Horses In Training 2023 review: a gem that has stood the test of time

Horses In Training 2023 still does what it says on the tin. What it has done for some 130 years. It is a list of (nearly) every thoroughbred racehorse in training in Britain (and some in Ireland and France) – covering 557 trainers and over 20,000 horses.

Is it the sort of book that you start on page 1 and find yourself looking at page 406 two hours later? Of course not. So why, then, did I find myself doing exactly that and almost unable to put it down as I moved through the alphabet?

Like a racing trainspotter, I pored over the pedigree of well over 100 Charlie Appleby-trained two-year-olds, overwhelmingly sired by Dubawi or Frankel and then compared them to the team assembled for Saeed bin Suroor up the road, who gets 20 two-year-olds and not a single Dubawi or Frankel among them, and 28 three-year-olds, half of which are so backward they haven’t even been named.

I licked my lips at the pedigrees at the disposal of Aidan O’Brien. And William Haggas. And John Gosden. And more. Racing’s ebbing and flowing fortunes are starkly illustrated on these pages.

The vast strings of the likes of Andrew Balding, Richard Hannon and Charlie Johnston set against other yards who would once have had well over 100 horses in their care, but now muster barely two dozen.

The shifting plates of the sport. New names with just three or four horses, other new names with 40. A jumps trainer with a team of 20, the majority of which are aged either four or five, another with seven horses, including two 14-year-olds and a 15-year-old.

There’s a lot more other useful stuff as a neat bonus for purchasers. A comprehensive list of principal race dates for 2023 in Britain and Ireland is something I often struggle to find online.

A list of median race times and course records for every track likewise are among 150 pages of facts and figures.