Martin Keighley began his career in
racing as a conditional jockey in 1992. In seven seasons, he rode
just nine winners, but they did include King’s Road, trained by
Nigel Twiston-Davies in the Martell Champion Standard National Hunt
Flat Race at Aintree in April, 1998. Keighley gave up race-riding at
the age of 25 and subsequently worked as a groundsman at Cheltenham,
where he learnt about ground conditions and how to build hurdles and
fences, which would help him when he started training.
Keighley first took out a public
training licence in October, 2006, but had previously trained
point-to-pointers and hunter chasers under permit. In fact, his first
winner under Rules was one of his own horses, Bosuns Mate, ridden by
his wife Belinda, in a hunters’ chase at Sandown in February, 2003.
Having moved into Condicote Stables in Luckley, near
Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, his first winner as a licensed
trainer was Prince Dundee, whom he also part-owned, in a conditional
jockeys’ selling handicap hurdle at Taunton in January, 2007.
The horse that made his name as a
trainer, though, was Champion Court, who recorded his first major
success in the Neptune Investment Management Novices’ Hurdle in
2010. The Court Cave gelding made up into a smart steeplechaser, too,
winning the Dipper Novices’ Chase at Cheltenham in 2012 and the
Silver Trophy Chase, also at Cheltenham, in 2013.
Keighley, understandably, has a special
affinity with his local course and, at the last count, had saddled 19
winners at Prestbury Park. His most recent major success was with
Brillare Momento in the Thoroughbred Breeders' Association Mares’
Novices’ Hurdle in April 2017.
In March, 2016, Keighley saddled his
first “winner” at the Cheltenham Festival when Any Currency was
first past the post in the Glenfarclas Cross Country Chase. However,
the 13-year-old was subsequently found to have traces of the
prohibited substance triamcinolone acetonide (TCA) in his urine and
disqualified. A disciplinary hearing at the British Horseracing
Authority (BHA) cleared Keighley of any wrongdoing but, nevertheless,
promoted Josies Orders, second in the Glenfarclas Cross Country
Chase, to first place. Any Currency did gain some scant compensation
when winning a handicap chase on the New Course at Cheltenham the
following month.
He was retired, as a 14-year-old, a
year later after attempting, unsuccessfully, to win both races again.
Keighley said of him, “…you have been a horse of a lifetime;
we’ll miss you, but wish you the long and happy retirement that a
dude like you deserves.”
