With just a matter of weeks left of the 2024 horse racing season, all eyes in Yorkshire horse racing are fixed on the latest figures regarding the most successful trainers and jockeys during the calendar year.
The team at Go Racing in Yorkshire are champions of all nine racecourses located across ‘God’s own county’. The organisation is meeting in December for its annual awards lunch, where it presents trophies to the top performers at the country’s racecourses.
With time running out to crown the most successful trainers and jockeys around Yorkshire’s racecourses, we thought it was a good time to check out the likely contenders for Go Racing in Yorkshire silverware next month.
The Top Flat Trainers in Yorkshire
Tim Easterby has been running away with things at the top of the leading flat trainers at Yorkshire venues this season, landing 49 wins to date, eight more than joint-second placed Richard Fahey and David O’Meara. Easterby, who is based at the family’s Habton Grange stables in North Yorkshire, has seen some great recent performances from his thoroughbreds. Count D’Orsay made it four wins for the year with a dominant display at Catterick, while Profiteer and Austrian Theory both landed encouraging wins at Pontefract.
The Top Jump Trainers in Yorkshire
When it comes to Yorkshire’s National Hunt racing, the victories have been shared out across the board, although Donald McCain is three ahead of joint-second placed trainers Oliver Greenall & Josh Guerriero and Tom Lacey. The latter has a state-of-the-art stable in rural Herefordshire and he is someone who is only prepared to enter horses who have a realistic prospect of winning races, as the statistics show. That’s why Lacey-trained prospects increasingly catch the eye of horse racing syndicate sites, where individuals can purchase one or multiple shares in horses trained and educated by Lacey and his staff.
The Top Flat Jockeys in Yorkshire
The most successful jockeys on Yorkshire’s flat racing meetings are Callum Rodriguez, Connor Beasley and David Nolan. Although Rodriguez appears to have the title sewn up with 49 race wins to date, compared with 38 for Beasley and 36 for Nolan. The Richmond-based jockey has been in blistering form of late. He stormed to victory at Redcar Racecourse’s EBF Novice Stakes for the Ed Bethell team on board Native Instinct. Rodriguez went on to make it a brace of victories at the same meeting late last month, steering Tazima home ahead of pre-race favourite, No Retreat in The Empentis – Supporting Equine Staff Novice Stakes.
The Top Jump Jockeys in Yorkshire
Finally, it looks like being a straight fight between Brian Hughes and Gavin Sheehan for the mantle of top jump jockey at Yorkshire’s jump meetings in 2024. Hughes currently leads the way with 13 victories to Sheehan’s ten. The 39-year-old Northern Irishman was the Champion Jockey in the 2019-20 season, becoming the first Northern Irishman since Jonjo O’Neill to achieve the feat. Hughes, who has over 1,000 wins over fences in the UK and Ireland, made it two Champion Jockey Titles in the 2021-22 season, so it’s no surprise to see him at the top of his class this year.
With just over a month remaining, it will be an exciting run-in to the festive season for trainers and jockeys alike across Yorkshire’s finest racecourses.
