It's all happening for Fleming in Dorking

WORKING FOR yourself may be the capitalist ideal but sometimes picking up a salary at the end of the month can feel pretty sweet too.

“You can sing it!” grins trainer Alan Fleming, currently fighting the elements near Dorking, the market town just 25 miles south of London. “In fact, it’s the way forward.”

The 33-year-old from Blessington in Co Wicklow has experienced both sides of the employment divide. It’s not so long since he counted himself one of the Curragh trainers apparently surfing the Celtic Tiger wave. Except, as most of us now forget, that wave didn’t pick everybody up and fling them towards success.

Fleming remembers the 18 months as being the most horrendous time of his life, working with rubbish horses, and often not getting paid for the privilege. At the end of it he had notched up three point-to-point winners, and a sole success inside the flags – which was on the flat.

It proved a chastening experience for the lorry driver’s son whose upbringing contained no horsey influences, bar spinning around on ponies near home. But a job in a steelyard in Naas changed that when he was only 13.

“Ted Walsh came in to the yard and I just asked him for a job. He said ‘yeah’ and that was it,” Fleming remembers.

After that he spent seven years as assistant to Oliver McKiernan in Rathcoole before taking the plunge into the training ranks in his own right. It was after that that an advert in the paper was pointed out to him.

Andrew Wates, the man who owned the Grand National hero Rough Quest, was looking for a salaried trainer at his Henfold House Stables.

Arthur Moore recommended Fleming and three interviews later the job was his.

“It’s a marvellous opportunity. When the right horse comes along, Andrew Wates is willing to pay and the result is I have some lovely horses to train,” he says.

“I would be much slower to go it alone again. You need to have a big backer and good people around you so that financially you are well set up.”

He adds: “I’m an Irishman through and through but you have to be realistic. If you want to train horses for a living you have to stay where it is going well for you and it is happening for me over here.”

For an operation primarily in the market for steeplechasers, it has been a small, nippy hurdler that has been the cornerstone of the Wates-Fleming relationship.

The ex-Kevin Prendergast-trained Starluck proved to be one of the leading juveniles of last season and also proved his ability to cut it in the highest class with a fine run in the Christmas Hurdle last month when another couple of strides would have seen him overhaul Go Native.

That has meant Starluck trading as low as 12 to 1 for the Champion Hurdle but even though Cheltenham is increasingly casting its long shadow over the season, Fleming is also keeping his gaze further over the horizon.

“It’s all about trying to win Grade Ones and you have to remember Punchestown is around the corner too. He is not a definite starter at Cheltenham and I would advise anyone backing the horse to do so ‘with a run’. He is only a second season novice, and maybe there are other tracks, and other races, more suitable for him,” he says.

A final call on Starluck’s Cheltenham participation is not likely to be made until after he runs in the Kingwell at Wincanton, a track that should play to his strengths.

However, jockey Timmy Murphy has already expressed concern about the little horse lasting out a stiff two miles.

Fleming’s suspicion that Punchestown may play to Starluck’s strengths more could end up paying dividends in April rather than March and a Grade One success at his local track would mean the world to the trainer.

“I remember from the Curragh how hard it is to get going when you don’t have a good horse. You need to be lucky as well, and I am a lucky man, but I had no good horse, and it means I still haven’t trained a jumps winner in Ireland,” he says.

Moving abroad could yet mean changing that statistic with a vengeance when he returns home.