GOLF and jump racing may seem like unlikely bedfellows but it’s a marriage that leading National Hunt trainer Ben Pauling believes works rather well. Having started out in 2013 with just eight horses, Pauling moved to his state-of-the-art yard, Naunton Downs in the Cotswolds, in April 2022. He’d been looking for an existing yard to move his burgeoning string to when an 18-hole golf course came up for sale in his ideal location with hills for fittening horses.
“We had the vision of doing two things in one place – why not?” says Pauling, 39. “People thought we were bonkers but as the golf course was already a commercial property, it was much easier than turning farmland and old barns into a business.”
This gave Pauling the scope to dream up the perfect racing yard, borrowing ideas from other trainers’ successful setups: a wide gallop from Joseph O’Brien to accustom horses to the bustle of a race; the dimensions of a schooling ring from Henrietta Knight; an Irish deep-sand gallop for the soft-ground horses. He enlisted an “open-minded” architect, Jon Courtney-Thompson, to execute a
