If you want to see artistry in the saddle amid the relaxed atmosphere of a point-to-point, book your tickets soon for a show that cannot go on forever.
This article first appeared in the Racing Post and on racingpost.com on November 4
The British sport’s finest exponent of riding a horse from one side of a fence to the other is moving his career through changes that will transform it from record-smashing rider to point-to-point trainer and trader. Will Biddick, a Cornishman based in Somerset (pictured above centre with staff at his yard), heads to Larkhill in Wiltshire on Sunday needing one winner for his 600th in the sport [he has a further 77 outside of it], another milestone he will reach with the easy calm in which he presents horses at fences. He is also a Cheltenham Festival-winning rider and trainer.
Many years ago, when he was a hungry – literally and ambitiously – young conditional jockey, I mentioned his lying-up-the-neck style – one most amateurs find hideously at odds with gravity – to his then boss Venetia Williams, and she said: “Yes, but I like that.” Now he is a 37-year-old father of two with the venerability of age and wily experience, but still the most aerodynamic amateur on the circuit and keen as ever for the next winner.
He says: “I love winning; I don’t care if it’s a raffle. I’d go anywhere to ride in a point-to-point.”
Biddick in aerodynamic action, heads to Larkhill on Sunday chasing a 600th win in British points
Consider that Richard Burton, another stylish and fabled former amateur, is next on the list of winning-most riders with 414 point-to-point victories and you get a better idea of Biddick’s achievement. His score may be less than half that of Ireland’s great point-to-point exponent Derek O’Connor, but while the sports on either side of the Irish Sea share a common name they have differences.
Counter-intuitively, fewer meetings mean more winners for the very best, which is certainly true in Ireland, and, as Biddick accepts, has slowly become a factor in him achieving a tally which would have been unthinkable at the turn of this century.
Fresh faces, eager to have a go, still emerge every year to the benefit of the sport, and Biddick himself has been a novice twice, first in point-to-pointing, then as a conditional jockey with Williams in the 2009/10 season. He won the 2010 Festival Plate on the stable’s Something Wells, but creating a professional career while battling the scales proved too much. He says: “Weight was the main problem, but I’d had four winners from 97 rides, I was driving all around the country and not being competitive. My head was fried and I thought I was finished with riding, so I went home to Cornwall for 12 months. While there Harry Fry got in touch and said ‘Come and ride out at Richard Barber’s [point-to-point yard] once a week, it will be worth it’, so I did, and [in the 2010/11] rode 29 winners as second jockey to Ryan Mahon. I got back in the groove.
“I’m very grateful to Venetia Williams for being a big influence on me, as was Richard Barber. Venetia for starting me off, and Richard for getting me going again. I just wish I’d met him 20 years earlier [when his yard was at its peak].”
Richard Barber, outstanding trainer and a big influence on the eight-time champion
Biddick will push his record score higher because he has a plan leading onto the next stage of his career. It is taking shape in the Sparkford Vale of Somerset at a farm he moved to last year with his wife Harriet, an international showjumper. The premises are owned by her father, Rupert Nuttall, a one-time amateur who won Sandown’s Whitbread (now bet365) Gold Cup in 1997 on Harwell Lad, trained by the late Robert Alner. Nuttall was booked because the horse was quirky and the trainer wanted a horseman who would kid his partner round. What would Alner make of Cheltenham’s decision to open, after 164 years, the NH Chase to professional jockeys, one that will, in time, mean little or no amateur participation in the race?
Biddick, who has been placed in the race three times, says: “I think they’ve done it for image. I know what they said about putting amateurs up in a marathon novices’ chase, but the top amateurs are good horsemen and women with more experience than conditional jockeys. I expect the top Irish amateurs will get rides in it, but it’s now just another novices’ chase.”
Receiving thanks from trainer Chris Barber after Biddick won Aintree's Randox Foxhunters' Chase on Famous Clermont
The aforementioned Biddick ‘plan’ has evolved after the rental agreement on premises he used for breaking, pre-training and handling pointers, came to an end. He was based one village over from Paul Nicholls, who continues to use him for educating a string of three-year-olds. Biddick says: “Rupert suggested we could come here. I hadn’t thought of it as an option because it was just farmland. We’ve since put in drainage, a circular sand canter, a straight four furlongs, stables, horse walkers. We’re ploughing every penny we make back into the business.
“I just want to be the best in the point-to-point world when I transition fully from being a rider to a trainer – and hopefully a recognised name in the sales ring. Last year was our first where we sold young horses after a run or two having bought them as three-year-old stores. We sold No Drama This End very well [£160,000 to Nicholls and Tom Malone], but that won’t settle well with me until the horse does well for the next man. We sold Fresh Perspective, who won his point then his first bumper for Jamie Snowden. That forges relationships in the game.
Biddick's yard houses breakers and pre-trainers plus young and older point-to-pointers
“If I can find someone to replace me [in the saddle] that will make the decision easier. If I can leg someone up on the four-year-olds and not have to give them instructions, or wonder what they are going to do in any particular scenario. There are tens of thousands of pounds at stake for getting it right or wrong, and it’s no good them coming back in and saying ‘I wish I’d done such and such’. There’s too much at stake, which is why at the moment I’m riding them.”
He is unfazed by the fashion for calling up leading Irish amateurs at Festival meetings, saying: “They have a better strike rate, they are probably better riders. When trainers want the best available they [Irish amateurs] have a better track record at all the top racecourses. It would be nice if British trainers called upon British amateurs – we have amateurs in this country who are more than capable of riding on the big stage and putting horses in the right position. It doesn’t frustrate me because I have enough going on in my life.
“Riding against the Irish lads is just another race to me. I want to be quicker than everyone else in a race, no matter where it is.”
Cantering back down the recently-installed woodchip gallop at Biddick's Somerset yard
Of his two wins in Punchestown’s Champion Hunters’ Chase on the Rose Loxton-trained Caid Du Berlais he says: “It was like playing an away game. You always feel chuffed if you win away games,” before adding wryly of the reception in the winner’s enclosure: “It was quite quiet. You would have thought the meeting was behind closed doors.
“Winning on him is among the highlights of my career, but Porlock Bay tops everything.”
Ah yes, Britain’s winning-most amateur rider trained the 2021 winner of the ‘amateurs’ Gold Cup’, the St James’s Place Festival Hunters’ Chase, yet it coincided with a Covid lockdown which meant the stands were empty, amateurs were barred from riding and Lorcan Williams was in the saddle. Biddick says: “Training Porlock to win that race beats all my riding achievements. The emotions, the feelings – what went through my body that day I have never experienced as a rider. You’re sent a horse and you have months of preparation to get it right for the day. It’s a lot harder than rocking up to ride and doing something you’ve done for 20 years. You can do that without thinking.”
Would he have won on Porlock Bay? “Probably not,” he says. “He was all out and won by a nostril, and there would have been a lot of things I would have done differently to Lorcan. A different route, things that happen out in the country, who knows?
“The nicest thing about that win, coming after a lot of poor results for the home team, was British-based jockeys and valets coming out into the paddock to give the horse a line of honour. There was no one in the grandstand, no one in the paddock, no atmosphere, yet the jockeys were clapping. It was very emotional.”