7 minute read
Hills on the up
Charlie Hills: enjoying a fantastic season
CHARLIE HILLS had big shoes to fill when he took over the trainer’s licence at Lambourn’s Wetherdown House from his father Barry in 2011, but he had learned well.
He might not have made quite the flying start that some were looking for, and some years have inevitably been better than others, but 2019 has begun particularly well and a career total so far of ten Group 1 or Grade 1 wins, including two Classics, represents a haul that all but a handful of elite trainers would be happy with.
Hills Snr remains a formidable character, and there is no question he was a formidable trainer too.
A self-made man who began in racing as a groom and set himself up as a trainer on the proceeds of his successful gambling – notably through a celebrated coup on the 1968 Lincoln Handicap winner Frankincense – he won most of the races that matter most in a career spanning well over 40 years.
Bad luck dogged him in the Epsom Classics – he had four seconds in the Derby, two of them agonisingly close, and a slipped saddle cost him an Oaks – but his success elsewhere covered the full gamut, from champion sprinters to champion stayers and with the winners of the 2,000 Guineas (two), 1,000 Guineas (two) and St Leger in between.
In total there were well over 3,000 of them, and he even had a major winner at the Cheltenham Festival.
It’s a different world now, commercially speaking in particular, and Charlie Hills, the fourth of five sons who have all forged successful careers in racing, tends to concentrate on the speedier end of racing’s spectrum, where the fruits can be enjoyed sooner and there is a vibrant market for those that do well.
The vast majority of his best winners have been sprinters or milers and he’s proved highly adept with them.
When Phoenix Of Spain won the Tattersalls Irish 2,000 Guineas in May he was a second Classic winner for Hills over a mile following Just The Judge in the fillies’ equivalent in 2013.
There might easily had been another but for the tragic death of that year’s Fillies’ Mile and Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies’ Turf winner Chriselliam the following spring.
Hills’s outstanding 5f performer Battaash has not yet received the official recognition given to stable-mate Muhaarar following a stellar 2015, but many believe his 4l defeat of Nunthorpe Stakes winner Marsha in the Prix de l’Abbaye two years ago was the equal, at least, of anything achieved by that year’s champion Harry Angel.
Hills, who was riding out for his father from the age 12 and broadened his horizons with Colin and Peter Hayes in Australia, and then with a memorable three-year spell with James Fanshawe in Newmarket, is unlikely to ever forget the half-hour on May 25 during which Phoenix Of Spain won in Ireland and Battaash bounced right back to his blistering best in the Temple Stakes at Haydock.
Looking back on the afternoon, he says he knew he had his team in great form, but he was not counting on them both winning, and certainly not in quite such style.
He says: “It was an immense day. Before the race we were just hoping Phoenix Of Spain might finish in the top four really because of the stop-start preparation he’d had which had meant he wasn’t ready for Newmarket. It was a nice surprise to see him win so comfortably.
“He’d always shown plenty and we’d always liked him, and he’s such a big horse that we felt that to do so well at two he was already punching above his weight. He’s now filled into his big frame and is showing his full potential.”
Phoenix Of Spain races for Tony Wechsler and Ann Plummer, who enjoyed success with One Word More soon after Hills started training and are now reaping the rewards of investment on a much grander scale through Howson & Houldsworth Bloodstock.
A deal was done in the winter for the Lope De Vega grey to join Invincible Spirit and company at the Irish National Stud when his
racing days are over. Hills, who trained last year’s Portland Handicap winner A Momentofmadness for the couple, says: “Tony and Ann have been great supporters and are wonderful people whose families are taking a great interest too.
“David Powell, of Catridge Stud, recommended me to them, and having a horse such as Phoenix Of Spain, whom they’ve leased back, is a dream come true.” The Irish Guineas preceded Battaash’s
Battaash: winning at Haydock
race by just 25 minutes that afternoon, and so when Phoenix Of Spain won Hills found himself unusually relaxed while he watched the action from Haydock, where the race was won with similar ease.
Hills says: “The pressure had been on with Phoenix Of Spain because of the problems he’d had in his preparation, and I’ve never been at such ease watching Battaash, which is usually a pretty tense experience!”
Looking back on Battaash’s rapid rise as a three-year-old he remembers: “At two he always just wanted to get on with things and do everything at a 100 miles an hour.
“We really fancied him for the Windsor Castle, when he pretty much gave it away at the start, and although we had him cut straight away it wasn’t really happening for him until he was second in the Cornwallis at the end of that year.
