From Sleeping Rough in East London to Training Winners at Newmarket: The Gihan Arnolda Story

Five winners from his first 33 runners, £50,000 in prize money, and a yard at the foot of Warren Hill in Newmarket — the heart of British flat racing. Gihan Arnolda's start as a trainer reads like a swift rise. His route there was anything but. The Guardian

Arnolda's mother, of Sri Lankan and Portuguese background, died of leukaemia when he was very young. From around the age of 12, he ran away from home and lived on the streets of east London for weeks at a time, stealing from shops to survive. After a confrontation with his father and a period in care, he was fostered by an English family.

School gave him a foothold. He gained six As and four Bs in his GCSEs and enrolled on a law course at college. At 18, he applied for the foundation course at the British Racing School in Newmarket — the training centre that introduces newcomers to the thoroughbred industry — and sat on a racehorse for the first time.

He took to riding quickly. In July 1998, his fifth ride in public, Knave's Ash, won an apprentice handicap (a race where less experienced jockeys ride horses that carry different weights to level the field) at Thirsk by a short head. Over the next decade he had more than 200 rides and rode five more winners. Then, in 2009, a broken pelvis ended his career in the saddle.

The Jets retraining scheme, which helps jockeys transition to new careers after injury, stepped in. Arnolda retrained as a chef. He worked under Andrew Pern in Yorkshire and at Gordon Ramsay's Maze restaurant in London. But racing pulled him back. In 2014, Charlie Appleby offered him a job at Godolphin, the global racing operation funded by Dubai's ruling family. From there Arnolda moved through the yards of Chris Wall, Roger Varian, and Peter Chapple-Hyam — learning the trade from some of the sport's sharpest minds.

Now he trains from Cadland Cottage Stables, at the bottom of Warren Hill in Newmarket, the gallops where generations of champion horses have been conditioned for the track. The Guardian

What makes this stand out is the distance between the beginning and the yard. Arnolda slept rough, was taken into care, lost his mother as a small child, and had a riding career snatched away by injury. None of that guaranteed a training licence. The five winners from 33 runners — a strike rate of 15% — are the early returns of someone who arrived at this point the long way round.

For racing fans, Arnolda's name is one to watch simply because the numbers are solid and the back story is real. The season is still young. Where it goes from here is a matter for the gallops and the race entries, not the headlines.