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“It’s just unbelievable, isn’t it?” Gihan Arnolda says as he reflects on his first three months as a trainer: five winners from 33 runners, £50,000 prize money banked and a string that is, according to the much-respected Timeform operation’s “run to form” statistic, outperforming every other Flat yard in Britain.
But it could equally apply to the story of Arnolda’s journey from the East End of London to Cadland Cottage Stables at the bottom of Warren Hill in Newmarket. He was the first trainer of black or Asian heritage in Flat racing’s HQ when he received his licence this year, and that is just one among a host of unlikely firsts and sliding-door moments along the way.
It is safe to assume he is also the first trainer to have slept rough on the streets of east London as a teenager.
“My mum and dad are Sri Lankan and Portuguese background,” Arnolda explains. “My mother passed away of leukaemia when I was very young. My dad was off the rails, really. [From 12 years of age] I used to run away and I was just living on the streets for weeks at a time.
“I was stealing from shops to live, not that I was that person but I had no other way of living. I remember living in people’s gardens and I couldn’t see any way out, and then you’re on the verge of the gang stuff. I could easily have gone down a very, very different path, because people I knew at that stage have gone down very different paths.”
The starting point for Arnolda’s escape from the downward spiral was unexpectedly close to home after a confrontation with his father.
“I went next door to a neighbour and they said: ‘Whatever happens, we’re going to back you and try to foster you.’
“I didn’t believe it really, and obviously the police came and I got taken back into care, but literally a year later, that English family fostered me. I went from a rough school in east London to going to Wimbledon college. It was amazing. I got all my GCSEs, six As, four Bs, and went on to a law course at college.”
By this point, though, an alternative plan that was hatched on Saturdays watching racing on TV with his foster dad had already started to form in Arnolda’s mind.
At 18, he applied for the foundation course at the British Racing School in Newmarket, and sat on a racehorse for the first time on day one. Less than nine months later, in July 1998, his fifth ride in public, Knave’s Ash, squeezed home by a short head in an apprentice handicap at Thirsk.
Arnolda had more than 200 rides and rode five more winners over the next decade, but struggled to shake off the lingering effects of his tough early years.
“I went on to be a jockey but I really struggled mentally when I went into the big, wide world, and I couldn’t really focus on being a jockey. It’s really tough [to leave the care system], you’re kind of let go. You’re 18, but you’re not a normal 18-year-old that has had that guided upbringing.”
A broken pelvis in 2009 ended his riding career, by which point he had become “disillusioned” with racing. Jets – the retraining scheme for former jockeys – helped him to enrol to retrain as a chef. After a spell with the Michelin-starred Andrew Pern in Yorkshire, he moved to Gordon Ramsay’s Maze in London.
Five years on from his injury, though, racing was back on his mind. “I just felt like I had missed something in racing,” he says. “In 2014, I got offered a job at Godolphin with Charlie Appleby, then moved to Chris Wall and then Roger Varian, and I learned so much off them. They were my biggest mentors, and then I moved from assistant at Roger’s to [Derby-winning trainer] Peter Chapple-Hyam, and he was a massive help too.”
Even with a dozen years of experience behind him, however, training in his own right still felt like a step too far from his East End roots.
“People were saying to me: ‘You’ve got so much knowledge, you’re such a horseman,’ and I’d say: ‘Yeah, well, there’s no chance of training,’ because I didn’t see anyone else like myself training. It’s normally handed down, or people have a massive connection in racing. I thought: ‘I’ll just rattle around as an assistant.’”
But an opening appeared when an owner with Denis Quinn, the previous licence holder at Cadland Cottage Stables, offered to support him, and Arnolda seized his chance.
“I’ve got that will to win, and the drive and the work ethic as well,” he says. “I’ve started with my partner [Charlotte] and we have two small children, so it’s a family thing and we’ve got friends that work with us as well, and it’s just slowly growing.
“I’ve got orders for six or seven yearlings at the [autumn] sales and I feel like having two-year-olds will add another string to the bow. Our aim was 10 winners by the end of the year, so we’re halfway there already, fingers crossed.”
Damascus Steel, a six-year-old grey gelding, was Arnolda’s first winner at the 11th attempt in a handicap at Goodwood in mid-June, followed up in a race at Epsom a month later and will attempt to take his trainer a step closer to his target in the Amateurs’ Derby at the latter track on Monday, one of the feature events of the bank holiday programme. Arnolda’s blossoming future as a Newmarket trainer is the focus now.
“I love the heritage thing, don’t get me wrong,” Arnolda says. “But I want to be seen as just a bloody good trainer, and put it out there that you can have a really horrible start in life, but if you work twice as hard, you can actually get somewhere.”
