David Pipe was born to train racehorses. Son of Martin Pipe, the most successful racehorse trainer in British racing history, David fast carved a niche for himself as an extremely successful and talented Point-to-Point trainer. He is now channelling his talents towards the Pond House string, which will provide a varied, challenging and rewarding role working alongside his record-breaking father.
He has learnt his trade not only from the champion British jumps trainer, but also through experience with some of the world's leading handlers. Indeed, David has spent time abroad working for Michael Dickinson in America, Cricquette Head in France and Joey Ramsden in South Africa.
In David's final season training pointers he won 47 point to points and two hunter chases. David trained a total of 164 winners over six busy seasons travelling length and breadth of the country between January and June. A visit to Yorkshire or down to Cornwall, each weekend he seemed to return with a winner. When he goes to the races on behalf of his father let us hope that he can continue to return with winners.
David has been lucky enough to train some prolific winners such as Well Armed (fifteen victories) and Slew Man (nine). With quantity has come quality: Stacky Light provided David with his first victory in hunter chases, while Horus showed himself to be one of the most promising young Pointer's / Hunter Chasers around while in David's care.
It is amazing how quickly time has passed by, with David taking over the reins at Pond House for his first season in May 2006. His first winner came on 9th May at Kelso with Standin Obligation. In fact, he went on to make it a treble for the day with Wee Dinns and Papillon De Iena.
The first big winner of the season came at the end of October when the enigmatic Our Vic won the Charlie Hall chase at Wetherby very impressively. He had his first Cheltenham Festival Winner with the four year old filly Gaspara owned by his father Martin in the Fred Winter Juvenile Hurdle.
The final winners tally for the 2006-2007 National Hunt Season was 134, making David the top trainer in the country in number of winners. He amassed £1,605,405 in prize money and finished third in the trainers table behind Paul Nicholls and Jonjo O'Neill. He has had winners for a number of different owners and from 75 individual horses. David has had a good association with a number of jockeys and the winners have been shared out between 13 different pilots including Timmy Murphy (36), Tom Scudamore (32), A P McCoy (30) and Andrew Glassonbury (19). The 2006-2007 National Hunt Season went buy so quickly but David's first season was a major success by anyone's standards.
After such a brilliant first season with David in charge at Pond House we thought it would be hard to repeat, but I think you will agree that he has more than surpassed his debut season. With An Accordion and Our Vic winning at the Cheltenham Festival, Comply Or Die winning the Grand National and a host of other big Saturday successes to his name, it has gone better than he ever could have dreamed of. We reached the magic 100 on the final day of the 2007/2008 season at Sandown courtesy of Mous of Men. Prize money has been fantastic. With earnings over £800,000 up on last season and totalling nearly £2½ million it just goes to show the quality of races that we have won and what a great foundation David is building to ensure many more years of success. All this has meant that David has finished in second place behind Paul Nicholls in the trainers championship, one place better than last year.
David could not have achieved all this success without the support of all his loyal owners, jockeys and the great team back at Pond House for which he is most grateful. The 2007-2008 National Hunt Season has been, as always, a terrific spectacle for so many reasons.
As with last season our 100 winners have been ridden by no less than 14 different jockeys. Stable jockey Tom Scu has partnered 44 of our winners, Timmy Murphy 20, A P McCoy 13, our conditional Johnny Farrelly 10 and our amateur Danny Cook 3 amongst them. Of the 100 winners they have come from 65 different horses, whilst David has also had 76 second places and 79 third places.
Click here to view the full 2007/08 season review