Anthony Honeyball comes from good
racing stock. His father, John, trained subsequent Cheltenham Gold
Cup winner, The Dikler – a strapping, 17.2 hand horse, famously
sent back to the hunting field by Captain Tim Forster after proving
too difficult to train – to win his first point-to-point at
Crowell.
Honeyball Jnr. rode as an amateur for
Richard Barber, one of the most successful trainers in the history of
point-to-point racing, and as conditional jockey to Paul Nicholls,
for whom he rode 45 winners, before embarking on his training career
in 2006. Initially based at his parents’ farm in Somerset, he
subsequently rented a yard from Richard Barber in Seaborough, Dorset,
before moving to nearby Potwell Farm Stables, near Beaminster, in
2012.
Honeyball has recorded his two biggest
wins ever, in monetary terms, with the same horse, Regal Encore,
owned by J.P. McManus, in the Lavazza Jolie Silver Cup Handicap Chase
at Ascot in 2016 and the Keltbray Swinley Chase over the same course
and distance in 2018. Coincidentally, Regal Encore beat the same
horse, Minella Daddy, trained by Peter Bowen, by a similar margin on
both occasions.
Honeyball saddled his first Graded
winner, Fountains Windfall, in the Gaskells Handicap Hurdle at
Aintree in 2017 and added a second, Midnight Tune, in the Weatherbys
General Stud Book Jane Seymour Mares' Novices’ Hurdle in 2018.
Fountains Windfall was sent over fences in 2017/18, winning twice,
and was a short as 7/1 for the RSA Chase at the Cheltenham Festival.
However, the 8-year-old was killed in a freak accident during a
routine schooling session a few days before his intended preparatory
run at Warwick in February. A shocked Honeyball said, “He
either had a momentary lapse of concentration and fell funny or it’s
possible he had a heart attack or a seizure.”
At the time of writing, in March, 2018,
Honeyball is already having his best season ever, numerically and
monetarily. So far, his string of 35 horses has won 33 races and
amassed just over £360,000 in prize money. In fact, since the middle
of November, Honeyball has sent out five doubles and a treble but, as
he explained, “It has taken 10 years of blood, sweat and tears
along with my wife [and assistant trainer] Rachael to climb the
ladder this far, but we’re not in a position yet where we couldn’t
slip back down. We buy our horses and we have properly grafted.”
No comments:
Post a Comment