Letting the numbers do the talking

During the period from 1994 to the end of last year, he's sent out a mind-boggling 1,523 winners which, together with all of the placed horses from the stable over that time, has accumulated a whopping £22m plus for their respective owners.

History shows the Scottish nation to be a determined bunch and Johnston, born and bred not far from Glasgow and fiercely patriotic, upholds the tradition with the verve that once, many moons ago, saw some sections of the Press dub him "Braveheart".

It was a "fear no one" policy to which the scribes referred, taking on all-comers from the worldwide training ranks and in many cases bringing the booty back to Middleham, a famous equine centre which some say was in terminal decline until he arrived on the scene in 1989.

Since Johnston's move to our region, The Northern Echo has devoted many deserved column inches to his almost unparalleled surge to near the top of the training tree, a state of affairs guaranteed to maintain its status quo given an unrelenting determination not to let standards slip.

And there you have it in a nutshell - standards must not slip. In fact, the fanatical year-on-year-out drive to improve every aspect of his business keeps everyone employed by Mark Johnston Racing very much on their toes.

To be fair, it's an attitude stemming from good old-fashioned principles. People pay decent money to have their horses trained by one of the best, in return for which all members of the company are expected to perform with a commensurate level of professionalism.

It really doesn't matter whether you happen to be pushing a brush around the stables, or sitting on top of a blue-blooded million-dollar thoroughbred, if you work for MJR and do your job properly, then everything is hunkydory.

On the other hand, anyone not committed to maintaining the high standards to what has rapidly developed into of the biggest training stables in the UK, is quickly found out and dealt with accordingly.

It's not an unreasonable state of affairs, in fact the policy is put into practice by the immensely able assistant trainer, Jock Bennett, and the seven yard managers, all of whom have first-line responsibility for 30 or so horses in their care.

"I encourage and ask all of my staff to take responsibility for the horses. If a horse isn't doing well enough then I want to know the background, so as a team (which includes full-time veterinary clinicians plus blacksmiths) we can do something about it, says Johnston.

"We like to deal in hard figures here, not some wishy-washy approach. If a horse only runs three times in a year and wins a Group race - that's fine. But if one has only run three times in a year and, for instance, won a 0-70 handicap, I want to know why the horse hasn't run eight or ten times, which is much more the norm at that level.

"We're totally committed to improving our management systems all of the time. There are still some staff believing I train the horses from my office, which is just not true unless they are winning.

"If you start trying to train horses entirely to a formula it just doesn't work, because you have to look at each individual and ask yourself whether it's thriving on its work or not. Do they want more work, or do want less work? These are the sort of decisions that can make or break a trainer.

"Numerically, we have to very satisfied with 143 winners all told in 2005.

"At the start of the year, for the first time, I asked our management staff to set their own targets and they came up with 150 winners, which I thought was wrong.

"I believed the emphasis was flawed because in my view they should have been looking at fewer winners than 2004, but more quality. However, as it turned out, they were nearly right.

"This year, we are planning not only to have annual targets, but also monthly targets. If, say, we set ourselves a goal of 20 winners in June and then only have ten, we'll be analysing the reasons for failure straight away.

"Strangely enough, 2005 showed me that it doesn't matter how many winners you have, you still need a "big" horse to get noticed.

"It transpired that as we didn't have a real star to keep the stable in the headlines, some owners and sections of the Press seemed to think we were having a quiet season.

"It was not until Attraction won in Ireland in September that people woke up to the fact we were actually having a pretty good campaign.

"Ironically though, if the yard had earned the same amount of prize-money as in 2004, I'd have been champion trainer.

"It's no use staying at the same level. Every year we must push the bar higher. That's why we have a much bigger turnover nowadays, the number one reason a horse doesn't stay or return to our stable is because he or she is simply not good enough.

"Some people have suggested our high turnover is to do with horses getting injured in training.

"In truth it's nothing of the sort. The reality is we're constantly striving to increase the overall quality, which requires weeding out the weaker links to be either sold, found alternative careers, or retired.

"We only had five Group winners last year and to be quite frank that just wasn't good enough. I'll be looking for targets from my yard managers of 15 Group winners, plus 150 winners in total. In other words, for every ten winners we have, I want one of them to be in a Group race."

Tough targets, from a straight-talking trainer who is going to have more than 200 horses to run during the coming months, including about 100 two-year-olds, many of whom have been supplied by the allconquering Maktoum family.

Unquestionably, Johnston holds a very strong hand indeed for this year which, combined with the legendary stable motto "Always Trying", should leave his rivals in no doubt that, as per usual, his horses are to be feared wherever they travel.