“It was lucky that we kept him, but when he came back in a bit later than most the following year he was a different horse.
“I remember working him with Cotai Glory [second in the previous year’s King’s Stand Stakes at Royal Ascot] and thinking something must be wrong with ‘Cotai’ as he made him look like a selling plater.
“Then he went and won a Listed race, a Group 3, a Group 2 and finally a Group 1, at Longchamp.”
If 2018 was less successful for Battaash, notwithstanding two more Group wins, Hills thinks he knows why.
“He’d had a hard year, and a wind operation that winter knocked him sideways too, as he never really thrived last year,” he recalls. “He’s thriving now though, as we saw when he won the Temple Stakes again.”
Phoenix Of Spain and Battaash are not the only ones thriving, and Hills feels the whole team are doing better now.
He can explain and says: “We’ve done a few things differently this year. We’ve changed our feed to Red Mills, and we had windows put in the barns over the winter, so that the horses can put their heads out and see what’s going on while enjoying more fresh air.
Expectations were high when Hills sent out his first runners, but while there was a Group 2 win at Newmarket within a month or so the first really big winner did not come until 2013. It was worth waiting for though.
Hills says: “Just The Judge was a great filly who was unbeaten as a two-yearold, including in the Rockfel, and was then second in the 1,000 Guineas at Newmarket before she went to The Curragh for the Irish 1,000. She was my first Group 1 winner, and it was great to do it in a Classic.”
Chriselliam came along in that same year and her top level wins at Newmarket and Santa Anita at the backend saw her crowned champion European twoyear-old filly.
The pride in what she achieved is obvious, but it is still overshadowed by a conviction that the best was still to come when she was lost.
Hills says: “Chriselliam was probably the best filly I’ve trained, and she would have been something special as a three-year-old. Then, what started off as a bruised foot, which is quite common, spiralled out of control.
“It was horrible and went on for quite a while, but she was incredibly tough and never went off her food.
“She gave us some unforgettable days though, and it was great to have Willie Carson as an owner, with the Aspreys and Chris Wright.”
Muhaarar was the stable’s next top flight horse, and in 2015 he did something that had never been done before when taking four Group 1 sprints as a three-year-old.
His career might have been very different, but for Royal Ascot’s introduction that year of the Commonwealth Cup, for he started his second season with Classic aspirations and his first step in that direction in Newbury’s Greenham Stakes had been a successful one.
Hills says: “I’m sure he would have got a mile no problem, and we had a good chat about the St James’s Palace Stakes after he finished in mid-field in the French Guineas from stall 18 of 18, but Gleneagles looked unbeatable.
“If the Commonwealth Cup hadn’t been there he would probably have run in the Jersey and then the Forêt and so on, but he had won the Gimcrack, so we knew he had speed, and we went that way instead. “That’s where it started for him really and he just got better and better from the Commonwealth Cup, through the July Cup, the Maurice De Gheest, the British Champions Sprint and then a career at stud. He had the most amazing temperament, and he got heavier and heavier with every race.”
Ascot not to be for the big guns, but Hunt Cup win for Afaak
HILLS WAS HOPING he might enjoy another hour of magic when Battaash and Phoenix Of Spain both ran next on the first day of Royal Ascot, but it did not quite work out.
Battaash went first this time in the King’s Stand Stakes, but he was drawn out on a wing with the Australian filly Houtzen in a race run on rain-softened ground. When Houtzen stumbled leaving the stalls, he found himself further back than ideal, and with little company.
For a moment, his usual surge looked as if it might take him to the front, but in the closing stages he was always being held by Blue Point and had to settle for second once again.
Hills said: “He probably just got outstayed again. It’s got to have tested his stamina, and we got a bit detached, but he’s run a good race.”
Phoenix Of Spain under Jamie Spencer looked the one to beat in the St James’s Palace Stakes and he travelled well into the straight, but his effort petered out surprisingly quickly and he finished only sixth.
Spencer said: “I thought going to the two-pole he was going to do something big, but he was beaten in a 100 yards and so something wasn't quite right.”
Sure enough, Hills confirmed the following morning that Phoenix Of Spain was “very sore” and so would be rested before we see him again.
Hills did not have to wait long for Royal Ascot success however, last year’s runner-up Afaak taking the following day’s hugely competitive Hunt Cup on his first run of the season.
Confirmation, not that it was needed, that Hills has learned well.
