INT ERV I EW – V ENE T IA WI L L IAMS


VENETIA WILLIAMS R E A L L I F E


Venetia Williams is one of the top National Hunt trainers in the country and only the second female trainer in history, to have won the Grand National. Ahead of this year’s


Cheltenham Racing Festival, Emma Logan spoke to her at her beautiful countryside stables, Aramstone near Ross on Wye in Herefordshire.


Where were you born and raised? I was brought up mainly in Cornwall though my parents divorced when I was very young, so I lived in various places when I was with my mother including part of the time in Gloucestershire. When I left school, I moved to Herefordshire to my paternal grandmother’s family home, who had lived here for many generations.


With your family background was it a given that you would go into the world of horses and racing or was this a vocational choosing? My father and grandfather were for many years Master of Hounds with the Four Burrow Hunt in Cornwall so I was always involved from a very young age with hunting and Pony Club as a child. When they moved to Herefordshire, my grandparents bought two fillies to race on the flat so that was the start of the family involvement in racing. I started by racing in point-to-points and I rode as an amateur in National Hunt races but I was never going to be a professional jockey, as I was never going to be good enough.


You had this terrible accident at Worcester in 1988 – could you tell us what happened? Two weeks before the accident, I managed to ride as an amateur in the Grand National where I fell at Beeches Brook. The accident at Worcester was during a Hurdles race. I was riding against professionals and it was a complete long shot really for a small trainer I rode for. I was in the lead and looking like the winner when the next thing I knew, I fell at the last and was briefly paralysed for about 10 minutes. I had broken the


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