We knew he’d learn a lot.”Īt Newbury, the rumour mill had it that Richard Hannon was unleashing one of his most promising two-year-olds in Baheer. “On his first start at Salisbury he was very green, the ground was soft and it was over five furlongs. “He was very attractive and almost looked like the finished article as a yearling,” she says. The colt was knocked down for £27,000 and when her husband returned some time later having organised a wind test and transport, he joked that he had pulled out of the bidding at £25,000, at which Main “uttered a few expletives”. We thought he’d go for 50-60,000 guineas at least, so I just sat in the cafe at Tattersalls and James went to the ring.” We had a 25,000 guineas budget, we’d just bought two on spec and only really had half an order for the Zoustar. “One of his owners, David Llewellyn, is Singapore-based and also has horses in Australia so was very keen on a yearling by Zoustar, who is one of the leading stallions there. “We were a bit perplexed as to how we got him so cheap but I guess some horses slip through the net, maybe other people also thought he’d be too expensive, too,” she says. The biggest problem facing small yards is finding the raw material at an affordable price. Two years ago Island Bandit won at Newbury at 125-1 Childesplay was second there at 80-1 on debut. When Zoulu Chief won on his second start he was 150-1, but he was her third 100-1-plus-priced winner. However, because she runs a small yard (30 Flat horses and about 20 jumpers), her horses are often at longer odds than they should be. Of course, singing is a fairly unique talent among trainers and it is one department in which she can trump Aidan O’Brien, John Gosden and Charlie Appleby. In 2009, at the depth of the recession, she took out a licence to train from their farmhouse in the Vale of White Horse. She met her husband, James, a vet, and together they prepared horses for the spring breeze-up sales (the process of buying a yearling and hoping to sell it six months later as a ready-to-run two-year-old for a profit). “I found the training fascinating, but never actually worked with anyone but picked and chose what I liked about it,” she says. She had a racehorse with James Eustace in Newmarket and then Paul Cole near Wantage and realised that she could ride her own horse in races if she was an amateur, which she did. Her switch from trained singer to training racehorses was gradual. “Schubert is designed to be sung in front of a handful of people in the house with a piano, but Covid put paid to a lot of that.” “I’d like to start up singing recitals in the sitting room again,” she adds. Last year she sang God Save the King at Newbury a week after Queen Elizabeth II died but normally it is funerals, weddings and winners. When she was getting established she had a “High Note” syndicate and occasionally she is now asked to burst into song by one of the racing channels in the winner’s enclosure or for a racing charity. These days she still ties in the singing with racing as a unique selling point. I sang at the Barbican and St John’s Smith Square, but never made it to a Glyndebourne level.” I’m professionally trained but I’m not famous and never made money from it. “It was gruelling – just like training a racehorse. “It took about 10 years and lots of private voice lessons just to get into Trinity College of Music in London, where I did a post-graduate course,” she says. I thought, ‘Whose voice is that?’ I got the part and my friend wasn’t happy – she’d wanted the lead.” From that moment onwards she never went back to America to complete her degree. “I’d done a bit of singing at school but my voice had matured and when it came out it was like an out-of-body experience. “Being me, I went for the female lead, Rose Maybud,” the 54-year-old recalls. Wishing to do something extra-curricular while in Southampton, a friend suggested she audition for a chorus part in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore. Later, she studied liberal arts and English at Emory University in Atlanta, and spent the third year of her course at a British equivalent. She was a cowgirl, rode quarter horses in barrel races and at her teen peak was crowned Rodeo Queen of Alabama. There will not be many better-looking colts in the meeting’s key juvenile race, but how did Main come to be his trainer? Main, the daughter of a doctor and a portrait artist, was born in America’s Deep South, where anything equine tended to revolve around the rodeo. Main hopes to hit the high notes on Tuesday when Zoulu Chief, a two-year-old who won at Newbury at 150-1 on his last start, runs in the Coventry Stakes. Participants at Royal Ascot this week will come from a vast array of milieux, but few will have as exotic a background as Oxfordshire-based Heather Main: rodeo queen, opera singer and now racehorse trainer with a good habit of saddling long-priced winners.
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