In the summer of 2020, 49-year-old British inner-city primary school teacher Paresh Patel had a moment of clarity. “I thought, ‘life’s passing me by, I’ve got to do something about this,’” he says.
So he opened his laptop and emailed one of the UK’s leading racehorse trainers, Mark Johnston (pictured), who was racing at the time. He wrote that he wanted to learn to ride racehorses and asked for his help.
If it sounds random, it is. The idea had been in his head, unformed, since the day he bunked off school to sneak into his local racecourse (Cheltenham) to “see what all the fuss was about”. Peering through the gates as the horses ballet-danced past him he was “lost for words” by their beauty. A seed was sown.
Johnston invited him to his Middleham stables in North Yorkshire. As they watched the gallops, Patel was again transported by the sight and sound of racehorses, this time the thundering hooves, manes and tails flying, all four feet off the ground. It electrified him. After a brief walk and a briefer trot (“about five seconds”) in the indoor school, to his enormous delight, Johnston and wife Deirdre offered to teach him to ride. The gesture was so kind, so surprising, and so huge that Patel drove home thinking it must have been a dream.
‘He really didn’t know anything at all’
He returned to Middleham for his first lesson. The 3-hour drive north from Wolverhampton gave the voices of self doubt in his head plenty of time to organise a rousing chorus that he wasn’t good enough, what was he thinking, he was bound to let everyone down.
To calm his nerves, his instructor, Angie, suggested he spent time in the stable with his partner-to-be, Ravenhoe. There he saw that, beyond the beauty, there is a stillness, an intuition, and a gentleness. He says, “He calmed me down straightaway, like he was reading my thoughts. I was nervous, but I felt calm around him. It was just us. There was a togetherness.”
Angie recalls, “He really didn’t know anything at all. I spent hours teaching him how to tack up. I don’t think he even knew how to put a headcollar on.”
Patel was a good student, she says, because he was so keen. “The two things he struggled with were tacking up and altering his stirrups - for some reason he could never get them the same length.” She remembers the riding part was easy. “He had good balance and quite nice hands from the word go and progressed very quickly. He was cantering by the third or fourth lesson.” She gave him a horsemanship manual to take home and read.
Nine months later, on May 1, 2021 (Patel has kept a meticulous diary, on Johnston’s suggestion, and emails his notes to him), Angie announced he was ready for the all-weather gallop.
Rising to the occasion, he felt “at one with this beautiful animal. Everything was whizzing past me. It was out of this world, a lifelong dream. It’s a feeling I can’t describe”.
Angie says, “Seeing him on the all-weather was my favourite moment. We’d gone from absolutely nothing to looking like a work rider.”
Another breakthrough came three months later, when she suggested that he could “go a bit quicker, and count in his head 18-20 seconds per furlong. He did it, I thought, ‘we’re there, you can go in the string’”.
Patel graduated from Ravenhoe (“a brilliant horse to learn on”, according to Angie) to No Flies On Me, a horse in training, and due to race ten days later. “When Mr Johnston put me on, it was a vote of confidence that they can see something in me,” Patel says. Now he rides three or four lots in the string (“it feels great to be a part of all that”), and every Friday he can barely wait to learn which horses he will ride.
While his dream is coming true, he is still Mr Patel to Year 6. “I feel fortunate I can share this with my friends and family and the children at school,” he says. His 10- and 11-year-old pupils are intrigued and inspired by his adventure. Four have started riding lessons and are thrilled by the effect of being around animals.
Looking back, Patel says he may have thought twice about emailing Mark Johnston out of the blue if he had known at the time about his spectacular record as the first UK flat trainer to send out more than 200 winners in a season (in 2009) and his status as the winning-most trainer in Britain (he saddled his 4,194th winner in 2018).
Now, at “50 going on 16” he says, “The dream was for a racing yard to take a chance on me and believe in me. It’s happened, and it’s happening now.”
He doesn’t know where it will take him, but he’s living proof of the maxim It’s never too late, and you’re never too old.