FLYING EVE'S BORN TO WIN

Nick Townsend talks to in-form trainer Eve Johnson Houghton

- Nick Townsend

Step into Woodway stables at Blewbury, high in the Oxfordshire Downs, and the sense of history - of the achievements of those who have lived here or have been connected to this idyll - is palpable.

Few could assemble a family tree aa remarkable as that of Eve Johnson Houghton's, both in what they achieved in racing terms and the world beyond.

The trainer, in her 18th season, and heading for her best yet, as she approaches the 600th British-winner mark since succeeding her Classic-winning father Fulke in 2007, is rightly proud of such a lineage.

"Both sides of my family, too," she reminds me. "My mother's father (John Goldsmith) was a trainer. He was also in the SOE (a Special Operations Officer acting behind enemy lines in WWII, helping the French Resistance)."

He resumed training after the war but died of Leukaemia in 1972, aged 61.

"On my father's side, granny was a Walwyn. So, you've got Fulke Walwyn on that side of it (that phenomenon of the jumps code, training the winners of four Cheltenham Gold Cups, two Champion Hurdles, five King George VI Chases, and the Grand National in 1964 with Team Spirit).

I suggest that she'd certainly been bred for the job.

"You'd say so, wouldn't you!" she concurs though, with a laugh, swiftly offers a caveat: "I remember once leading a jockey up and saying of his mount: 'I think he'll get the trip, he's bred for it'."

He replied: 'Well, my father's a farmer but it doesn't mean I can plough a straight line'. And that's very true. Breeding only goes so far, doesn't it?"