Mr and Mrs Smith's Fling

Classy chaser can consolidate a famous couple's place in an exclusive racing club

The head of the house might be out, gone to York for the morning, but the boss is in, apologising for her lack of skill at firelighting. That must be one of Harvey's jobs, because there is a strict demarcation in the chores, if not the conversation. Away or not, Harvey is ever present, in the painting by the fireplace, in the photos on the wall and in the favoured chair with the arm- rests worn down to the frame. "Seen better days," you remark casually. "Like its owner," comes the reply. Mrs Sue Smith can hold her own on horseback or over the airwaves, that much is clear.

The Smiths, Harvey and Sue, have long since ceased to be the curiosity couple on the northern racing circuit. Their raiders rumble down from the moors, fit and unfussy, rarely contenders for best turned out, but ready to compete for what matters. The journey north-west from Leeds to Bingley on rolling stock which predates Stephenson's Rocket, then on up to High Eldwick to an eyrie perched just below Ilkley Moor, pitches the unsuspecting visitor into a setting half Wuthering Heights, half Mad Max II.

The swell southern yards can keep their manicured lawns and clipped routines. There is order here amid the rusting tractors, the piles of rubble and the discarded oil cans, discernible from the healthy flow of winners, but the rolling landscape is the true master, dictating training regimes and moulding character, equine and human.

Harvey Smith is hewn from the rock, The Last Fling is from similar stock, and only those not blessed with a decent imagination would deny the classiest chaser in the Grand National on Saturday the victory which would confirm the Smiths as an item in racing's exclusive hierarchy. If nothing else, think of the sport when spritely Sue Barker interviews bluff old Harvey. "T' missus doon graat." Move over Des and Mrs Pitman.

The Smiths bought The Last Fling five years ago and realised their luck when he trotted up in a novice hurdle at Bangor on his first outing. Since then, the horse has improved steadily, winning over hurdles and fences at almost every distance, until grad-uating into the company of top-class chasers this season. Running him in the Gold Cup on fast ground proved to be over-ambitious and The Last Fling was pulled up, but Sue Smith's readiness both to admit to the mistake and to let the horse decide his National future says much about the homespun philosophy of the trainer. "He'll tell me when he's ready, he usually does," she said.

The obsession with modern methods of interval training patented by Martin Pipe and the Duke of York - down the hill and back up again, three times every day - is foreign to Sue Smith's experience. She likes her horses to be individuals, to breathe and relax. "We can go anywhere out there," she says, surveying a view which falls away to the misty outline of Baildon and Bradford. "We can go leftways round and rightways round, up and down. The horses get fit naturally." No less than Harvey's, her background was Hickstead not Haydock, and much of what shelearnt growing up around horses on a farm in Sussex has had to be revised for the very distinct art of training racehorses.

"In showjumping, you ride and train a horse for control and accuracy, riding them round in circles five times a week, stop, go forwards, reverse," she explains. "Not so racehorses. You feed them differently for a start. People say, 'Well, that horse should be able to jump if it's come from Harvey's', but the horse has got to want to do it.

"If there is a particular problem with a horse, perhaps we can school him a little differently because of our background. What we didn't know so much about was the technical side, the entries, the registrations, the placing of horses. There are all sorts of things we had to learn but, eventually, bit by bit, it comes together."

Sue was a decent showjumper herself, though 10 years Harvey's junior and nowhere near Harvey's class. Who was? They met while showjumping and she moved up to Craiglands Farm 16 years ago without harbouring any particular ambitions to take up training. What began as a hobby, she says, turned into a business until in the space of a decade a smattering of horses has flourished into a stable of 45, the initial two winners of her first season into a regular slot inside the country's top 15 trainers. Clearly, the demarcation works, no less at home than on the racetrack.

"The regime of the horses is my job, the training of the horses is my job, the entries and where we race is basically my job, but we do discuss that. Harvey is very good with the lads, the jockeys and schooling and, believe it or not, he's brilliant with the owners."

In return, Sue has learnt about the true nature of competitiveness from an acknowledged master of the subject. "Certainly, some of Harvey's competitiveness has rubbed off on me. I'm fairly competitive, but I'm fortunate in that I'm married to a very competitive person." She repeats the phrase, accentuating the "very".

Yet, in the world of racing, themiddle ground between Harvey Smith's wife and Sue Smith's husband is still there to be contested. For all the silverware in the room where the vacuum cleaner and the ironing board are housed, there was never much chance of Sue Smith, the youngest of four children and the only girl, playing the role of the trophy wife. "I'm afraid I'm not much of a one for coffee mornings," she says. In conversation, at least, Harvey is regarded with the same air of benign resignation that a mother reserves for a teenage son who has just dyed his hair green.

"He's the most famous man there ever was in showjumping and they still love him there. In racing, people know Harvey Smith. But if I'd have come in feeling the underdog it would have been a waste of time, wouldn't it? You've got to be proud of him, but that doesn't mean I don't say my piece and stand my ground. We don't have anything other than equal rights in our house. What one can do, the other can do, and I've never been brought up to think any differently."

A few clerks of the course, faced with the sight of Harvey's 15-stone wrestler's frame heading full tilt for the weighing-room, might contest Mrs Smith's quaint notion that her husband is mellowing. A long, rambling question about the public image of Harvey not being the real Harvey brings only a puzzled look and a stifled guffaw from the woman who knows best.

The standard of fence construction on racetracks and the state of the ground are his prime beefs now that the high-ups at Hickstead are no longer there to be goaded with V-signs, and he has earned considerable respect for his relentless pursuit of improvement in both. In the Harvey Smith philosophy, things are to be done properly or not at all.

Now it is up to The Last Fling, with his long white nose, to complete the transformation of Craiglands Farm and provide a fitting tribute to Sue's father, who died recently. "I'd be the happiest person in the world if we won," she says. Harvey would be pretty chuffed with t' missus too.