Martin Pipe: 'I wanted to commit suicide. I really did, knowing the world was against me'

This interview with legendary trainer Martin Pipe on the good days and dark days of his career was originally published in March exclusively for Racing Post Members' Club subscribers, and has been made free to read for users of the Racing Post app as our Sunday Read.

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It feels like a journey back to the good old days, which for Martin Pipe were once very good indeed.

He answers the door with a warm handshake, leads the way through a smart kitchen and walks into a room whose walls are filled with photographs. The horses featured inside the frames enjoyed their moments of glory when trained by a man who revolutionised a profession he entered without experience, then conquered. Pipe changed everything. He continues to miss nothing.

The huge televisions help. There were times when his Pond House headquarters, now occupied by fellow Grand National-winning son David, looked rather like mission control at Nasa. The sitting room in the nearby Nicholashayne home of Pipe snr and wife, Carol, is similarly not lacking in visual stimulation. On one side of a door are two vast screens set to Racing TV and Sky Sports Racing. On the other side are screens showing non-horsey sport, while sitting on a coffee table are two laptops broadcasting live images from all across Pond House. For the 77-year-old Pipe, a former trainer for almost 17 years, this is what retirement looks like.

"I'm not very happy because David has five TVs, whereas I've only got four, although mine are bigger," says Pipe, flicking between pictures that take him from the gallops into stables and on to horsewalkers. 

"We were even able to see it all in Fuerteventura," says Carol, underlining the extent to which their interest remains complete. "We were on a cruise a few years ago, so I watched the cameras on my phone," adds her husband. "I could see two people walking around the yard with suitcases. I rang David because I thought they were taxmen. It turned out they were just equine dentists."

Pipe did not invent teeth but brought much else to the sport, not least horses who were fitter than almost all his contemporaries had thought possible. British jump racing's 15-time champion trainer, the son of a famed West Country bookmaker, had no history of working inside yards, save for having once been, by his own admission, a distinctly moderate jockey. He learned by experience and education, reading colossal amounts and putting what he discovered into practice, embracing blood testing, temperature taking, interval training and so much more. 

Martin Pipe is surrounded by pictures and memories at his home in NicholashayneCredit: Edward Whitaker

"The past tells you the future," says Pipe, offering one of numerous insights into the mind of a true pioneer. "I didn't have a clue how you trained a horse. It was all down to studying books, trial and error and facts and figures. When you have facts and figures, you know."

Punters knew that Pipe knew. He became a constant friend to those who followed a man who sent out his first winner aged 29 in 1975. The victories followed in dribs and drabs until Pipe truly hit his stride in the mid-1980s.

There were 34 Cheltenham Festival triumphs and regular rewrites of the record books. Pipe notched more titles than anyone before him, sent out more British jumps winners (3,930), notched the most wins in a British jumps season (243) and the most victories, Flat and jumps combined (253), in a calendar year. 

There was a CBE, a race named in his honour at the festival and a castaway appearance on Desert Island Discs. Even now, however, Pipe stresses the significance of his father, who 50 years ago sold a chain of betting shops and bought the derelict pig farm that became Pond House.

"He was a huge influence on my life," says Pipe. "He taught me everything, but he was very hard on me. I wasn't allowed holidays. I wasn't allowed anything. There was a lot of criticism and not a lot of praise. He was proud of me, though."

When asked how that pride was expressed, the answer is short.

"I don't know. Carol will tell you," says Pipe, his gaze flicking between the televisions, a raft of papers on the table and his interviewer. Subject matters move almost as rapidly. A question on one topic often gets an answer on something else, mainly because there is so much he has done and so much he wants to say. Yet, just as with one of his famously tough front-runners, if you keep asking, he keeps responding. Repeated inquiries are rewarded with increased focus, which is necessary when we move on to the most fraught period of his career. 

It began late in the 1980s, when racing people – often fellow trainers – began to question Pipe's methods. They thought he was cheating and were happy to say so, although not to his face.

Martin Pipe: with his video collection of every race his horses have run Credit: Edward Whitaker

"I was probably seen as an outsider for some time," says Pipe. "I was a bookie's son. I'm sure people wondered how I knew what I was doing.

"It's not good to get that sort of reaction when you're not cheating or doing anything wrong. I was just trying to train winners by getting our horses fit. I was aware what people were saying, but it was always done behind my back. 

"I carried on and did my own thing. If they were upset about me, I just tried harder to get more winners. It didn't really bother me."

