Racehorse Trainer
British Racing School

Amy W

00:00:04 My name is Amy W and I’m a Race Horse Trainer. My job as a Race Horse trainer involves training horses, getting them fit and ready to run in races, hopefully winning races. It involves managing staff, organising owners and entries for the horses, and transporting to the races on the day of the race.

00:00:23 I started off attending the British Racing School and getting my NVQ level one. That was a nine week residential course. That was in 1998, ten years ago. And from there I got a job placement for two years in a trainer’s yard working my way up as a stable girl and doing all the usual duties, riding the horses, mucking out. From there I came to Newmarket, and worked for a trainer called Michael Bell who I worked for for a year, before moving abroad to work in France as a Pupil Assistant, working my way up the ranks. And then I came back to racing full time as Assistant Trainer to Michael Bell for the last three years, before starting up training on my own this year

00:01:03 Being a Race Horse Trainer’s something I’ve always wanted to do. It’s something I was very passionate about, and from an early age I sort of became involved working weekends and holidays in the local racing stables, helping out. Doing my job you have to be a hundred percent committed to doing the work. It’s every day of the week, the horses don’t understand that it’s Sunday and that you might like a day off, so it is a full time job. It’s more of a way of a life really than a job. And you’re there every day, come rain or shine. It’s really exciting actually, it’s amazing that it’s all happened so quickly I’m – you know I am quite young, I’m still 26 and to have started off – it was always my ambition and my dream to become a Race Horse Trainer, and you know, along the way you kind of think, Oh it’s probably not actually going to happen, and for it actually to have happened and to be going and I’ve trained a winner now and it’s fantastic.

00:02:30 Well there was a turning point after I’d been working in the sport, I’d done it ever since I left school at 16, and after about 5 years I sort of just fancied a change really. I’d never done anything else, and I thought well I don’t want to leave it too late, and be stuck in a career where, you know, I might not be a hundred percent happy. So I went and started work as a Dealer in a Casino, which I actually really enjoyed, it was kind of a colourful job and a lot of fun and I earned quite good money there and was able to save and buy a house. But one event that had an impact on my life was actually breaking my leg. At the time I was working in the Casino, and riding horses for people in the mornings, and I fell off a horse one morning and broke my leg quite badly. And it was while I was sitting at home waiting for it to mend, that I’d seen sort of basically my dream job advertised as Assistant Trainer to Michael Bell, who I used to work for. And it was a great job because at the time he had the favourite for the Derby, which is like the biggest race of the year, and to get the job there as his Assistant was fantastic, and it was really sort of through breaking my leg that it gave me a bit of time to think about my career and where it was going, and I decided that, despite the break, I wanted to get back and work with horses full time and that was it, from then on it was what I wanted to do, and I knew it for a fact then.

00:03:00 I think anybody else who fancies being a Horse Trainer shouldn’t be put off by the fact that it does look a hard sport to break in to, because it is possible if you work hard and you meet the right people, and you want it that badly, you can do it. And I started off not from a racing background, my family aren’t involved with race horses. But I managed to do it by hard work and, you know, getting a few lucky breaks, and meeting the right people at the right time, to work my way up the ladder, and now I’ve started training, so it is possible if you really want it.

00:03:25 There haven’t really been any low points so far, I’ve been really lucky to get really good jobs and there’s – there’s like nothing I really could say that’s a low point, except for the weather, some mornings.

00:03:37 ENDS