Racing: Best Mate the beast ready to roar for McCoy

It was a cold, clear morning under a watery blue sky at the home of National Hunt's most thrilling young talent yesterday. But, deep in the Oxfordshire bosom of the winter sport, Terry Biddlecombe, who, along with his wife, Henrietta Knight, trains Best Mate, did not want to talk about the great horse. He wanted to talk about bosoms.

Uppermost in the old cavalier's mind was the stable's Christmas party the previous Sunday. It was full of seasonal images: a stripper, baby oil, nipples, cream and licking. As Terence relayed his festive Yuletide tale, grown men shifted rather uncomfortably. "Hen", however, thought it all rather amusing. Earlier we had been allowed to see the horses.

It was, as usual, a thrilling moment to break the ice-glazed puddles beneath the wheels on the way into West Lockinge Farm. This is rich racing country and, on the doorstep, would be two of the most entertaining figures in the sport of horses.

Terry Biddlecombe, three times champion jumps jockey, one-time scourge of drinks cabinets across the globe, behaves, like other men who have washed away half their life with alcohol, as if he is still drunk, even though a drop has not passed his lips for almost a decade. He has been married three times and even remembers his first two wives. Well, he remembers their names, Bridget and Ann, anyway.

Despite her name, Hen Knight took until she was 48 to get married, to the man she admired in his time in the saddle as the "Blond Bombshell". She, like Terry, used to pour the measures out clumsily. Now, it's water for both. Fizzy and still respectively.

As we arrive, Henrietta is spraying liquid on her car windows. In the old days her breath would have done. Terry offers coffees and, with a nicety that was afforded him a long time ago, reveals there is a whisky bottle for topping-up purposes. Good morning.

Knight and Biddlecombe may still do a sort of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf turn, but their competitors recognise them to be the deadly professionals they have proved once again this season. Chief among their equine assassins is Best Mate, who, had he not been tied up in his box yesterday, would have had his visitors fleeing, hands up, for the hills.

The six-year-old may have been in a slightly elevated position, but he still looked huge in his quarters, a gleaming monster ready to buffet the Lockinge air.

The trainer loaded us up in her Subaru Forester and drove through a tunnel of trees to the peak of the Butterbushes gallop. Along the way she rummaged through work notes, an organisation technique borrowed from her days as a biology teacher.

Best Mate used his own personal horsepower and, having thundered uphill for a fraction under a mile, was wide-eyed and snorting with adrenalin at the end of exercise. He bared his teeth but it was not a smile.

Best Mate will be easy enough to start in Boxing Day's King George VI Chase, for which he is second favourite behind the reigning French champion, First Gold. Stopping might be a different matter.

It emerged yesterday morning that the man who would be throwing out the anchor would be Tony McCoy. Jim Culloty, the horse's regular jockey, rang in from Dubai to reveal that even the recuperative qualities of the Emirates had not been enough to heal sufficiently his broken right arm. McCoy will school the horse on Christmas Eve.

There is a convincing sense at West Lockinge Farm that Best Mate could be in no better shape for his most demanding assignment yet over fences. But there is trepidation also about Kempton. Biddlecombe has had it in for the place ever since he was careless enough to lose a kidney there. Knight dislikes every racecourse and Sunbury as much as anywhere else.

"I never wanted to run him in this race [the King George] and I still don't actually," she said. "I entered him in the Intermediate Chase at Wincanton and if he'd been my horse he would have gone there. Things have gone wrong with top horses in the King George before and I'm superstitious.

"I very often hate going to the races. You have to be part of the team, you have to talk to people and you have to pull yourself together sometimes and go and face things. The only bit I like is the one at home. I love preparing a horse as fit as I can get him and looking in the best condition."

It is part of the Knight culture that she will not watch or listen to a race in which one of her good horses is a contestant. Thus there are media-repellent hidey-holes established all over the nation, at Kempton behind the trees fringing the horsebox park. "I've found out that everywhere else there you can hear the Tannoy," she said.

Henrietta Knight's horses represent more than her standing as a trainer. She sees them as a conveyance for her worth as a human being. It must be quite a stress. "If you've got a really good horse I couldn't bear anything happening to it or its colours being lowered," she said. "I don't want it to make a fool of itself or hurt itself. I don't want to face up to people if something goes wrong."

The eyes of the operation, and the mouth for that matter, belong to Biddlecombe, who, after the wilderness years, is enjoying the time of his life. He has five offspring, but no grandchildren. "Right now they're just playing," he says of his children. His current wife, he refers to, rather sweetly, as the "barren mare".

Biddlecombe has forgotten a lot of things, but he still recalls the moment his orbit first locked with Hen's. "I met her at a party and arranged to go round for lunch, but I was having a few jars then," he said. "She rang up the next day and asked why I wasn't there. 'I forgot,' I said, 'and who are you'?"

Biddlecombe knows who she is now and plays around quite imbecilically for a near 61-year-old with his wife among the haybales. At West Lockinge Farm, he has two best mates.