This Racing Life: the team behind champion trainer Dan Skelton

Tom Bull visited Lodge Hill Farm Stables in Warwickshire for a This Racing Life special on how reigning champion jumps trainer Dan Skelton runs his operation, and the people who make it work.

It's 13 years since Skelton set up his own stables after spending nine years with Paul Nicholls, and the hard work came to fruition in style when he won his first British jump racing Champion Trainer's title in the 2025–26 season, becoming the first trainer to win more than £5 million prize money in one campaign in the process.

However, Skelton admits that when he first took out his licence, he felt he had to carry everything himself.

"It's a very insular feeling to get that licence for the first time, and then you think all eyes are on you and all the mistakes are yours," he said. "But you soon realise very quickly that actually it's not that at all. It is actually all about the team."

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Several of that team have been there from day one. Polly, now head girl, has been with him from the start, along with travelling head lad Phil. Assistant trainer Tom Messenger joined soon afterwards.

Skelton also had to learn to delegate. "You don't have to do six jobs," he said. "There's things that other people do that I used to do, and by allowing them to do it, they do it better now than they did. And in a lot of instances better than I did."

Skelton took his whole team to Sandown last season to collect the trainers' trophy, and he hopes to do it "again and again and again".

"It's a tangible result to everyone's efforts," he said. "If you do well, you get presented with the trophy. It's a very, very basic human emotion and feeling."

His wife Grace never had any doubt it would happen. "I never doubted for a minute that he would be champion trainer one day," she said. "From the second he decided he wanted to be a trainer, it was 'I'll need to be Champion Trainer'. That's the mindset in the family."

Watch This Racing Life: The Team Behind Champion Trainer Dan Skelton in full on the Racing TV YouTube channel.