'It's the Horses That Make It': Rae Guest Reflects on 60 Years in Racing

After a stormy first day of 2025, Newmarket Heath was bathed in frost-speckled sunlight by January 2, but local trainer Rae Guest is now setting his sights on sunlit uplands of a different kind. 

This he is doing in his usual quiet way, to the extent that his decision to call time on his training career took even some of his longest-standing owners by surprise when he contacted them prior to making an official announcement in December. The prophetic victory, two days after the news broke, of his filly Sunlit Uplands (Ire) (Sands Of Mali {Fr}) was no coincidence.

“We named her that on purpose,” says Rachel Flynn, the trainer's wife of 26 years, with a laugh. “It was a bit of fun really as we started to think about Rae finishing.”

With trainer Jack Jones having bought their Chestnut Tree Stables, Guest and Flynn will remain in situ in their house alongside the yard in the short term. Guest will continue to train a few horses from one of the barns there until his licence expires in May. Now 74, he has certainly not fallen out of love with the game. Indeed, he is reluctant to leave his beloved Newmarket, which has been his home for longer than his 35 years as a trainer, which followed a successful and peripatetic riding career.

“I don't want to go anywhere else,” he says. “Rachel would be happy to go to the country somewhere. I wouldn't go anywhere too far away. We are trying to find somewhere to have a house with some paddocks, but that's difficult around here. We'll keep looking.”

Horse racing, with all its colourful history, attracts its share of braggarts and bluffers, to whom Guest provides a perfect counterbalance. Simply, it is impossible not to like this man who has made his mark as both a trainer and a jockey, and whose air of almost apologetic reserve has perhaps meant that his contribution has not been fully acknowledged. 

A childhood interrupted by three years in hospital with serious bronchial issues meant that Guest's formal education was also disturbed. The fact that he had been born into a family with deep racing roots would almost certainly have led him down his current path anyway, but he left school at 15 to be apprenticed to Sir Gordon Richards, where his uncle, Nelson Guest, was one of the stable jockeys, second in line to Scobie Breasley.

“My uncle used to ride all the work, and then we had work riders who used to come in on a Wednesday and a Saturday, and my dad was one of them. I'd already been there on work experience, which it wasn't called in those days, but I'd been there for my school holidays. Gordon Richards retired after I'd been there two, three years or so, and I'd had a couple of rides for him, finished second at Ascot in an apprentice race, but he didn't used to give apprentices many rides.”

A teenage Rae Guest riding at Klampenborg in Denmark

As Richards was retiring, Nelson Guest had been offered a job riding and training in Denmark and encouraged his nephew, who was on the brink of switching to become a jump jockey like his dad and another uncle, Joe, to give the Flat another chance in Scandinavia. 

“He's been my mentor, I suppose they'd say these days, but he was that more than my dad was. Your son's hard to teach, I suppose. It's easier for somebody from the outside, and Nelson used to take me off to the races and riding out with him,” says Guest of his uncle. Rae's grandfather had been stud groom for George Lambton in Newmarket and his three sons all followed him into the business. Rae's late father Charlie also went on to train, and a generation later, Rae's brother Richard followed the same path and won the Grand National in 2001 aboard Red Marauder (GB) before setting up as National Hunt trainer. Rae and Richard's four sisters Jane, Sally, Joanne and Rita have all also been involved in the racing world in different ways. Sally, who was married to Paul Eddery and then Jeremy Noseda, was one of the leading lady amateur riders of the day and a key work rider for Sir Michael Stoute. Jane, now Lady Jane Cecil, became a Group 1-winning trainer when taking over at Warren Place upon the death of her husband, Sir Henry Cecil. Her son James McEwen is now a trainer in India.

Indian racing played a key role in the early years of Guest's career, but it was in Scandinavia where he first tasted significant success. He says of his uncle's job offer all those years ago, “I was only 18 and it sounded a good idea. Scandinavia, in those days, had everything, a good way of living. I know it sounds ridiculous now but they had central heating in every house.”

Guest's initial frustration at being unable to race-ride in Denmark because of a restriction on the number of jockey licences was short-lived when the unexpected departure of the former champion apprentice Brian Henry meant that Guest was given his licence. 

The winners soon came his way and they included victory in the Svenskt Kriterium aboard Highlight (Swe) for the Rausing family's Simontorp Stud. Fifth-generation descendants of Sweden's champion two-year-old filly of 1974 are still associated with Guest's yard 50 years later, with Kirsten Rausing having been a loyal and longstanding supporter of the trainer, who speaks of the owner of Lanwades Stud in glowing terms.

“We added it up the other week and I rode 17 Classic winners abroad,” says Guest who rode Triple Crown winners in Scandinavia and India, as well as in Holland for his father. 

“I was asked the other day about whether it was easy to start training. It wasn't easy but I had worked very closely with trainers, because in Scandinavia and India, you're riding weekends, so all week you're working with your trainers. And they all liked your input, and you had to know where things were going and build up the horse's career, if you like.”

Such strategising was also a feature of Guest's later association with Luca Cumani on his return to England. When recounting his life in racing, Guest frequently refers to the role fate and luck have played while modestly overlooking his own hard work involved in riding top horses and becoming a multiple Group 1-winning trainer himself. 

