny Henderson, a banker and racehorse owner (not to mention aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, whom he tapped to be Nicky’s godfather) who was instrumental in keeping Cheltenham Racecourse out of the clutches of property developers when, in 1963, he and other Jockey Club members formed Racecourse Holdings Trust, a non-profit-making organisation that raised £240,000 (approximately £4.4 million today) to purchase the racecourse and safeguard its future, and that of the Cheltenham Festival.
Henderson père’s name was added to the title of the Grand Annual Handicap Chase in 2005. It had been expected that Henderson fils would follow his father’s well-healed footsteps into pinstripe suited respectability. “And I did, in a roundabout way,” he says. He spent a year in the Sydney offices of aristocratic private stockbroker Cazenove. He had been “mucking about in Western Australia with sheep and cattle and horses” when he was summoned back to London to start his City career. “I didn't like the idea of it, so they came up with a great idea,” he says. “I could go back to Australia and be in their Sydney office, which had two people in it. That was going to suit me an awful lot better than sitting in London. So off I went, back to Australia, until it was eventually time to go back to London and get serious.” He lasted a year and a half. “I just couldn't sit behind a desk and stare at a wall,” he says.
Instead, he became assistant trainer to the legendary Fred Winter. “I was at Fred’s for five years,” he says. “Then it was either a matter of going elsewhere to see if I could learn something else or kicking off [on my own] and seeing what happened.” So the legend goes, in 1978 he was at the pub when he agreed to purchase Windsor House Stables from Roger Charlton. “We just dreamt it up one night. Roger was going to go and be Jeremy Tree's assistant and he said, ‘Well, why don't you buy my place?’” he reminisces. “So he went off to Jeremy’s and I went down the road from Uplands, which was where Fred was. We had about five horses to start with. I hadn’t got a clue what we were doing, but it sort of got off the ground, miraculously.”
Windsor House came with two amenities – an equine swimming pool (something of a novelty at the time) and Head Lad Corky Browne. “Roger said to me, ‘I've got this amazing head lad who and you really want to take him on.’” Corky would become Henderson’s right-hand man and remain an integral part of the team for more than four decades. He retired in 2019. “And then somebody said to me, ‘I've got a really good traveling head lad,’ which was Johnny Worrall,” Henderson continues. “And there was only one other person we needed: Jimmy Nolan, who was used to ride for Fulke Walwyn. So I had the best head lad you could have, the best traveling head lad you could have, and a really good rider in Jimmy.”
The second half of the twentieth century was a golden age for National Hunt trainers in Lambourn. “There was Fred and Fulke, and then Richard Head and Jenny Pitman came along later,” he says. “They were great, legendary, men that you just looked up to and spoke to very quietly, if required to speak. We had such enormous awe and respect for those guys. They were icons. They were gods.”
Now Nicky Henderson is one of those icons. His accolades include nine Champion Hurdles and six Champion Chases. Amongst currently active trainers only Willie Mullins has won more races at the Cheltenham Festival than Henderson, making him Britain’s most successful trainer at the Festival. His encyclopaedic list of winners runs from Altior to Zongalero, the latter of whom was second in the Grand National in Henderson’s first year as a trainer. “A horse like him comes along and you nearly win the Grand National in your first year… Well, that would have been daft,” says Henderson. “Fred Winter did it, incidentally. But to come second in the Grand National in our first ever year? That’s how lucky you can be,” he says self-deprecatingly.
I put it to him that Napoleon famously said he’d rather have lucky generals than good ones. “I don't think Monty would appreciate that!” Henderson laughs. Monty – Field Marshal Montgomery – and Henderson maintained a correspondence throughout the general’s life. “He was a fascinating man, and we got on very well. We had some very funny times together. We did write to each other a lot. But if I had said, ‘God, you were lucky,’ I think he'd think was a bit more skill in it than that!”
Zongalero’s second place in the 1979 Grand National – beaten by two lengths by Rubstic, the smallest horse in the race – has yet to be bettered by a Seven Barrows runner. But Henderson remains grateful for his first flag bearer. “He was the first horse I was ever asked to train,” he remembers. “He was quite a well-known horse. Tom Jones – who trained him – was becoming more and more of a flat trainer, so he was giving up the jumpers. He had this great big thing and he thought it was better for him to go somewhere else and, blow me down, I got this amazing letter one day – before we'd even opened the yard – saying, ‘I've got this horse. I'd like you to train it for me.’ I thought he was mad. Anyway, Zongalero came along with a few others, and, you know, the bits and pieces suddenly turned up and it sort of got the ball rolling. But I see him as the first great horse.”
