IT’S 7.45am on a Friday morning and two horses are walking down a track on the edge of Newmarket Heath with their trainer, George Boughey, driving alongside. Second lot on an ordinary morning, and this pair are heading out for routine exercise, nothing special.

But these are no ordinary three-year-olds. Both are unbeaten. On the near side is a Teme Valley Racing-owned son of Starspangledbanner called Protection Act, winner of a pair of low-key contests at Haydock and Goodwood and partnered today by amateur rider and budding point-to-point jockey, Cian Murphy.

And beside him is Bow Echo, the unassuming star of the show, ridden by his regular racecourse partner, Billy Loughnane. Although his laid-back demeanour and unexceptional physique give no clues to his status, this Night Of Thunder colt is the hottest property in town, brilliant winner of the 2000 Guineas with Gstaad, his nearest pursuer, almost three lengths adrift, and the rest of the field so far back that they seemed closer to Cambridge than Newmarket as Bow Echo crossed the line.

“Bow Echo is a completely different animal now, already, than he was last year,” says Boughey, at the wheel of his car, creeping along at walking pace beside the apple of his eye.

“We’ve actually taken the feed out of him since the Guineas, we’ve put him on a conditioning feed for two weeks to then build him back up.

A freak

“Yet, in a maturity sense, he’s light through his neck, he’s light through his middle, he hasn’t got a fully-developed hindquarter, he will look very different again when he walks round Keeneland in November, only then will you see the finished article. He’s a freak.

“There’s a lot of water to go under the bridge before the autumn, but I want to keep him on decent ground where possible. You’ve got to train a horse for a race but, luckily, he can turn on and turn off like a robot, so if it came up decent ground at Ascot [for the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes] he could possibly go there, but the better percentage chance of fast ground is in America, so the Breeders’ Cup is more likely.

“I think the international aspect of a stallion is massive and to win a Breeders’ Cup Mile would be pretty close to winning the Derby for me.”

Where some might prefer (in the presence of the media at least) to look no further than his next start in the St James’s Palace Stakes on June 16th, Boughey is openly planning six months ahead to the end of the season.

And Protection Act, now in the Wathnan Racing colours, could be the next member of his string to become a household name.

“He’s a horse who can really climb the grades,” he adds. “He’s one of our standout horses for the coming festivals, he’ll head towards the Hampton Court Stakes at Royal Ascot.”

When you assess Boughey’s training career, it is his youth and the speed of his precipitous ascent which stand out.

It was under seven years ago that he first took out a licence, with four moderate horses to his name and a solitary member of staff, Adi Rogers, who remains his head lad to this day, riding every one of them each morning.

Now, less than two months on from his 34th birthday, Boughey has already won both of the two classics staged in his adopted home town of Newmarket: the 1000 Guineas in 2022 with Cachet before Bow Echo’s famous recent victory.

This represents an astonishing rate of progress, one that has seen him move on from saddling 26 winners in his first full season to a gargantuan 136 just two seasons later and at least 100 in each of the following three campaigns.

When measuring him against other fast-emerging young trainers, the names that spring to mind are Francis Graffard and Joseph O’Brien. But, while Graffard is comparable in that he too comes from a non-racing background, he is actually 15 years older than Boughey.

And O’Brien, though only 14 months Boughey’s junior, had a huge head-start by dint of the fact that his father is the preeminent European trainer of the 21st century and his oldest son not only benefited from spending his entire childhood at Ballydoyle, he also rode no fewer than 30 Group 1 winners.

If starting age is the most important criteria, John Gosden, who was only 32 when his charge, Bates Motel, won an Eclipse Award in America, seems a good comparison as does Andre Fabre, though of course I am jumping the gun here because Fabre was already totally dominating French jump racing, winning four editions of the Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris, while still in his thirties.

No family name

But, unlike O’Brien, Gosden and Fabre, Boughey had no family name to trade on when he took the training plunge.

Which is not to say that he has dragged himself up from poverty, far from it - he was educated at Radley College, one of England’s leading private schools, which currently charges some £60,000 per pupil per year.

Yet, in contrast to Fabre, who was a highly successful jump jockey, Boughey was, to use his own description, a ‘terrible’ rider, and he did not have the surname recognition of Gosden, the son of Sussex trainer Towser Gosden.

Boughey’s connection to the racing world was much more tenuous. His father, James, farms at the wonderfully-named village of Piddletrenthide in Dorset, and at one point rented out some of his land to first Richard Mitchell and then his son Nick Mitchell, trainers of a pair of top-class steeplechasers almost 20 years apart in Cool Ground and The Listener.

In terms of flat racing, the strongest link was the Boughey family’s friendship with the Derby-winning trainer Michael Bell, who is godfather to George’s brother.

What the master of Craven House Stables on Newmarket’s Hamilton Road has achieved before his fourth decade is half over is pretty remarkable. His way in to the industry was through the bloodstock agency route, initially working for Tom Goff and then for Luke Lillingstone, who insisted that he further his education with what turned out to be a highly formative spell Down Under with the ‘Grand Dame’ of Australian racing, Gai Waterhouse.

Biggest influence

On his return to Britain, employment was found with another Waterhouse disciple, Hugo Palmer, who himself was just getting going as a trainer. Boughey, who spent six years with Palmer and cites him as the biggest influence on his career and still a close friend, was a significant player in his operation by the time Galileo Gold gave Palmer a breakthrough triumph in the 2016 2000 Guineas.

Which brings us nicely back round to Bow Echo, who, in a neat twist of fate, landed the same classic precisely a decade later.

