Oliver Sherwood: 'Cancer plays with your emotions in ways you don't realise'

High on the Mandown gallops, with London to the left and the West Country to the right, a group of ten young jumpers make their way up a Polytrack hill and towards a man whose life has changed. More importantly, he is a man who still has a life.

This time last year, and for a few too many months thereafter, Oliver Sherwood faced an uncertain future at a time when he was already adjusting to the changes imposed by his recent past.

The bumper babies now reaching the brow of the climb will soon make their way back to Neardown, the smart Upper Lambourn stables from which the consistently affable 67-year-old has trained since the spring of last year. Its entrance gates are just half a mile from those of Rhonehurst, the place that for 37 years had been Sherwood's racing fiefdom, a yard whose boxes were occupied by all the trainer's Cheltenham Festival victors and, more recently, the mighty and much-missed Grand National champion Many Clouds.