Colin Tizzard: 'I had to have five pints before I could ask a girl to dance!'

Legendary Cheltenham Gold Cup-winning trainer Colin Tizzard celebrates his 68th birthday today and to mark the occasion we have republished this fantastic interview, which was first published exclusively for Racing Post Members' Club subscribers in December 2022.

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With his sturdy build, rosy cheeks and rustic tones, Colin Tizzard has the air of a man who was formed many moons ago from the lowland clay of the Blackmore Vale and has remained gratefully rooted in its rolling pastures ever since, forever bucolic and grizzled, untouched by the passing fashions of the decades; but Pauline Tizzard tells a different story, and she should know.

"Actually, he wasn't too bad-looking back then," recalls the woman who married her man 46 years ago and has barely regretted it since. "He had long hair, big collars, wide trousers and platform shoes," she continues, painting a picture that will live long in the memory, whether you like it or not. "I'd say he was definitely the most modern of the Sherborne Farmers."

Some of this may sound like faint praise, given that the Sherborne Farmers have never been a byword for progressive liberalism, but Colin seems to have been the leader of the pack, chairman of the Sherborne Young Farmers when Pauline was secretary, and all that 70s garb and aphrodisiacal power clearly turned the young girl's head. It took a while, though.

"We used to say that in Dorset Young Farmers there were three main clubs," explains Colin. "There was Blandford Young Farmers, where all the boys had sports cars; Dorchester Young Farmers, where they all had Ford Capris; and Sherborne Young Farmers, who all had Morris 1300s. That was me. I had a Morris 1300 and Pauline went round with the chaps from Blandford with their sports cars, because she didn't want to go in my dirty motor."

Lesser men might have been deterred by this very public snub, but our hero, although a shy man by his own admission – "I had to have five pints before I could ask a girl to dance" – was made of stern stuff, and he hatched a cunning plan to win his woman over.

"He just kept moving his chair closer to me at the meetings," shrugs Pauline, "and that was that." 

So began an enduring rural tale that might have remained confined to the pages of Farmers Weekly had Colin's pioneering streak not steered him away from the Tizzard family's dairy business to become one of Britain's leading jumps trainers and a mainstay of the Racing Post. 

'He'd still be able to win - that's how good he is': Colin Tizzard with old hero Cue CardCredit: Edward Whitaker

Where his siblings milked ever larger herds, Tizzard realised that his early exploits in the point-to-point field could pave the way to a new career, and he began to accumulate ever-better horses and build ever-better facilities, shifting his focus from the tired sheds of Venn Farm to the state-of-the-art American barns rising from the earth a few minutes over the hill at Spurles Farm.

Not that Venn had been barren ground for Tizzard. It was at this unprepossessing site in Milborne Port, on the Dorset-Somerset border, that he prepared Cue Card to win the Champion Bumper at the Cheltenham Festival, while the stunning World Hurdle winner Thistlecrack was also housed cheek-by-jowl with the dairy herd as a new force began to emerge in West Country jumping.

At the end of this campaign, Tizzard will officially hand over the training licence to his son Joe. In one sense, what he has achieved is simply an extension of what he was born to in the fertile fields of Somerset; in another, it's a remarkable transformation engineered by a remarkable man.

But before Colin came his father Leslie Tizzard, the man who once kept a handful of cows and pigs in the skittle alley of the Queen's Head pub in Milborne Port, a few fields over from the heart of a modern racing empire at Spurles Farm.

Leslie relocated to a caravan at Venn Farm when his children came along and farmed as a tenant before organising his fellow tenants to buy the land they'd worked. But it was less as a farmer and more as an agricultural expansionist that he started the rise and rise of the Tizzard fortunes.

"We never thought Father was a very good farmer but he was never afraid to borrow money," explains Colin. "We'd find a bloody good farm and tell him we should buy it. We'd say it'll cost a million and a half, and he'd go and arrange it because he knew we'd do the work if he talked to the bank manager. That's what we've always done and that's what we'll still do.

"After all, land is land and money's never been cheaper. I remember we bought a farm when Black Monday came along and the variable rate went up to 19 per cent; now you can borrow at two per cent, so why wouldn't you?"

