Timeform's Jumps Horses To Follow: Rising Stars extract
Timeform's Horses To Follow for the 2024/25 jumps season is out now. Here's an extract from the Rising Stars section, highlighting a couple of trainers to note.
Robbie Llewellyn
In many ways Robbie Llewellyn has taken a very standard route to becoming a racehorse trainer – from starting out in pony racing as a youngster to riding in point-to-points and then becoming assistant trainer before taking out his own licence, something he did in October 2022. Less conventionally, Llewellyn also found his way into the film industry which, as has been widely reported, led to a role on horseback in Game of Thrones, but while his work as an extra was just a way of making some money, it resulted in a side-line to his increasingly successful training career as he provides racehorses for film and television work.
Training was always his long-term ambition, though, and after riding work for local Welsh trainers Tim Vaughan and Evan Williams, Llewellyn spent five years as assistant to David Brace, training his pointers during a time when Brace was twice champion owner in that sphere. After his stint outside racing, Llewellyn returned to Tim Vaughan’s yard as assistant for two more years before deciding during Covid to take out his own licence.
Llewellyn’s first winner under Rules in his own name had actually come before then when pointer Tanit River, formerly with Vaughan, won a hunter chase at Southwell in May 2021. However, his first winner as a full licence holder at his Wiltshire base near Alan King came in November of the following year when Loup de Maulde gained a first career success in a conditional jockeys’ handicap hurdle at Huntingdon. The same horse has been as good an advertisement as any for his trainer as Loup de Maulde has improved considerably since, winning another five races to date, including his first two starts over fences in the spring of 2024. Loup de Maulde provided four of Llewellyn’s five wins in his first season but 2023/24 was the stable’s breakthrough campaign with a total of 25 winners gained at an impressive 23% strike rate.
Feel The Pinch, who won his first start after joining the yard, has racked up five wins for Llewellyn, while two more success stories, the hurdlers Titan Discovery and Top Cloud (another who’d won on his stable debut), provided the season’s highlight when winning handicaps on consecutive days at Ascot’s pre-Christmas meeting under Liam Harrison who, along with Toby Wynne, has ridden the majority of the stable’s winners.
Harry Derham
Apart from being the home of numerous good horses, Ditcheat is fast becoming an academy for future trainers too and the latest of Paul Nicholls’ graduates to make a success in the training ranks is Harry Derham, following the example of Nicholls’ previous assistants Dan Skelton and Harry Fry. Derham has close family ties to Ditcheat too, being Nicholls’ nephew, and his first job with the yard was as an amateur jockey before turning conditional. His 50 winners in the saddle – he retired from race riding when still in his teens – included a Festival success on Salubrious in the Martin Pipe Conditional Jockeys’ Handicap Hurdle, though he nominates his win on Brampour in the Greatwood Hurdle at the same track, when still an amateur, as his most memorable victory as a jockey.
After six years as Nicholls’ assistant, Derham began training from his purpose-built yard near Newbury late in 2022, assisted by former trainer Oliver Sherwood, and made a dream start to his new career when his very first runner, Seelotmorebusiness, formerly trained by Nicholls and carrying the colours of Derham’s mother Julie, defied an absence of more than 12 months to win a handicap hurdle at Huntingdon on Boxing Day. By the end of his first season, Derham had notched 14 wins at an excellent strike rate of 25% and that one-in-four success rate was maintained in 2023/24 from a lot more runners, resulting in a much-improved total of 44 wins.
Two more ex-Nicholls horses, the chasers Sir Psycho and Fidelio Vallis, were among the leading lights for the yard last season and the latter’s win under conditional Alice Stevens in quite a valuable handicap at Musselburgh formed part of a New Year’s Day treble for the yard in a red-hot spell of form which yielded eight winners in all between Boxing Day and January 1. Derham’s highest earner last season was Brentford Hope who’d been smart on the Flat for Richard Hughes and has now reached a similar standard over hurdles for his current yard. He has now won five times since joining Derham, including a final of the ‘Challenger’ series at Haydock in the spring, and has been placed in three of his other four starts, notably when runner-up in a handicap at the Punchestown Festival. The majority of Derham’s winners have been ridden by stable jockey Paul O’Brien, while Stevens was appointed official second jockey prior to the start of the current season.
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