Aged 65, Elliot has gradually lost the use of the right side of her body, but still has some mobility on the left. The other thing she hasn’t lost is an appetite for keeping busy and an obvious and evident passion for horses and horse racing.
It is through the Multiple Sclerosis Borders Racing syndicate that she set up while still a trainer in the Scottish Borders that Elliot continues to get people talking about Multiple Sclerosis while enjoying the ups and downs of ownership.
Last week, Wot A Shot once again put the group into the spotlight when scoring at Musselburgh, after which Elliot gave a powerful interview in the winner’s enclosure.
“This is the 22nd winner in the 15 years of the club and it’s been amazing,” she said. “What people don’t realise is that there will be a lot of people sat at home, who are suffering from MS, who know these colours and who will be cheering them on. This is for them.
“Our trainer, Nicky Richards, has done a brilliant job for us and I’m so grateful to him.”
Elliot has good reason to want to give the Multiple Sclerosis Borders Racing Club any publicity that she can. Since its foundation in 2004, she has been able to raise over £150,000 for charities, while at the same time giving her members a steady stream of winners in their colours and much more besides.
“I like to think it’s probably one of the best value‐for‐money ownership groups out there, and I would love it to grow even bigger,” she says.
“The thing is that I have time to organise it properly. Yes, I’m in a wheelchair, but there are still lots of things I can do and I’ve always been a bit of an organiser.
“I’m lucky in that I have had a tremendous amount of support from all sorts of people in racing, people like Mike Cattermole and Dale Tempest and so many others who have been generous with their time. We recently went down to Nicky Henderson’s yard and he was so generous with his time, and Newbury racecourse were brilliant too.
“I was sitting chatting at Kelso one day with Johnny Weatherby and he said ‘I’d be delighted if your group wanted to make use of a box at my racecourse’. I was a bit embarrassed as I had to say ‘That’s so kind, but which is your racecourse?’ I’m afraid I didn’t realise quite who he was, but when he said Ascot, I was obviously thrilled. The group had a brilliant day out there as a result.”
Rather than seeing her disability as a potential barrier to going racing as much as possible, Elliot instead sees the sport as one of the best ‘days out’ on offer to those for whom mobility is an issue.
“When I look on TripAdvisor, I’m always amazed that more people in wheelchairs don’t realise how good many racecourse facillties are,” she says. “Of course, there is always room for improvement, but you can get around, see the horses in the parade ring, get into the restaurants or the bars and even the parking is on hard surfaces at many tracks. You can get under cover, find places to keep warm and the thing about going racing is that people will always talk to you.
“I’ve just persuaded Musselburgh racecourse to invest in two mobility scooters that can be borrowed for the day by racegoers who want to come to the races but find it difficult to transport their own scooters from home – and I would love more racecourses to think along those lines.”
Wot A Shot’s latest victory followed up a win at Carlisle last month for the club’s other horse, Isaactown Lad, and despite only ever keeping one or two horses in training at a time, the members have enjoyed plenty of success.
“We’ve been lucky from the start because the first horse we had was Diamond Mick in 2004. He’d been with a couple of other trainers without winning and was given to me,” says Elliot, who was awarded the MBE in the New Year’s Honours List in 2017 for services to horseracing and her fundraising efforts.
“I was still training at that stage and we tried to sweeten him up a bit at home. When the time came to run him I wanted to use Rose Davison (now Rose Dobbin and herself a trainer) instead of a professional jockey, which I think surprised a few people, but I had a feeling that he didn’t want to be bullied and Rose had been doing so well in point‐to‐points. They won together at 9‐1 on his first start for us at Kelso and then won again back there the following month. How’s that for a start?
“Around three‐quarters of our members either have MS, or have a friend or family member or loved one who has it.There isn’t always a lot of fun in having MS. It is hard. So we try to have as much fun as we possibly can and if other people would like to be part of it that would be great.”
For more information on the Multiple Sclerosis Borders Racing Club, contact: [email protected]
