Tristan Davidson is a racehorse trainer based in Laversdale near Carlisle, Cumbria. He holds a dual licence training horses on both the flat and over jumps. Millie Mason from our Rural Professional team recently caught up with him and learned how he balances being a racehorse trainer and sheep farmer and what makes the perfect racing yard when buying or developing your own equestrian property.
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Tell us a bit about yourself, how you got into horse racing and any career highlights.
I’ve loved racing since a very young age. When I was about 14 years old, I used to go down to Jonjo O’Neill’s yard when he was based near Penrith in Cumbria and that’s where I really caught the bug. For a bit of fun I had a couple of goes at pony racing at Langholm Common Riding, but it was some years later before it got serious when I took up Point to Pointing.
During my Point to Pointing years, I was Northern Area Men’s Champion Jockey three times and I rode over 100 winners. I also rode 14 winners under rules before I took up training. I got my trainer’s licence in 2014 and started off training a small handful of horses and have built up the yard to where it is now.
One of my favourite successes as a trainer is the day I had my first career double, with two winners at Cartmel. It was an unreal day and absolutely fantastic to get one winner, let alone two, on one of our local tracks in Cumbria.
As a trainer, the real highlight of my job is to get horses in which haven’t made the grade at other yards and carefully get to know them, learn their strengths and weaknesses and then give them another chance. Keeping a smaller yard means all of our horses get one to one attention and I know all of them and their individual personalities, so it is really rewarding when they are on form and winning races.
If you could train racehorses anywhere in the UK, where would it be and why?
Both Middleham and Newmarket are great locations. I have a dual licence and enjoy training horses on both the flat and over jumps, so Middleham would be the better location for me. Plus I’m a Northerner and North Yorkshire isn’t too far away from home in Cumbria. Middleham has great facilities, the gallops up on the moor are fantastic and there’s a good racing community around there.
Yorkshire is also a good central location for travelling to racecourses across England and Scotland. There are nine racecourses across Yorkshire, which is more racecourses than in any other region in the UK.
If you were to design your dream racing yard, what would be the key facilities that you’d include and why?
It would be nice to have all the mod cons like an equine swimming pool, however, the gallops are the most important part of a trainer’s yard. I’ve heard of trainers with really smart yards, who haven’t had much success because their gallops weren’t well designed and thought out.
If I was to buy a plot of land and start from scratch, I would design the gallops first and then design the layout of the yard around them. The gallops would have a nice steady incline, be just over 6 furlongs and would have an all-weather surface.
Aside from the racehorses, you’re also a farmer. Talk me through your average day?
The farming side is quite small, so our horses are the main focus. We have a flock of 130 Swaledale ewes which we breed with Bluefaced Leicester tups to produce North of England mule lambs. Mules suit the ground and climate up here in Cumbria and they consistently produce good carcases.
I generally get up at 6am, feed the horses and check the sheep. Then it’s time for my first coffee. The yard staff come in at 7am, we muck out and then the first lot of horses go on the horse walker.
Then it’s time for a coffee with the team before we saddle up and head out riding. Once we’re back from riding, we take the horses for a quick graze, before putting them back in their stables to give them their lunch. Once the horses are fed and watered, we can all have ours.
At about 3pm, we groom every horse, pick their feet out and check them over, before skipping out the stables. The yard staff then go home and I catch up with owners and admin and check the horses again later on.
Do you have any favourite horses on the yard and are any of them set for big races this season?
I have a couple of horses on good form at the moment who will definitely be set to win races this season, so watch this space.
One of my favourite horses that I’ve trained was called Justatenner. He was only rated 82 when he came to me and he’d practically been written off as a racehorse. I really took the time to get to know him and I got his rating up to 134 with wins at Ayr, Perth, Hexham and Cartmel.