If Zongalero was the first great horse, he certainly was not the last. Henderson’s current stable stars include Jonbon, Constitution Hill, Sir Gino, Lulamba and Jango Baie. “Those top horses are as good a string as anyone could have,” says Henderson. “They're all genuine Group 1 horses, the top of their categories.” But after four decades at the top of the game, does Henderson ever worry about the Young Turks snapping at his heels? “There are a lot of very good young trainers coming through, particularly National Hunt,” he says. “I think we're probably all competitive. I know I am. You wouldn't do this if you didn’t want to win. There's no point in going out there thinking, ‘I’m just going to do this for fun.’”
So what’s the secret to his longevity? “There are two things you need: good horses and good people. You've got to have an awful lot of good people,” he says firmly. “That is essential.” He is quick to pay credit to Charlie Morlock – whom he describes in Montgomerian terms as his aide-de-camp – and Assistant Trainer George Daly as well as his wife, Sophie. “I know you're trying to write about me,” he says, breaking the fourth wall. “But it's not about me. Gosh, no. It's the whole operation.
“We were talking about eyes,” he continues. “I have actually got three different pairs of eyes,” he says, “in Charlie, George and Sophie. I would be in serious trouble without them. They're vital.” Morlock previously assisted Henderson for 10 years before striking off to train in his own name. “And he did fine,” says Nicky. “But it was a mutual idea that we get back together again. And he's been here for God knows how long this time. George is my assistant trainer, he's Charlie's aide-de-camp. We just do everything together.” It all sounds a bit like being a field marshal, I suggest. “I suppose so,” he says. “It has to be reasonably regimented with that number of people and that number of horses. We pull out at 7.30am every single morning, 365 days of the year, except Sundays.” Every evening Henderson goes round half the yard. “I'm feeling their legs, looking at them. ‘You've got lighter,’ ‘You’ve put weight on,’ ‘I don't like your leg,’ ‘You look well,’ ‘You look shocking.’ Not many yards would do evening stables like we do here. It's still very old fashioned.”
Despite his insistence on his antiquity, Henderson is not immune to the proliferation of technology that has swept through the racing industry in the past decade. “It's got its advantages,” he admits. “We use heart rate monitors. There is blood testing and scoping, all the modern technology. It filters through.” But there are limits to his embrace of technology: “It’s not like I'm still going to school like these guys are, or have been over to Australia and America to learn all the new technology they have over there that you can bring to this country. We’ll pick it up somewhere along the line,” he says. Henderson has also revealed an unexpected gift for social media. (“I hate it,” he says.) And yet few among us will ever look at a photo of a printed page of Calibri the same way again.
In the course of researching this profile I managed to turn up a news report from 1979 (written by one Brough Scott) that describes Henderson’s training as showing “a mastery and skill beyond his years.” It is submitted that, more than four decades later, the reverse is true: the septuagenarian Henderson trains with an energy and enthusiasm that belies his age. As Henderson looks ahead to yet another National Hunt season – his 47th – there is one prize that eludes him: the English Grand National. “We've won all the Champion Chases and Champion Hurdles and Gold Cups, a couple of King Georges. I think most of them have got ticks by them,” he says. “But a Grand National is the obvious thing [that’s missing].
“Embarrassingly, there are no Grand Nationals [in his trophy cabinet] whatsoever. Except for the American, which I really can't count because it's a two-and-a-half-mile hurdle race.” The obvious candidate to capture Henderson’s white whale is Hyland. “He ran in it last year and I think he would have probably grown up from the experience. And I would think it's probably on his agenda this season.” One can’t help but hope that Henderson will get to see a Seven Barrows runner crossing the winning post in first place at Aintree, even if he has to watch it on TV. “One thing I don't see particularly well is on a racecourse. I can't see even with binoculars,” he says.
With Henderson’s eyesight failing it’s tempting to think of Ludwig van Beethoven, who produced arguably his greatest works when completely deaf. Even as he rages against the dying of the light, Henderson has no intention of calling time on his training career. “I'm first to admit it, I've been very, very lucky. But we've done our best to make the most of it, and it's been fun. And it’s still fun. And I intend to go on having fun.”
