Eve Johnson Houghton success is no accident

There is much speculation about who will be the star of Qipco British Champions Day at Ascot on Saturday, but, for Eve Johnson Houghton, that argument was settled a fortnight ago.

The Blewbury trainer runs Accidental Agent, a three-year-old colt named after her maternal grandfather John Goldsmith’s autobiography about his life as a Special Operations Executive during the Second World War, in the £250,000 Balmoral Handicap and his exploits have mirrored her rise and rise in the past couple of years. Bred by her mother Gaie, from her foundation mare Sirnelta, Accidental Agent is the sixth generation of the family and is precisely the type of horse that sustains the racing dream.

At a yearling sale, Johnson Houghton’s bid of £8,000 for her mother’s colt was the only one and, with a valuable sales race at two and a heritage handicap at Ascot the Saturday before last under his belt, his winnings stand at over £200,000 and there have been some hefty offers on the table.

“Mum says she’s having too much fun to sell him,” explained the trainer. “If it wasn’t for horses like him none of us would be in business. There would be no dream. If horses that cost gazillions were the only ones to win races there would be no point.

“He has bags of pace. We’ll see if he gets a mile on Saturday. He wasn’t stopping when he won over seven last time and, if he does, he will go very close.”

With three of her four grandparents having trained, including Goldsmith and Helen Johnson Houghton, the first female trainer, a career doing something sensible was always going to be a long shot for the current incumbent of Woodway Stables.

She barely remembers Goldsmith, whose clandestine role in wartime France included escaping from a Paris hotel while a prisoner of the Gestapo and he was the basis of Jamie Reid’s William Hill Sports Book of the Year Blown.

“I remember his distinctive smell, because he used hair oil and I remember his voice,” she said. “I was three when he went to Hong Kong and he died six months later.”

She made a good start when taking over from her father 10 years ago, had a dip the second season but, for the past eight years, has improved every year and earlier this month hit 50 winners in a season for the first time.

In the Radley Stakes at Newbury a week on Saturday, she will find out just how good Magnolia Springs is. The filly beat Veracious, an impressive winner since, by 3½ lengths on her debut and could be anything. So what, apart from hard work, does Johnson Houghton believe is the reason for her snowballing success?

“The horses have been healthy and I’m more confident in my own ability. I’m more confident about picking the right races and doing the right thing. When you start you are always second guessing yourself. The day Accidental Agent won at Ascot a horse got beat in a tiny little race. It finished fourth. It should have won, but I got the tactics wrong and I got cross with myself. I let the owners down. I will learn from it, but some horses only have one day and that might have been his. I’m better at running them when they are right, not pushing them and I am more patient, waiting when they are wrong. It’s a fine line.”

As a trainer she is yet to look a Galileo in the eye. “We have the highest-rated offspring of Delegator [Accidental Agent], Frozen Power [Ice Age], Creachadoir [What About Carlo] and Sabiango [Reaver] in the country – stallions nobody has heard of. Just imagine what we could do with a Dubawi or Galileo.”