The recent purchase of 3,000 acres of common grazing on Dartmoor – "I know you can't do anything with it, but it was cheap as chips and I see it as my legacy to the family" – is evidence that the Tizzard trait for land accumulation remains intact, but it's the acreage around Milborne Port that has been most significant.

At Venn Farm, the horse-to-cow ratio began to reach a state of imbalance, and the relocation to Spurles began. The farm provided 500 acres for the conditioning of racehorses, and into the side of the hill was carved the uphill strip that Tizzard still believes has been the foundation of the entire business.

"We've extended it a few times since, put a few more tracks in, some jumping lanes, then another gallop, so we haven't really stopped, and I don't know if there's much more we can do," he reflects. "I think we've got enough facilities here to last us, even if we decide to train more on the Flat."

As he utters the word 'Flat', a gentle rumble of disapproval seems to rise up from the surrounding hills, but this is Colin Tizzard speaking, and he's a man used to challenging the status quo in a region known for its ages-old traditions in the fields of hunting, point-to-pointing and jump racing, which have long been his passions. Where once he was a point rider with 21 winners to his name and a bright future in dairy, soon he started to alter the possibilities of what might be achieved.

"When I was 16, Father went to the sales and bought a cheap point-to-pointer," he remembers. "He didn't realise until after he'd bought it that it had never got round before. The next year he went and bought another one that was even worse, but then they got a little bit better.

"In the same way, I started doing it because of Joe. Things changed when he came along. When he was 15, I went to the May sales and bought a horse called The Jogger, and everyone I met for the next two months told me he'd had a leg the year before, so I went and bought another one, Qualitair Memory, one for two grand, the other for two and a half, and the first year they won four each, including two hunter chases, and I thought it was a piece of cake.

"When I was riding, if we had a busy day on the farm, the horses wouldn't go out, but now we were doing it properly and point-to-point people started sending us horses. But when Joe turned professional and wasn't riding them anymore, it wasn't as much fun, so we decided to take the next step.

"I think everybody who's ever ridden a horse fancies their chances of making a better job of it than the trainer. It's a great thrill, training a winner, no two ways about it, so we put up four stables at Venn, then another eight, pushed the heifers back bit by bit. Then we had Cue Card, then Thistlecrack, then Native River, some of the best horses in their time, and they made other owners think we could do the job."

The Tizzard mantra became well known. "We wanted to be known as racehorse trainers with a few cows, rather than dairy farmers with a few horses," chimed Colin and Joe, and soon the dairy herd went off to market and the transformation was all but complete. Except that, for more than one reason, Colin couldn't bear to have a farm without a bovine presence.

It was partly his insistence that the cattle and the horses could co-exist, economically at least, just in case hard times hit either of the two limited companies. But as he stands in the bustling, wet-nosed middle of his herd of boisterous beef cattle, it's not hard to see that his devotion to the 'old ways' has never quite left him.

Our photographer takes his pictures leaning out of the car window, for fear of cow-related injury, but the old "stockman" – "that's what I still am," he says proudly – is in his element. It's all about arses, apparently.

"That's a Belgian Blue out of a dairy-bred cow, and they always end up having little narrow arses," he educates us. "These Simmental crosses are more robust, but this one hasn't got the best arse. I buy the best ones at market, the ones with the best arses, even though they cost a bit more. Look at the backside on that Limousin cross!

"I love these animals, and it all mixes in very well with training racehorses, one supports the other, and beef is a lot less work than dairy. So I go to market on a Friday and if we've sold 20 in a week, I buy 20 more to keep the numbers up, have them back here and look after them until they're ready to sell.

"Dad would have loved all this. In his last few years he'd sit in his house and look out the window at the cows and the horses, telling me he didn't think much of the one that went up second lot. I bet Mum's sitting there watching it all now."

A brother to Gold Cup winner Sizing John trots past in the distance, over the heads of the beef, and the soon-to-be ex-trainer wears the smile of a contented man. 

We head back from Spurles Farm on a whistle-stop tour of Milborne Port's most famous tourist attractions.

"That's where my mother lives," he points out, "and that's the house Joe bought and lived in for five years when he was a jockey and had some spare money – we were keen he didn't fritter it all away.

