David Menuisier had a simple target when he moved into a small corner of the famous Coombelands training estate in Sussex a decade ago. “We started with four horses,” he recalled here this week. “We had no owners, no money, we were living in the [staff] hostel. We were working to survive, and the target was to survive to the next month.”
A decade later, Menuisier can set his sights considerably higher. The 2024 season is already the trainer’s best yet in terms of prize-money earnings, with just over £700k in the bank, but he will shoot well into seven figures if his colt Sunway leads the field home in the St Leger at Doncaster on Saturday. And the money, while very welcome, would be secondary to the kudos attached to a victory in one of Britain’s five Classics.
