A famous American horse-handler – after seeing an English trainer who had been his assistant starting to win races back in the UK – declared: ‘I taught him everything he knows.’ He then added: ‘But not everything I know.’ With a friendly but intense end-of-season battle this year for the Jump Trainers’ Championship between Paul Nicholls and his former assistant Dan Skelton, I suspect that Paul is secretly hoping that he too has retained an edge despite their successful years together.

Paul has been telling us that it would mean more to him this year for his stable jockey Harry Cobden to win his first Jump Jockeys’ Championship than for him to clinch his 15th trainers’ title, but I think he is kidding himself. A 15th title would bring Nicholls level with Martin Pipe, with whom his past battles were not always amicable. There is no chance of the Nicholls size 11 (I’m guessing, but his father was a policeman) easing off even a fraction on the accelerator until he has not just 15 but 16 trainers’ titles clocked up on his CV to make him the outright all-time champion.

Skelton is very much in the Nicholls mode: he has the same kind of intense coiled-wire energy

Skelton is very much in the Nicholls mode: he has the same kind of intense coiled-wire energy, the same all-encompassing desire to analyse and win every race and the same exuberance in celebrating victories. His four wins at this year’s Cheltenham Festival made him the most successful English-based trainer for the second Festival running and took him ahead of Nicholls in prize money won, the measurement which decides the trainers’ title. As racing commenced at Newbury on Saturday, Skelton led Nicholls by £2,533,943 to £2,444,540, and the punting public were latching on to the Skelton factor. His Kartoon and Co, Heltenham and Lindy Reilly were all backed down to favouritism but only Heltenham, at evens, was successful. By winning the Goffs UK Spring Sale Bumper, which carries the biggest prize money in the world for such a race, including £59,000 for the winner, Nicholls closed the gap at the day’s end to just £50,369. It will be a hot last five weeks of the season.

A medical incident which interrupted racing at Newbury for more than an hour left plenty of time for racegoers to continue the debates sparked off by this year’s Cheltenham Festival. We can’t blame the racecourse or the BHA for the cost of living and rampant hotel prices and it turns out that the local authority won’t let Cheltenham pave over the soggy car parks, which forced many to wait for towing vehicles. But a lot of people are now complaining that an excessive focus on the Festival is giving us unsatisfactorily small fields in other top chases. Not a single Grade One chase in Britain, a racegoer told me, had enjoyed a field of eight or more between the 2023 and 2024 Gold Cups. Too many trainers are keeping their stars fresh for a Festival which should be for the battle-hardened. One idea which appealed to me was that horses should be unable to run at the Festival unless they have had a run in, say, 80 days before it.

Plenty felt that we don’t need as many mares’ races as Cheltenham provides and that trainers with multiple entries for Festival races should be forced to declare sooner which race their chosen target is. Surely, too, a few more Cheltenham contests could become handicaps, especially the Cross Country Chase, which wasn’t designed to be a sunset home for ex-Gold Cup chasers in decline. But to those who argued that a score of 18-9 for Irish-trained chasers wasn’t too bad a situation after all, I had to counter that in the 14 Grade One contests it was 12-2.

While the jumpers were still strutting their stuff at Newbury, Doncaster opened the Flat racing season with the Lincoln Handicap won by David Egan on Mr Professor for Amo Racing and Dominic French Davis. But David Egan’s victory in the Lincoln won’t count towards the Flat Jockeys’ Championship. Nor will this year’s November Handicap winner have that counted in his total. Some while ago officialdom decreed instead that the Jockeys’ Championship begins only with the Guineas Festival in early May and ends on Champions Day at Ascot in October. Top jockey in that period last year was William Buick with 125. Oisin Murphy was second on 106, Rossa Ryan third with 104 and Tom Marquand fourth with 102.

Quirkily if the jockeys’ title, like the trainers’ title, was awarded on stakes won, then Marquand would have been champion. Surely it would be more logical, given the amount of all-weather racing, that the Jockeys’ Championship should be decided over a full year, including rides on the all-weather? Tricky for the international stars who ply their trade abroad in winter months, but that is their choice.

Had the title been determined that way in 2023 the winner would have been Ryan, who on 21 December hit the 200 winner mark. I wouldn’t be surprised if this year he won the ‘real’ title too.