“It was great. I loved it. When you're 74, you're wishing to be 21 again with all those things that you've done,” he says. 

Fate did intervene as Guest was thinking that he may have made a mistake in attempting to continue his riding career in England. Just as he was considering returning to Denmark, he bumped into an old friend in Newmarket High Street who alerted him to a vacancy at Cumani's Bedford House Stables.

“As luck would have it, again, Luca had World Leader, who was a very hard horse to ride. So, I ended up riding him, and I got on well with him,” Guest recalls. “He won some good races, and then he was third in the Leger and then me and Luca got into a good working relationship. I know I didn't ride hundreds of winners, but I rode some great horses. And I rode in Derbys, Oaks, loads of Group 1s, all things that if I'd been riding 30 or 40 winners a year at that time, I wouldn't be getting on those sort of horses.”

Those good horses included Tolomeo (Ire), on whom Guest finished third in the G1 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes behind Sadler's Wells and Teenoso, and Old Country (GB) when second to Rainbow Quest in the G1 Coronation Cup.

Struggles with his weight and the appearance of Ray Cochrane as stable jockey to ride the newly arrived Aga Khan's horses at Cumani's yard prompted Guest to start planning his next move.

“They wanted Ray Cochrane, which was fair enough, but I didn't lose out. I rode nearly the most winners in my last season or two anyway. I think 42 was my best season when the champion jockey at the time only rode 100 or so winners. It was two meetings a day, most days,” he says. 

“I got on well with Ray and we had a good relationship, but then along came a little apprentice called Dettori. I was in my thirties and getting fed up with losing weight. I had a small yard, and I used to take a few horses for Luca and other people so I thought, 'Well I've got 12 horses and I can just enjoy training them.' That's how I started.”

Guest with David Probert in the colours of long-term patron Kirsten Rausing | Racingfotos

The Group 1 jockey became a Group 1 trainer within months of the switch when Aldbourne (Ire) (Alzao) lined up for the 1,000 Guineas of 1989.

“She was a good two-year-old and they kept moving her about. Anyway, she ended up with me in January and she finished third in the English Guineas, second in the Irish Guineas and was our first Listed winner, so she gave us a good start,” he says. “Then we had [four-time group winner] Millyant, all within three years. And then everyone said I trained fillies. But I suppose our four Group 1 wins have all been with fillies.”

A rare break in the domination of fillies in Guest's yard came with Mirza (GB) (Oasis Dream {GB}), but then he was a son of Millyant and, extraordinarily, won the G3 Prix de Petit Couvert twice, just as his mother had done. 

“Nobody ever seems to pick up on that except me,” Guest notes. “I think it's an amazing statistic. It never got the headlines but I'm not that bothered about headlines.”

There were plenty of headlines, however, for My Emma (GB) (Marju {Ire}), the Lord Mathews homebred who landed Guest with his first Group 1 win in the Prix Vermeille and followed up in the next year's G1 Yorkshire Oaks, with Whitewater Affair (GB) and Reams Of Verse among those finishing behind her. Guest also trained her daughter, Moments Of Joy (GB) (Darshaan {GB}), to win the Listed Gladness Stakes. 

The Mtoto (GB) filly Serious Attitude (Ire) would put his name back in lights in 2008 when winning the G1 Cheveley Park Stakes and adding the G3 Summer Stakes to her tally at three before finishing off her career with victory in the GI Nearctic Stakes at Woodbine as a four-year-old. Later that year she was sold to Shadai Farm for $1.85 million at Keeneland. Serious Attitude's progeny in Japan include the G2 Sankei Sho All Comers winner and G1 Tenno Sho runner-up Stiffelio (Jpn) (Stay Gold {Jpn}).

Celebrating Divina Grace's Listed win with his uncle, Nelson Guest, right | Emma Berry

Most recently, Divina Grace (GB) (Golden Horn {GB}) added her name to the list of Guest's stakes winners when winning the Listed Chalice Stakes at Newmarket in August. The trainer's uncle Nelson, now 92, was there to share in the celebrations with him. 

With the 60-year anniversary of his starting out as a teenaged apprentice looming, how does Guest view today's racing industry in comparison to that of the 1960s?

“I'm not going to say anything bad about racing because I love racing and it has been good to me,” he says simply. “And, I mean, we can all say what we don't like about it, but I think what I like is the way I started off with trainers who took their time and had plans for their horses. Like Luca – every horse had a career path, if possible. Now, I think they just run them because there's a race.

“I like the way Ralph Beckett trains, and Andrew Balding. Divina Grace is going to Andrew. And I think they, in the world they're in now, do take their time and bring the horses on more gradually, and hopefully there will be more trainers like that.”

He continues, “It's the horses that make it. We wouldn't be talking here now if it wasn't for horses. They're what my life has been about really. There's a story with every horse. It's not always just the best ones either, it could be the one that you just know is trying really hard to give you their best.”

Guest plainly has appreciated the horses he has been associated with through the years, and they were fortunate to have ended up in his care. For, like them, he has been trying really hard to give them his best. Job done.