David Elsworth

There is a modern view that if something is serious, it mustn’t be joked about. David Elsworth, 82, trainer of Desert Orchid, knows different.

David, who is retiring after 66 years, locates the most important things in life and laughs at them.

He grew up in Birmingham without parents. Well, his mother had a boyfriend, he thinks, who either ‘couldn’t or wouldn’t’ come back after the war. No big deal. It didn’t bother him at the time, he says, and it doesn’t now.

There’s a punch-line. ‘People do call me a bastard and I suppose they’re right’.

According to Trivial Pursuit, penguins have sex once a year. This, reckons David, is 207 times fewer than him. Intimacy is now merely ‘four times a week’. It keeps him off the gin, at any rate in the mornings.

He is not depressive, but does suffer ‘waves of enthusiasm’. Had he read Lady Chatterley’s Lover early enough he would undoubtedly have become a gamekeeper. As it was he settled for being a stable lad with Alec Kilpatrick (in 1955).

He escaped a productive urban life (catching rabbits with ferrets) by putting his suitcase ‘on the handlebars’ of his racing bike and setting off.

He does tell the truth; it’s just that one has to look round corners to understand.

As David strolls humorously and somewhat sadly into the sunset of the racing world, who is there to replace him?