L’Homme Presse will be turned out as impeccably as his eight opponents before he goes to post for the King George VI Chase at Kempton Park on Monday, but away from the public gaze, when he is relaxing at Venetia Williams’s Herefordshire stable, the seven-year-old has a grubbier side to his character.
“He’s the muddiest of the muddy,” Andy Edwards, L’Homme Presse’s owner, said this week. “[His groom] Beth says, I let him out and the first thing he does is get caked in mud. His rug is caked, his mane, everything, constantly, because he loves it.”
The seven-year-old gelding who loves nothing more than rolling in mud has taken Edwards, Williams and Charlie Deutsch, his jockey, to the brink of what would be a memorable and heart-warming success in the feature event of the Boxing Day racing programme.
Deutsch has shown immense strength of character to claw his way back to the top after a prison sentence for dangerous driving in May 2018. Williams, meanwhile, has always allowed her horses a freedom that many of those stabled in major training centres rarely enjoy, making her an ideal trainer for Edwards and his co-owners in DFA Racing, his wife, Pam, and close friends, Peter and Patricia Pink.
Some racehorse owners do little more than sign the cheques, or the modern-day equivalent, and look forward to an afternoon or two at the races. Edwards is the polar opposite, an owner who take a close and intensely personal interest in the day-to-day wellbeing of his horses from the moment he first spots them in a field.
Edwards spends the summer touring around France, “listening”, as he puts it, to yearlings and foals in their paddocks and then, if he can, buying those with whom he forms a connection. A photograph on the DFA Racing website shows him with his hand on the forehead of an 18-month-old yearling in the Jura mountains that has never before been handled, never mind broken in for training.
“If I can make a connection with a horse by listening to it, then I make a purchase if I can,” Edwards says. “I can’t buy all of them, of course, but where I can, I take something on, and then nurture it like you would your child in a football or rugby team. You want to bring them on and make them feel good and positive about themselves, so that they believe in themselves.
“I do communicate with the horses but from a human point of view, it’s easier to say connect, because humans believe communication is verbal. It’s very humbling to be able to do that, and when people say how do you do it, I say that I listen. Empty yourself of everything and the horse will show you what it needs.
“I say 20% [of performance] is physical structure and 80 per cent is mental and emotional, and if you talk to any sports psychologist with top [human] athletes, they will tell you the same.”
L’Homme Presse had a tendon injury when Edwards bought him, but his new owner was undeterred. “Other people might think it was a bit mad,” he says, “but it worked out all right, so it can’t have been that mad, can it?”
Williams, meanwhile, fulfilled “the golden rule of DFA, which is that if you don’t turn out after work, you do not get one of my horses”.
“It’s part of the mental and emotional process,” he says. “More emotional, because they have emotional freedom and they feel appreciated. They work, they get washed down and they can have a play and no one is worried about it.
“If a horse calls me, I will spend time with it and the things that come out are really interesting and varied but most of it is centred around anxiety. As adults, if you have a fall out with a friend or something doesn’t go right, the consequence of becoming anxious has a massive effect on your physical body and it’s the same with horses.”
The circumstances, of course, are very different, but Deutsch received similar, and invaluable, support, from Williams after his jail sentence four years ago, and has not looked back since returning to his job as stable jockey.
“He got the support he needed from his family and friends and in spades from Venetia as well,” Edwards says. “He’s a lovely lad and a very, very good horseman, and he does connect with the horse.
“Some people ask about instructions but Venetia said early on, if we have to give instructions to our stable jockey, we’ve employed the wrong stable jockey.
“The only thing I ever say is, connect with each other and be as one, and if you watch Charlie and L’Homme Presse, it very much looks like one entity, not two.”