UK Horse Racing Tips

By his own admission, Charlie Mann is ‘never one for keeping a low profile’ and has frequently courted controversy since first taking out a public training licence in August, 1993, making something of a divisive character in horse racing circles. Mann was a successful National Hunt jockey in the North of England in the late Seventies; so successful, in fact, that he was offered, but turned down, a job with Michael Dickinson when he took over the training licence at Poplar House in Harewood, West Yorkshire from his father, Tony, in 1980. In any event, with just shy of 150 winners to his name, his riding career was effectively brought to an end in 1989, when he suffered a so-called ‘hangman’s fracture’ of his second cervical vertebra during a fall at Warwick.

Nevertheless, in 1995, Mann both trained, and rode, the ten-year-old Its A Snip to win the most challenging steeplechase in Europe, the Velka Pardubicka Steeplechase, in Pardubice, Czech Republic. He enjoyed his most successful season, numerically and financially, in 2008/09, while still at his previous base, Whitcoombe House Stables, Upper Lambourn. He has yet to come anywhere close to either total, 63 winners or £640,960 in prize money, since moving to nearby Neardown Stables in 2012, but has managed to amass at least £124,000 in prize money in every season since, bar 2019/20.

Mann has yet to saddle a winner at the Cheltenham Festival, but came as close as he ever has to doing so in the Fulke Walwyn Kim Muir Challenge Cup Handicap Chase. On that occasion, his nine-year-old Merchants Friend held a 12-length lead jumping the final fence, but weakened dramatically on the uphill climb to the line and was collared in the final stride by Maximize, trained by Martin Pipe. He has, however, recorded two Grade One wins, albeit some years ago; the first came courtesy of Celibate, ridden by Richard Dunwoody, in the BMW Chase at Punchestown in 1999, and the second courtesy of Air Force One, ridden by Noel Fehily, in the Ellier Developments Champion Novice Chase at the same venue in 2008.

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