The drop in form of the hitherto invincible MAM Ramaswamy stable over the past two years has made the race for the trainer’s championship in Bangalore highly competitive. Last winter Padmanabhan took the honours and this year after an absorbing contest which went down to the final day, Irfan Ghatala emerged as the leading trainer.
     It was not a smooth ride to the championship and Irfan was candid enough to admit that the pressure was enormous as it became clearer that he had as good a chance as anyone else to clinch the prize. It was an incident about three weeks before the end of the season that made him relax and focus on his horses and not on the championship. One of his charges that had been heavily fancied to win fell in a race and Suraj Narredu who was bruised in the fall could not do justice in the very next race where another of Irfan’s fancied runners was participating and failed to win. Two fancied runners and nothing to show for them on the points table brought Irfan firmly down to earth and he concentrated on getting his charges ready to race from there on. The delicious irony of this tale is that both these horses, Criminal Lawyer, the one that fell, and Dolce Vino who did not win on that fateful day, came up trumps on the final day of the season thereby taking Irfan to the top of the trainer’s table three clear of his closest rival. He feels that he was rewarded for his calmness and says that the entire experience was very humbling given the amount of trials and tribulations that one has to go through to achieve this feat. He heaps praise on his entire stable team and says that every member of his staff worked for each other as a team without which this achievement would not have been possible.
     Not content to rest on his laurels he is already planning his summer campaign. Tsavorite, the leading juvenile filly in Bangalore, is being aimed at the Fillies Trial Stakes along with Sun Dancing, another highly thought of filly while Sun Kingdom has the Colts Trial Stakes as his target. On

the likelihood that this might be the last season to be run at Bangalore, Irfan hopes, like the rest of the racing fraternity, that the club is able to come to some sort of understanding with the government that will enable racing to continue at the present premises until a new facility is built.
     While the rest of his colleagues make their plans to relocate in the event that racing comes to a halt in Bangalore, Irfan is determined that he will not follow suit and is instead ready to take a break from racing and wait for the sport to resume in Bangalore. He admits that when he moved from Chennai to Bangalore in 1994 he found the going extremely hard and does not want to go through the same experience again as he feels that starting up in a new centre will be very tough. He is also loathe to disrupt the successful system that he has built up for his horses where the early breaking in and training is carried out in conjunction with Silva Storai at the Embassy Riding School on the outskirts of Bangalore. A major part of his operation will be split, he feels, and he would not achieve the same success without this process.
     Silva has always been integral to Irfan’s training operation and her rapport with the horses under his charge proved invaluable when she partnered them on the track. The pair enjoyed classic success including two derbies and a host of other big prizes making Silva the only classic winning female jockey in India. It was not always easy however, in a male dominated sport the sceptics were never really convinced that this particular trainer with his reliance on a woman rider could be successful. There were many hurdles that had to be overcome but they persevered and Irfan now feels vindicated in his decision to team up with Silva more than a decade and a half ago.
     He feels that Silva’s return to work riding after a not entirely voluntary two year hiatus was a major factor in his recent success and dedicates his championship to her presence in his professional and personal life.