Philip Hobbs & Johnson White

Philip Hobbs has trained horses on his own license since 1985, when he climbed down from the saddle and started his own yard at Sandhill, in Somerset. He is one of racing’s best known trainers.

He had his 3,000th winner at Newbury on 11 February 2023 with Zanza, a milestone he had been waiting to achieve, because he wanted to bring long time assistant, Johnson White, onto his license, too. If he had done so before reaching the 3,000 winners, the total would have been reset to naught.

Johnson White first started working for Hobbs as a schoolboy, initially with ambitions to be a jockey, but Hobbs soon talked him out of that, saying he had no chance due to his height and his size 12 feet!

White worked his way up the ladder and finally became a trainer on a joint license with Hobbs in 2023, aged 49. He has added some very successful horses to the stable since then, but sadly, his first Grand National entry in partnership with Philip ended in tragedy. Celbre D’Allen was the horse in question, who was pulled up at the final fence and collapsed. A few days later, he was dead. Officially, the cause of death was a bacterial lung infection called pleuropneumonia which developed after the race, but many people blamed jockey, Micheal Nolan, for pushing the horse too hard.

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