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Phillips
Fans Flames of Change
By Andrew Longmore
Courtesy of The Sunday Times
A virus stopped his yard in its tracks last year, but the Cotswolds
trainer has fought back by embracing a new approach to training.
By Andrew Longmore
THE SIGN at the entrance to Richard Phillips’s racing yard
in the Cotswolds is quite categoric. “Welcome to Adlestrop
Stables,” it reads. Nothing out of the ordinary in that, except
that racing stables have generally regarded themselves as a world
apart, a feudal world of ancient practice and accepted wisdom unchanged
and largely unchallenged since the 18th century. Outsiders are tolerated,
rarely welcomed.
Had Phillips not endured a virus-ridden season last year and been
forced into hospital for a hip operation, the odds are that the
culture of Adlestrop would have stayed as unbending as the landscape.
After all, the previous year had been marked by a Cheltenham Festival
winner and the best strike rate in the country. But, forced to take
an outsider’s view of his business for perhaps the first time
in his life and with the insistent tones of Michael Caulfield, a
sports psychologist and one of his oldest friends, ringing in his
ears, he embarked on a radical change of philosophy that has begun
to pay dividends on the racetrack and, more significantly, in the
atmosphere in his yard.
The new sign was not just window-dressing, nor were the bright new
waterproof jackets supplied to the staff. A recruitment advertisement
in the racing press emphasised the responsibilities of employer
to employee, not always racing’s strong suit, and used the
language of business, not of horses. “Maximise your potential
. . . improve in areas including riding, stable management and involvement
in every aspect of training high- class racehorses.” And the
odd old donkey, it might have added.
“What the ad was saying,” says Caulfield, “was
‘please come and help me train some winners’. We’re
trying to get a yard based on praise, discipline and good practice,
where staff improve because they want to, where they feel they belong.
Twenty years ago you might have been able to rule a yard by fear,
now a different type of person is working in them. We want the best
young people to come to this yard. ”
As a result of the ad, Phillips took on two new yard managers. In
fulfilling his side of the deal, he has hired a riding consultant,
who visits the yard once a month to help the staff improve their
riding. Not just any old riding consultant either. When Richard
Dunwoody talks, staff listen; one word of praise lasts a month.
“Like having football coaching from Bobby Charlton,”
says Phillips.
To minimise the effects of the virus last season, he adopted Mark
Johnston’s method of dividing his yard into smaller units.
Each of his three yards has its own colours, its own management
structure and, to an extent, its own autonomy. Each team in the
yard has a weekly meeting; Caulfield chairs the monthly meeting
with all of the staff, and internal competition is encouraged.
Structural reorganisation was easy. Much harder for Phillips was
changing his own ways of communicating and finding time to listen,
like any good chief executive. Regular staff appraisals require
commitment, honesty and trust from both sides, but they have become
central to the working system at Adlestrop. “Trainers tend
to be realists, they have to be,” he says. “But it’s
no use me being a grumpy old bastard every morning.” His own
faults were swiftly exposed in appraisal. Too little praise, too
much swearing. He’s trying hard to change.
“It’s like being the headmaster of a school,”
he says. “If my teachers aren’t good enough, my kids
won’t pass their exams. I was brought up to do things properly
in the old-school way and, in a sense, this is all about getting
back to the standards of the old days, where dedication and motivation
were almost taken for granted and, to quote the Prince of Wales,
people knew their place. Society’s changed so we have to adopt
a more modern approach.”
Caulfield’s input has been critical to the process. He and
Phillips learnt the value of true horsemanship riding out for the
Captain, Tim Forster, two decades ago. As Caulfield became a highly
effective head of the Jockeys’ Association and Phillips climbed
early rungs on the training ladder, they stayed in touch, but only
when Caulfield branched out into sports psychology and performance
consultancy did a casual exchange of ideas turn into a genuine working
relationship.
Caulfield imported lessons from the youth academies at Liverpool
and Middlesbrough, and from individual centres of excellence such
as AP McCoy. “I can’t make horses run faster,”
he says. “I don’t do technique, that’s Richard’s
job. But I can make the yard as free of distraction as possible
so that everyone can get on with the job of getting more winners.”
Is it working? Owners seem happy, the staff have embraced the new
ways and 10 winners is better than last season, but not enough,
not nearly enough, for a man of Phillips’s ambition.
“Other trainers say, ‘I hear you’re being nice
to your staff now’,” he says. “They’re missing
the point. The whole system is designed not to accept second best
and we’re working on it.”
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