The Sunday Times November 28, 2021 23
One of the reasons I
buy the Sunday Times
is to read David
Walsh. His interview
with Roy Keane
(Sport, November 21)
was excellent. We
could all do with
reading a touch more
honesty from pundits
a la Roy. More in
similar vein please.
Steve Smith, YorkRob Morris (Letters,
November 21)
criticises David
Beckham’s “naive and
fiscally motivated”
World Cup role.
Surely those
comments should be
alleged against all
those Fifa countries
that voted for Qatar.
Beckham may be
greedy but he is at the
back of the queue.
Steve McCann,
via emailReflections on the
autumn rugby series:
England won’t win
the World Cup with
the number of
penalties they
concede. A high
standard of
refereeing with good
communication
made the series.
Jeffrey Box, ShalfordLETTERS
TO THE
EDITOR
Send your letters to:
The Sports Editor,
The Sunday Times,
1 London Bridge St
London, SE1 9GF
email: sportletters
@sunday-times.co.ukWHO IS DAN SKELTON?
legal team asked if there had been
such a payment. They were told there
had been a payment, but that this was
in lieu of training fees incurred by
Yorton-owned horses in Skelton’s
yard. Skelton’s legal team provided
them with the relevant invoice.
It had been sent to Yorton Farm
Stud on November 16, 2016, one week
after the syndicate had paid for
George Gently. The invoice was for
£42,033 plus VAT. The invoice listed
the six Yorton horses involved,
detailing the amount of time they had
been with Skelton. This accounted for
the £42,033 debt.
Holt and his associates considered
it unusual that the invoice was sent
from Jam House Bloodstock Ltd. Jam
House Bloodstock is one of two com-
panies controlled by Skelton and his
wife, Grace. Dan Skelton Racing Ltd is
the other. In the Companies House
register, Jam House’s business is listed
as “Activities of racehorse owners”
while every invoice the syndicate
received from Skelton for training fees
was issued by Dan Skelton Racing.
The single greatest source of con-
cern related to the amount claimed
for training fees (£42,033) because
that happened to be precisely one
third of the £130,000 (less the blood-
stock agent’s 2.5 per cent commis-DAVID DAVIESin the summer but whose 25-race,
six-victory career includes an
afternoon when he ran out with
Deutsch at Cheltenham last year.
“He’s very quirky. Venetia’s a genius.”
One final note on a day when
snow-hit Newcastle had a dead heat
between Not So Sleepy and former
Champion Hurdler Epatante in the
Fighting Fifth. Four races before
Cloudy Glen’s Ladbrokes triumph,
the Scottish-trained Ahoy Senor put
up such a spectacular display of
jumping in the John Francome
Novices’ Chase that one sharp-eyed
operator immediately got £600 on at
33-1 for the 2023 Cheltenham Gold
Cup. You read it here first.finishers. For once the Rachael
Blackmore/Henry de Bromhead
combination left a big race without
making an impression, the favourite,
Eklat De Rire, fading out badly before
being pulled before the 17th of the 21
fences. The spotlight could rightly
rest on a young man in his twenties
and a stylish woman just into her
sixties, who has serenely marched to
her own drum since she survived
breaking her neck as an amateur
jockey and set about training in a
blissfully rural loop of
Herefordshire’s part of the River Wye.
“He’s always been a weird one,”
Williams said of Cloudy Glen, whom
she first ran to be fifth of six under arookie Deutsch in December 2017.
“But he did a piece of work last week
and I thought, ‘Blimey, where did
that come from?’ and decided to run
him in this race. He’ll be out partying
with us tonight because he’s that sort
of horse.”
Deutsch himself was anxious to
defer any praise. “I can’t believe it to
be honest,” he said of this day of
days. “It’s huge for me and to do it in
such distinguished colours is so
special. We turned in and we were
going so well, we just needed to keep
going and he’s done that.
“He’s a funny little horse,” he said
of Cloudy Glen who had clearly
benefited from a breathing operationsion, plus VAT) they had paid for
George Gently.
Fifteen months after lodging the
complaint against Skelton, Holt
received a reply from the BHA. A letter
from its head of regulation, Andrew
Howell, explained to Holt that the
case against Skelton was not strong
enough to initiate any action against
the trainer.
Howell also wrote: “The BHA
acknowledges that it is regrettable
that Mr Skelton did not provide prior
notice to you that he would benefit
financially from the transaction of
George Gently. Following this investi-
gation, the BHA would fully expect Mr
Skelton to provide information of this
nature to his owners in the future and
the BHA has made its expectations
with regards to the code of conduct to
Mr Skelton in concluding this matter.”
The syndicate refused to accept the
BHA’s ruling. For almost 3½ years, the
case has rumbled on. In a letter from
the BHA last month, Howell said that
the involvement of Jam House
Bloodstock “was essentially an issue
of convenience”. As for the construc-
tion of the invoice, Howell wrote,
“There is no claim that the training
fees of all horses amounted to exactly
one third of George Gently.” Howell
went on to explain that Skelton’s
arrangement with Futter was that the
trainer would receive one third of the
proceeds from the sale of George
Gently in lieu of training fees.
The BHA’s position is that it would
have been better for Skelton to advise
Holt that he stood to gain financially
from the sale of George Gently, but
that he was not obliged to do so. In an
earlier letter, the governing body
advised the syndicate that if it got a
judgment against Skelton in a civil
case, they would review the case in
light of that.
So far, Holt and his friends have
spent £120,000 in legal fees. They are
determined to continue their action
and accept the case may end up in a
civil court.
Skelton refused to answer ques-
tions about the case. “There are two
sides to this story,” he said. He would
not elaborate on what his side was.Skelton set up his own stables
in Warwickshire in 2013 after
working for the respected trainer
Paul Nicholls for several years.
He has had four winners at
Cheltenham. His brother Harry is
a jockey and his father, Nick, won
team showjumping gold for Great
Britain at the London Olympics
and individual gold at Rio 2016.Trainer Skelton has denied
taking a third of the sale
price when Holt, far left,
and Macnabb bought
George GentlyINVESTORS
AND THE
HORSE THAT
SPLIT THEM
APART...
ALAN CROWHURST