Here it is just the high school,” said Lewis whose protege rapidly repaid the faith with 15 successes in his second year.Hunt’s hardness helped him to become British road race champion last year when he got up from a jarring crash to win. It has also become his undoing especially when faced with a 30-hour-a-week training regime.”I got a bit carried away with training, and my body was not used to it. I cannot yet cope with really hard training,” said Hunt who was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, 24 years ago.”I got ill too, and as soon as my health goes down, everything goes out of the window I had come through the apprentice stage with Banesto Now I have to start all over again. I trained too hard after I was ill and it would not go away.”The lung infection has set him back in a year when, with the right form, he could be tackling his first three-week tour in September “I might be riding the Tour of Spain. It is a possibility if I am showing well in August.”His dreams lie with the one-day classics.
“I would like to be a classics rider like I was as an amateur because that is what I am good at. My big ambition is to win a classic or a world road race championship.”Banesto’s handlers have the skill and patience, Hunt has the qualities, and only time will tell if the mix is right.. Border Arrow, a son of Selkirk whose liver-chestnut complexion is a perfect match for his surroundings, finished third behind King Of Kings in the 2,000 Guineas last Saturday, and is Balding’s most serious contender for the ultimate Classic since Mill Reef himself was working up on Watership Down.”Mill Reef was a horse in a lifetime, probably the best to have raced in this country since the war,” he says. John Porter would certainly have approved.The 2,000 Guineas, as it happens, has eluded Balding ever since, but what with the subsequent efforts of Lochsong at sprint distances and Selkirk over a mile, it is one of the few major events that has.And now there may be a red-brick box at Park House with another Derby winner inside. He worked like a champion but at first seemed sure to be only a sprinter. Instead, he was a phenomenon called Mill Reef, and the further he went, the faster he went. He won the Derby, Arc, Eclipse and King George, and would probably have won any 2,000 Guineas since the war except the one he contested, which included another great champion, Brigadier Gerard.
I hadn’t ridden in the Grand National and there were all sorts of things I wanted to do, but in those days the Jockey Club wouldn’t let you train as a professional and ride as an amateur. Luckily I inherited a lot of good owners and horses and the following year, which was my first full season, I think I was the leading English trainer, behind [Ireland's] Paddy Prendergast, who won the title.”Five years later, a juvenile colt arrived at Kingsclere who would take Balding that vital step further. He arrived in 1964, as assistant trainer to Peter Hastings-Bass, whose daughter, Emma, was to become Mrs Balding five years later. Barely three months into his apprenticeship at Kingsclere, Hastings-Bass died suddenly, and at just 25 years of age, Balding took over as the master of Park House.”I felt at the time that I was too young, and I was a jockey at heart. When John Porter, one of the finest trainers of any generation, built Park House Stables more than a century ago, he did so with the same care, patience and attention to detail that he later showed to the six Derby winners he prepared on its gallops. The red-brick buildings seem to glow with health and history. Such is the sense of heritage that, as Balding admits, its freehold almost comes with a responsibility to succeed.
“The beauty of Kingsclere has been one of the driving forces of my life,” he says.