That was not the case when Roger Cook intervened. The ITV documentary maker sought to expose those guilty of serious wrongdoing in his prime-time programme The Cook Report. In a 1991 edition he tackled Pipe, attempting to prove that Britain's most prolific trainer ran a regime built on cruelty. It was a wholly unjustified but still devastating attack on an individual already being ostracised by some of the more bigoted members of his trade.

"That was horrendous," he says before repeating those three words. "People were spying on us with hidden cameras. We weren't doing anything wrong, but I didn't want anyone to think we were.

"After the programme went out I had a lot of phone calls. Nearly all the people who rang stuck up for me, but I decided I didn't want to talk to the ones who were for me, I wanted to talk to all the people who were against me.

"One of them was a lady who was just about to get married. 'Why do you treat the horses like that?' she asked me. I told her what they had claimed wasn't true. In the end we became friends and I sent her a congratulations card for her wedding."

I ask if Pipe ever discovered who had stimulated Cook's interest. "Yes," he says. "It was someone within racing. They contacted the programme makers. 

"Racing people were against me. It was shocking. I really did get upset. I wanted to commit suicide. I really did, knowing the world was against me. I hated it."

Martin Pipe, in the Pond House laboratory, brought science to the training of horses, but his innovative methods aroused suspicion in some quartersCredit: Edward Whitaker

The sentences are short but powerful. Similarly strong, and desperately needed, was the support that started to come from within the industry.

"Sir Mark Prescott was brilliant and wrote some lovely letters in the press," recalls Pipe, whose mood was improved by a trip to Exeter races, where a Jockey Club steward, the very embodiment of racing's establishment, asked if he could send Pipe a horse.

"That brought me back to life," he says, as Carol approaches with sandwiches and chocolate digestives. She knows one of us will be interested only in the biscuits.

"He doesn't like sandwiches," says the wife of a man who confesses to having never made a cup of tea, let alone a meal.

"I'm a little bit strange," he admits. "I once sponsored a race at Taunton. It was called the Am I That Difficult? Handicap Hurdle. I eat plain bread with no butter. I'll have meat, fish and ice cream but no vegetables and nothing minced. I've always been a finicky eater. My mother used to put my peas on one plate and the rest of my meal on another plate. Carol is marvellous to put up with me."

During their marriage of more than half a century, the supremely patient Mrs Pipe has at times had to share her spouse, first with Peter Scudamore and then Sir Anthony McCoy, the two jockeys with whom he forged not just winning relationships, but also supremely tight bonds.

"They believed in me," says Pipe. "They trusted me and I trusted them. I remember telling Scu he hadn't gone fast enough one day at Newton Abbot. We sat down with the video and kept playing it back, hurdle by hurdle, with me timing each bit of the race. We didn't fall out but we discussed it. 

"Carol always said Scu and I were married because we were on the phone to each other all the time, day and night, talking about why we won or, more importantly, why we got beat. Scu and I had some great times together. It was the same with AP."

Martin Pipe, pictured with wife Carol (right) and author Jilly CooperCredit: Edward Whitaker

But not with Richard Dunwoody. In a Racing Post interview published a year ago, Dunwoody spoke of his admiration for Pipe but admitted their brief union had been largely unhappy.

"Yes, the 19th of March, 2022," says Pipe, quick as a flash, when I mention the interview with Dunwoody. He also brings up a story told in the article by Dunwoody, who remembered what happened after he asked an employee in the Pond House laboratory if he could have his own blood analysed every two months. 

"Martin called me into the office and said if I went in there again I would be out of the yard," said Dunwoody, adding, 'I immediately knew where I stood."

Pipe wishes to address the anecdote. "I can't remember the thing about the blood testing, but I'm not denying it," he says. "If I thought somebody was going behind my back, I probably would have said it. 

"I always gave jockeys instructions. Richard had his own ideas. He didn't seem to want to do what I wanted him to do. He was a brilliant jockey, mind, and won me a Grand National."

The four-legged Aintree hero was Miinnehoma, one of the many horses to benefit from the mastery of a man who is owed some time talking about things that make him happy. Invariably, that means winners. 

Martin Pipe forged a close bond with stable jockey Peter ScudamoreCredit: Getty Images

"Rolling Ball – that was good, wasn't it?" he says of the 1991 Sun Alliance Chase win by a horse who had made his debut over fences only three weeks earlier. 

"And Cyborgo, first time out at Cheltenham," he volunteers, adding to the conversation his 1996 Stayers' Hurdle victor. Two years later, 5-2 favourite Unsinkable Boxer romped home at the festival a few minutes after Pipe told McCoy he was about to partner "the biggest certainty that will ever walk out on to this racecourse". To be fair, he was right.

