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Published: 24/01/2004 by Alan Lee Courtesy of The Times
PEOPLE have always had the wrong idea
about Richard Phillips. Because he tells a good joke and wears a
ready smile, they have him down as the laid back, carefree type
who will laugh his way through life’s crises. The truth could
hardly be more different.
“I’m nervous crossing a road,” Phillips admitted
yesterday. “I’m that type of person — I don’t
relax.” Imagine, then, how this fretful character has suffered
this winter. Just when it seemed he had the training game cracked
after years of struggle and upheaval, it has mocked him mercilessly.
Phillips, 40, was the rising force of last season, his 32 winners
including a Cheltenham Festival breakthrough with the prolific La
Landiere. Today, as the mare returns to Cheltenham for the fiercely
competitive Ladbroke Trophy, her trainer is languishing in the file
marked “forgotten”.
The jumps season has run for nine months and Phillips has registered
just five winners. Since the end of July, his score stands at a
mortifying two. Yet the pretty, purpose-built yard in the Cotswold
village of Adlestrop is bulging with more than 70 horses. What has
gone wrong? Sickness, that’s what. Like several other leading
jumps yards, Phillips’s horses have been laid low by an elusive,
stress-related bug. “We had a good year, which brought an
influx of new horses,” he explained. “It was probably
inevitable that one of them would be carrying something. These things
happen, and we are far from alone, but we’ve had a few boring
months.”
Being bored around Phillips seems a contradiction. His wit and talent
for mimickry were appreciated long before his training ability and
he could, if he wished, make a comfortable living as an after-dinner
speaker. Resolutely, he refuses almost all approaches these days,
intent instead on consolidating a career he treasures far more.
Those who have sat next to him before he speaks, though, will have
recognised the nerves and insecurities of a man who worries about
everything. Such tendencies must have made him difficult to live
with these past few months. Yesterday, as one of his staff pointed
me towards the office, he added: “I shouldn’t go in
there, if I was you.”
“It’s very demoralising,” Phillips conceded later,
as another syringe of cloudy liquid was delivered for his inspection.
“My desk has been full of blood tests and trach washes for
months.
“Sometimes the harder you work at this thing the worse it
gets, and what you mustn’t do then is panic, because that
leads to stupid decisions. I think very deeply about everything
I do here but I haven’t had sleepless nights — I’m
always too exhausted for that.
“People have told me I should go on holiday but that’s
the last thing I’d do, walking away with the ship in trouble.
In my early days of training, I used to get a lot more down because
I knew I didn’t have good horses and getting out of the situation
would be very hard. Now, it’s just a matter of patience.”
Phillips has been training for 11 years, much of it nomadically.
He was plucked from relative obscurity to succeed David Nicholson
at Jackdaws Castle — a fleeting paradise but one that left
him neither bitter nor regretful.
“It was only one season but I made the most of it and it was
the best thing that ever happened to me. I’d been a non-league
manager and I was suddenly at a Premiership club. We made an impression
— people saw that we could train better horses.
“When I left, people were saying ‘poor old Phillips’
but I was very cool about it because I took some nice horses with
me and I knew we’d be all right. Without wanting to quote
Elton John, it’s the circle of life — you have to keep
starting again, just as we’re doing now.”
As if illness was not enough of a blight, Phillips has also been
handicapped by injuries to some of his best horses. “We have
got Supreme Toss, Chopneyev and Dark’n Sharp out for the season,
so it was going to be a hard year anyway,” he said. “I
hope to have them all back for next year and we’re deliberately
planning for the future. The next three years look very good.
“Way back in the summer, I warned everyone that we would have
to manage expectations. Last season gave us a real boost and our
numbers went up significantly. But we have a high proportion of
very young horses and they are going to take time.
“I know people will say that we’ve got too big and taken
our fingers off the pulse but it’s nothing to do with that.
It’s all about health. These are just like kids at infant
school — the youngest ones will get sick because they haven’t
built up their immune systems. It’s just the same with horses.”
There is a yarn or two thrown in, a few guffaws. No conversation
with Phillips could be entirely without such relief. But despite
appearances, he is a serious man, a serious trainer, desperate for
deliverance from his torture.
La Landiere, twice disappointing since her phenomenal run of seven
wins last season, is giving him hope. “She wasn’t quite
firing through November and December. Something went through her
but she’s brighter now and it will be fascinating to see how
she runs tomorrow.
“The horses are coming out of it slowly and we’ve got
plenty entered next week. There is sure to be a freeze-up now, though
I won’t moan about that — viruses hate the cold.
“I wish all this hadn’t happened but I have to lead
the way out of it. It’s important to show a positive outlook
to your staff and owners. It’s a war against sickness and
it’s no good saying it’s all gone wrong and we’re
being beaten by it. As long as I keep telling the owners the truth,
and as long as they are convinced that I want to win even more than
they do, I think they’ll stick by me.”
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