YOU can hear the dogs before you see them.
Seven of them, in fact, stood barking their heads off behind the glass panelled double doors that overlook Old Manor Stables.
Sara Bradstock has a new stable star in Mr Vango[/caption]
Mr Vango has won the London National and Peter Marsh Chase this year – but likely won’t get a run in the Grand National[/caption]
They are mainly a wide array of small terriers and they are as nice as pie once you’re inside – quite literally all bark and no bite.
Sara Bradstock is just finishing some odd jobs around the yard – the historic home of five time Gold Cup winner Golden Miller – and comes inside for a brief break, a coffee and a chat.
“Two of the dogs are my son Alfie’s, they’re not all mine I promise. That one is Frank, he is only a baby and he is lovely.”
Poodle-Jack Russell cross Frank, who is barely a year old, was added to the pack shortly after Bradstock’s husband of 37 years, former trainer Mark, died of cancer last March.
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Some of the medical equipment Sara, 63, used to care for him is still in the living room, and there is memorabilia from their great days in the sport all over the place.
Bradstock said: “The horses have always been my life and my focus, but they were especially important during Mark’s illness.
“It goes without saying it was very difficult. Mark was desperate that we were able to keep going when he was very sick.
“I was concentrating on looking after him and if you’re not careful you can very quickly end up with no horses.
“But we devoted our life to them and the sport, we were never going to just give up. I work very closely with my daughter Lily and she has always worked hard, she just works twice as hard now.”
No matter how deeply embedded in racing you are, you need a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel to keep you going when times are especially rough.
Popular chaser Mr Vango has been that glimmer, and a whole lot more besides.
But before we talk about him, it’s impossible not to reminisce about Coneygree, especially as we are fast-approaching the 10-year anniversary of his famous Cheltenham Gold Cup win.
It was, and still is, one of the great stories in the modern history of jumps racing when he became the first novice to win the big one in over 40 years back in 2015.
She said: “It surprised us at the time that so many people thought it was a crazy idea running him in the Gold Cup as a novice and we got a lot of abuse for it.
“He’d shown already he was a very difficult horse to keep sound, he’d been around and he’d seen life, he wasn’t scared of anything so we were always going to go for it.
“If I’m honest, I have virtually no memory of the day itself. I’ve watched the race back so many times but because of all the adrenaline those few hours are a blur.
“I remember the stick we got in the build-up. Ted Walsh was asked on TV about us running Coneygree and he said: ‘This is Cheltenham, not Disneyland’.
“So when we took the horse to Punchestown I very nearly got T-shirts printed with the Disneyland logo on them – I really regret not doing it! It was a proper fairytale.”
Coneygree won an epic Cheltenham Gold Cup in 2015[/caption]
Our chat is interrupted as Sara gets a call on her phone, she glances down: “Suspected spam. I think we can tell them to f*** off.”
She is not a woman who suffers fools and, for all she had a privileged start to life as the daughter of Lord Oaksey, she hasn’t always had it easy.
She has to hold a finger to her throat to speak, having suffered severe damage to her respiratory nerves as a result of heavy falls as a jockey.
And despite the success she and her late husband had on the track with very limited resources, their big winners chiefly helped pay the bills.
She said: “We showed what we could do for so many years but I never understood why more people didn’t give us a chance and send us some horses.
“People have said things to me like, ‘don’t you just want to give it up and move on’, which is incredibly stupid. The answer is obviously no.
“We are in a position where we are just trying to keep our heads above water, but I would not swap this life for anything and wouldn’t let anyone tell me otherwise.”
And when you’ve got a horse of the calibre of Mr Vango in the yard, why would you even contemplate chucking in the towel?
He gave the Bradstock family an incredibly emotional day when winning in the Devon National by 60 lengths last February, with Mark gravely ill at home.
He died just a week later, but the horse went on to run a great race at the Cheltenham Festival later that month and has since bagged the London National and Peter Marsh Chase this winter.
So it’s to the detriment of the sport that a horse with this ability and back story will be highly unlikely to get a start in the Grand National at Aintree because he is too far down the weights.
She said: “He’s won the London National and the Peter Marsh, you’d jolly well hope you’d be able to get a run in the National, but there we are it looks unlikely.
“It will be really upsetting if we get testing ground on National day, so our only hope is a big storm comes and puts the Irish off coming. It would put them off and put us right in there with a chance.
“We had so many nice messages this season and his wins have been very special, because this is the horse that has kept us going through some difficult times.
“We’ve put him in the Kim Muir at Cheltenham but that will be ground dependant, and we always have the Midlands National to go to as an alternative.
“When he won by so far in the Devon National last year it really cheered Mark up because there was a bit of hope for the future. And that’s exactly what he gives us.”
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