Evan Williams
IT would be easy to assume that Evan Williams is a laid-back, happy-go-lucky sort of chap. We speak in the build-up to any National Hunt trainer’s most intense week of the year – the Cheltenham Festival – yet he is easy to get hold of, he chats merrily away, and says that the thing that would give him most pleasure at the Festival would be for his daughter, Isabel, to have a nice first ride there in the conditionals’ race and to come home safely.
The statistics, however, show the skull beneath the skin. He won his first Grade One just months after taking out a full licence in 2003, appropriately enough for a Welshman at Chepstow, and within two years was training 50-plus winners a season. Horses such as State Of Play, Deep Purple and Cappa Bleu let him mix it with far bigger operations, and at the time of writing he
