Racing Post 15 May 2026

Training is not a game for the faint-hearted. Yes, the highs look mighty fine, but the lows are pretty unforgiving, and you need something of an iron resolve in order to weather the storms that inevitably come with attempting to produce winners year-on-year.

In a recent conversation with Hugo Palmer, he introduced me to the idea of ‘flockers’ – a term coined by Sir Mark Prescott for owners who bounce around yards looking for a shiny new trainer to attach themselves to, perhaps someone fresh from a first Group 1 success or a particularly strong sequence of winners. Yet once that form dries up, as all good records must at some point, these fair-weather flockers inevitably move on too.

As such, it seems a rather thankless task for some of the older faces in the industry to climb the pecking order when younger trainers keep cropping up and fighting for the spotlight. The flockers are unlikely to look your way and it seems all too easy to be lost in the crowd.

This makes the efforts of one Lambourn trainer particularly impressive. It is somewhat astonishing, and certainly commendable, that Jonathan Portman is enjoying the best run of his career, 28 years on from sending out his first runner in 1998. 

After more than two decades of averaging around 17 winners a season, Portman has suddenly taken his operation to a new level. He enjoyed a career-high tally of 45 victories last year, smashing his previous best of 33 in 2018, and last Saturday’s winners at Lingfield and Nottingham already took him to 11 for 2026.

He has not done this through a big injection in runners either; rather, he seems to have quietly developed his string and is rightly seeing the fruits of years of patience. Last Saturday’s winners were both nine-year-olds he had worked with for their entire careers.

The bulk of Portman’s success comes in handicaps, but he also has a 20 per cent strike-rate in Group company in the last five years,  a statistic boosted by the speedy six-year-old Rumstar – another to have lived at Whitcombe House his entire career – landing a pair of Group 3s last year. 

Portman’s victories are not likely to be splashed on terrestrial TV all that often, but they deserve praise all the same. It may have taken over two and a half decades, but this trainer is proving that slow and steady does indeed win the race.