“I hope that we are going to see three Guineas winners take each other on in the St James’s Palace Stakes - that’s what racing wants and that’s what racing needs,” Boughey says. “It’d be great to see a proper Guineas showdown.

“There was pressure on to a degree in the Guineas because it is such a big stallion-making race, but I wasn’t awash with sweat. We were all very confident about the horse, he hadn’t missed a beat in his preparation, and he behaved beautifully on the day. Everyone close to him is delighted with how he has done physically since then.”

While Boughey admits that swerving the opportunity of plundering a second classic in the Irish equivalent was hard, he reasons: “My job is to try and make a stallion. Longevity is fundamental with a horse like him and the six weeks between the Guineas and Ascot give me the best chance to try to produce the best animal through the year.

“I see him as an out-and-out miler this season. It was a very brief conversation afterwards, about whether he’d be running in the Derby. If I had 10 like him, he’d be running in the Derby, because he switches off, he relaxes, he’d handle the occasion, but at the moment I just want to make him the best miler that we can.

Easy to train

“It’s so hard to find these good horses, but Bow Echo makes our lives easy because he is so easy to train. Going in to the Guineas, my preparation with him was an incredibly enjoyable four months and it’s fun to be able to showcase what we can do if we are given the right ammunition.”

Being trusted with such a blue-blooded colt (by Night Of Thunder out of a six-furlong winner who is the daughter of a half-sister to Dubawi) is something that Boughey has earned via his achievements with much less fancily-bred stock, most of them fillies.

Cachet herself was reasonably priced (60,000gns at the Tattersalls Craven Breeze Up), while Boughey’s initial pattern winner, Oscula, cost a mere 4,000gns as a Tattersalls Book 4 yearling before being sold for €1 million as a broodmare prospect at Arqana little more than two years later.

He also trained Via Sistina for a year, winning a Group 1 and gaining places in three more, prior to her sale to Australia for 2.7 million guineas.

My own favourite tale of Boughey turning base metal into gold is the story of Perdika, who came to him unraced late in her two-year-old season of 2022 and, just a year later, was sent off to the paddocks having won six of her 20 starts and finished runner-up in the Group 1 Prix de l’Abbaye.

She remains by far the best progeny of her sire, Unfortunately, who has recently been exported to Pakistan.

A round of drinks

Prompted to recall Perdika, Boughey says: “She was one of the most rewarding parts of my career so far. She was out of a mare who was bought for a round of drinks, but that was the kind of bloodstock that we were dealing with at the time when we would take anything. In fact, we still would take anything, get them through the system and see if they are any good or not.

“If Perdika had gone through the ring as a yearling, she’d have made £1,000. She came here with a very low reputation and, within a few weeks of having her, we did her first piece of work and I immediately phoned her owner-breeder, Sally Nicholls, to say ‘she’s not useless’.

“Then we ran her when we knew that she was still very short of work and she ran huge. After that she didn’t do a huge amount of work ever again - I know that sounds mad. She was a here and now filly, we needed to strike while the iron was hot, and after she had won three £20,000 Great British Bonuses, I even sent her out to Dubai.

“Sally was a brilliant, hands-off owner and having the flexibility to programme a horse where you want is one of the most exciting parts of a horse’s career, it’s one of the things I enjoy the most.

“She, and a few others, showcased us to people who wanted to have a filly in training, which is what makes it so satisfying now, starting to have a few colts and people beginning to think that we can do it with both sexes.”

Hard work

My biggest takeaways from having spent a couple of hours in Boughey’s company are his appetite for hard work (something that he says he first came to realise was a prerequisite for a successful training career during his time with Waterhouse) and the quickfire pace of an average morning at Craven House, plus his resolve and self-confidence to occasionally go out on a limb and try things a different way.

He may still be at an age when most people are paid employees trying to learn the ropes of their chosen profession, but there is no doubt who is in charge.

When I suggest, as his first lot are warming down by walking in a circle following their work, that getting the immediate reaction of their riders is among the most important moment of his day, he responds: “Yes, you’re not far off, you always have to respect what the riders say,” before adding, tellingly: “But only within reason… I’m training the horses, so it’s about what I think.”

Then, asked how satisfied he has been with first lot, with a number of costly two-year-old breeze-up purchases strutting their stuff, he explains: “A lot of people like to get their breeze-up horses straight into the yard, whereas I like them to have a bit of an easy time and have a few days off.

“When we got them out for the first time on Tuesday after 10 days off, they were a little bit hot, and some of them can go the wrong way, but to see them as relaxed as they were this morning was a pleasure.”

Less fashionable

Right from the moment he started out, including since early last year when he moved into Craven House following its £1.9 million purchase, he has been based on the less fashionable ‘Racecourse Side’ of Newmarket, away from what many would think of as the jewels in the crown of the extensive gallops network: Warren Hill, the Al Bahathri all-weather gallop and the Limekilns.

In answer to my query about how often his charges venture to the other side of town, he gives an intriguing reply: “Never, I haven’t sent them over there since July last year. It’s a long way and I felt that the horses were possibly doing too much on a day-to-day basis, they were out of their boxes too long, and I feel that we have very good gallops over here.

“To be honest, I reckon that we could train horses anywhere really and the horses seem happier where they are and in their routine.

“If you put the gallops over here into the middle of any county in England, people would say that it was the best training centre in the country.”

Longevity is a word that he suggested was a crucial aspect of his current stable star’s ongoing career and Boughey himself looks like he will be a top trainer for many years to come.

Unless that is, the top job becomes available at his beloved Southampton Football Club, and that looks much more likely after the bombshell of ‘spygate’.

“Southampton are keeping me up more at night than Bow Echo,” he wails, and his plans for a second trip to Wembley this spring are in tatters.