"When I got married, I moved into that cottage for the first five years, and both our children were born there. I was earning £25 a week and we paid £5 in rent. I told Father I couldn't live off that so he put me up a couple of quid.

"I'd say Milborne Port hasn't changed much. There used to be a big tannery in there [the town was big in the leather glove business, back in the day] and that's my old infants' school. That wood across the road [from Venn Farm], it caught on fire on August 20, 1976, the hottest summer anyone can remember, when Kim was born."

Kim was Colin and Pauline's daughter, who died two years ago at the age of 43. She was Colin's "partner", the rock of the business, the hub of it all, and her death hit him hard, although he's not emotive about it in the modern vein.

"She's buried just over there," he says, as we stand admiring the ever-youthful Cue Card in his quiet box at the little isolation yard, "so if I'm on my own I walk up and have a little chat to her, about her son Freddie [Gingell, the up-and-coming young rider], how boisterous he's getting and how I wish she was still around to keep him under control.

"She was everything. I got on better with her than I did with Pauline. She lived it. She'd talk about it and then make it happen. The poor girl getting cancer was a terrible blow, but you've got to move on from it."

'I love these animals' - Colin Tizzard in the fields of the Blackmore Vale with his prized beef cattleCredit: Edward Whitaker

There's time for a quiet moment as we talk about Kim, much missed, and Cue Card, the horse still credited with kick-starting the entire operation with that incredible bumper win (by eight lengths from Al Ferof in 2010) and bolstering it with his later successes in multiple Grade 1 chases.

"I remember when he won on his debut at Fontwell," says the proud trainer as the 16-year-old pricks his ears, skin still tight and shiny, eyes still bright and lively.

"We went back to the winner's enclosure and waited for ten minutes for him to come back, and I thought bloody hell, he must have injured himself, but he'd gone round the top bend and Joe couldn't stop the bugger until halfway down the back.

"He was a super athlete, and I reckon if we cantered him up the gallops for three weeks, he'd still be able to win – that's how good he is.

"Of course, winning the Gold Cup [with Native River in 2018] was the pinnacle, no two ways about it, but the moment that almost made me have a stroke was the last two furlongs of Cue Card's Champion Bumper. My neck went tight and I couldn't breathe. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. At that moment it felt as though the doors had opened and the whole world was in front of us."

That was the dramatic start, but next weekend won't really be the finish. Colin won't have his name on the licence any more, and he's looking forward to Joe finding out what it's like to make the big decisions, but he'll still be a partner in the racing yard and the farm, and it's hard to believe his son will let all that experience be offloaded just yet.

Together they've turned the business organically into something that combines the traditions of the Blackmore Vale and the modern methods of getting to the top of jump racing's slippery pole, to heights unimaginable when Colin set out.

"It's still traditional but things have changed," he thinks. "I'd say 60 winners and a million pounds a year is about us – that's what we expect now. We need to be in the top ten, and when we had those real good horses they put us in the top five, but horses like that need to find you, because you can't buy them, even with some of the London money we've got now.

"It happened over a few years and we were chuffed as hell to be playing in that league and we're still there, which is something I'm proud of, but I think it's a young man's sport."

He fancies travelling a bit, maybe getting himself a camper van and becoming a hermit on Dartmoor – with his dogs, of course – and Pauline's adamant that he won't be allowed to hang around the house cluttering the place up.

"I think you need something to do, otherwise you'll go stir crazy," she advises him. "He'd just get in the way, and he knows that, so he still goes up there every morning."

After 46 years they know each other pretty well, and although the old house at Venn Farm hasn't been altered much since the yard's fortunes changed for the better, there's no sense that Colin's 'retirement' will spark a sudden flurry of home improvement and DIY.

"We'll be having new lino in the kitchen next week," he says, "but we don't really want anything different. I want to be able to walk in and sit down, read the paper and have an argument with Pauline because I haven't taken my muddy shoes off. That's all I need." 

More Sunday Reads:

From the master trainers to a beaten 1-25 favourite: the record-breakers of 2023 

Fur coats, Bentleys and bus passes: meet the flamboyant former king of the betting jungle 

Adele Mulrennan: 'My heart was pounding and my mouth was dry - I was so nervous'

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