"He was working better and better all the time," says Pipe. "I told the owner the night before the race that he had already won. We told everyone to back him. It was no secret. I used to love to tip winners to the public. I liked to make people happy."

Pipe insists he did not back Unsinkable Boxer himself. He did, however, like a little bet now and again.

"Occasionally," he agrees. "We'll get on to Blowing Wind in a minute," Pipe then adds of the French import who in that same Unsinkable Boxer week netted a £50,000 bonus when completing the Imperial Cup-County Hurdle double. 

"We honestly thought he couldn't get beat," says Pipe. "I told everybody he would win and I had a decent bet on him for both races. It was no holds barred. It wasn't about the betting, though. It was about being proved right. We did the same with Olympian. I told Scu before Christmas he would do the double at Sandown and Cheltenham."

Pipe has become the definition of a man warming to his theme. "I shouldn't show you this," he says, pointing to a black and white picture of a winner's enclosure scene featuring a horse, Pipe and his much-missed sidekick Chester Barnes. The horse was Carrie Ann, the track was Haydock and the winnings were extraordinary.

"That was the best race I ever won," says Pipe, the voice full of glee as his thoughts return to the Makerfield Selling Handicap Hurdle on Saturday, January 5, 1980. 

"The horse had been off for a year but we got her fit. There were lots of racecourse bookmakers in those days and we had £30 to £1,000 with every one of them. Honestly, every one. At one point Ches said to me that one of the bookmakers hadn't altered the odds. 'Well, go in again!' I said back to him.

"It really was fantastic. It was like winning the football pools. I won loads and loads and loads."

Pipe regularly won loads while wearing a top hat, as he explains when spotting another picture, this time showing little Sweet Glow winning at Royal Ascot. 

"We always had it off in the Ascot Stakes," says Pipe, who had gone to Cheltenham with even more confidence when running evens favourite Carvill's Hill in the 1992 Gold Cup. Having made desperate mistakes when harried for the lead by 150-1 outsider Golden Freeze, Carvill's Hill walked past the line in last place and never raced again. Golden Freeze's trainer Jenny Pitman was widely accused of using unsporting tactics in a bid to aid her chief hope Toby Tobias. Those allegations were dismissed at a Jockey Club inquiry.

"We don't want to discuss it," says Pipe. "That's a difficult one. He was finished after that race. He pulled every muscle under the sun."

The outcome was even worse in 2000 when Gloria Victis suffered a fatal fall in the Gold Cup and again when Valiramix sustained an irreparable injury while cruising in the 2002 Champion Hurdle. Both deaths hit their trainer hard.

"Gloria Victis was a novice in the Gold Cup," says Pipe. "I shouldn't have run him. If I hadn't, everything would have been okay. I directed the horses and owners to the places and races I wanted to go. I made the wrong decision with Gloria Victis. It's not good. If he hadn't run, he would have lived. 

"It was the same with Valiramix. There's a picture of AP and me crying at the track. We kept their stables empty for a long time out of respect. They are our children and we love them."

Martin Pipe with some of his oldest Racing Posts and the iron used to press them Credit: Edward Whitaker

We lighten the mood by chatting about the wonderful 1997 Champion Hurdle winner Make A Stand and then smile some more in the converted stables that have become Pipe's den, inside which is his late father's betting stand, a Fawlty Towers box-set, long rows of race-filled VHS videos and cupboards containing practically every edition of the Racing Post ever published. There is even an iron that has been used to press some formerly crumpled copies.

As we head back outside, Pipe looks out into the distance, pointing to the place where he changed the way people trained racehorses. So many winners, so many memories.

"Tim Forster was a lovely man," he says of a legendary figure once described as "the last of the old-school trainers". He was also one of many who paid Pipe a visit. 

"He came down to see how we did things. He saw the horses going up and down, up and down. 'Is that all you do?' he asked me."

Pipe did it so well that all the others started copying him.

"I'm proud they thought I was doing it right," he says. "In the beginning there was hate. In the end, perhaps they believed me."

Read more from our Sunday Read series:

Leonna Mayor: 'People have no idea what my life has been like - I've no reason to be ashamed'  

Sir Henry Cecil remembered: 'The public have always been fantastic to me and I really don't know why'  

Adrian Maguire: 'I couldn't borrow, borrow, borrow - I wouldn't sleep at night'  

'I take flak and it frustrates me - but I'm not going to wreck another horse'  

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