The eyes of the sporting world are on Gloucestershire this week as the 2022 Cheltenham Festival takes centre stage.
The four-day meeting is the highlight of the National Hunt horse racing season in the United Kingdom and plenty of hard work goes into preparing runners for the meeting.
West Ham United manager David Moyes is a big racing fan and has undoubtedly learned a thing or two about the pressures of working at the top level during his career.
After keenly studying the horse racing odds from Betway before the Festival, the Hammers’ boss is full of admiration for the work done by the trainers.
“Football management is hard but horse trainers do the real hard graft” he said.
“I’ve got one horse with my trainer, Donald McCain”. I bought it six months ago and it might run this weekend, but it’s more for next year.
“We think our job in football’s hard but horse racing trainers are up at five in the morning every day, taking those horses out. That’s hard graft.”
Moyes highlighted the pressure the top football managers are under to cement his point, saying that even the likes of Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola are constantly under the spotlight.
“Sometimes you see managers, like Pep at City, doing so well and you think it must be easy for them,” Moyes added.
But they’re under great pressure because they have to win. So, the big horse trainers who spend money on the horses must be under huge pressure from the owners to get results.
“The difference is that horse trainers don’t get chanted ‘you’re getting sacked in the morning’! The horses can’t do that”.
Moyes’ comments were made during a one-to-one session with Irish trainer Ross O’Sullivan, who was out of luck with his runner at the Festival on Tuesday.
His Sea Sessions finished down the field in the Boodles Hurdle – a race that attracted a sizeable audience on sports streaming sites around the world.
However, Irish runners won three of the seven races on the first day, with Honeysuckle’s success in the Champion Hurdle the standout performance.
With plenty of fancied runners during the rest of the meeting, Irish trainers are expected to dominate the headlines and mop up many more of the top races before the end of the week.
O’Sullivan says that Irish racing is in a healthy state at the moment, but admits the pressure he faces bears plenty of similarities to what Moyes endures with West Ham.
“It’s similar to football,” O’Sullivan said. “If West Ham have a great year this year and finish in the top four, and then next year they don’t do as well, people say ‘what happened?’
It’s the same with a trainer. You want to train 30 winners or 25 winners. When you fancy your horse and you have a chance, you’re looking at the form and where the pace is going to come from.
“You have to be happy with your horse.”
