EVERYBODY always asks us, ‘What the hell is KTDA?’

“Even Gordon fails to get words out and in the end I think he always just says, it’s Dave and Dave!”

Dave and Dave, are Dave Page and Dave Rabson. KTDA stands for Keep The Dream Alive and that’s been their life motto ever since they became friends playing football together at under 6s.

They’ve since become highly successful professionally and more recently, as National Hunt racing owners. Dave Page has his own business called Viewture, an interesting venture, which in a simple explanation, buys the future royalties of YouTube content creators, while Dave Rabson works in IT, and has his own outsource service management business that has been a success for the last 10 years.

Along the way they have gone from one-day Cheltenham visitors from 20 years ago to taking a week-long pilgrimage now every year. And they’ve kept the dream alive alright, essentially living it, albeit from their own homes last March when Mount Ida defied odds of 999/1 in-running to win the Kim Muir at the Cheltenham Festival in extraordinary fashion under a ride from Jack Kennedy that befitted the KTDA acronym.

That success was amazing and has buoyed them to kick on again, most notably by unleashing their ¤300,000 purchase Bellatior, a Walk In The Park half-sister to Altior, to win her bumper at Naas earlier this season. She joins a small and select team of horses that looks set to grow bigger in the coming years and further dreams look set to be well and truly kept alive.

Cohort

Most interestingly, the Daves are part of a cohort of owners more than willing to staunchly back Gordon Elliott with young horses, and also part of a separate but overlapping group of owners based abroad but more than happy to give up the basic convenience of having their horses trained locally to be with an Irish trainer.

Dave Page takes up the story of how it all came to pass.

“Cheltenham has always been the Olympics to us and we’ve always massively been into horse racing and wanted to get involved as an owner. Fortunately I had a bit of cash to do that around 2014, so I bought into a few horses, learned the game, and spent some time with some great people here in England. Me and my wife just loved the experience.

“Then Dave (Rabson) jumped on and said he was interested in doing this as well. So that’s when we set up KTDA Racing. I remember in the early stages, me and Dave were thinking that we wanted to make our involvement a bit more serious; build a strategy of what we want to do, what sort of squad we could have and think about what we should be aiming for.

“Like every jumps racing dream, we were desperate to get to the Festival, just to have a runner - that was the pinnacle of what we wanted to do so we started thinking, how do we go about that?

“I’m a data guy, that’s what I’ve done in my life - data analytics - and I spotted some big trends in 2017. You could see a wave of change - the Irish dominance was coming to the fore at the big spring festivals and that crystallised our thinking.

“Gordon won the leading trainer award at the 2017 Festival. I wasn’t at the races on one of the days but I remember watching the highlights and seeing all Gordon’s crew who I know now were Tom Howley, Mouse O’Ryan, Busty Amond and all the rest of the team and you just felt, ‘Wow, this is some team.’

“To see what it meant to them was incredible actually, quite infectious. I remember saying to Dave, ‘Right, we need to get into that yard.’ Gordon is a young guy, he’s very energetic, he’s got a huge desire to win and chase down Willie for the trainers’ championship, he’s desperate to be a winner. Let’s jump on the train and see if we can come help him and maybe experience some good things ourselves.”

How it began was a simple response to a Twitter advert on the Gordon Elliott racing page for a store horse. Page got in touch with the girls in the office and then Gordon himself and before he knew it, he and Rabson were visiting the yard.

Braeside and Mount Ida were the first horses to show promise in the black and white silks, in honour of the lads’ old Sunday football team which was named Becks FC, in honour of that British beer.

Mount Ida showed plenty of promise in her early days, notably finishing second to Minella Melody in the Grade 3 Voler La Vedette at Punchestown, but it has been as a chaser that she has prospered and she achieved the pinnacle for her owners with that amazing Kim Muir success.

Huge success

It was a huge success for owners still in their burgeoning stage and perhaps is put into perspective when you take into account fellow owners in the Elliott yard, Bective Stud, have spent significantly more but have yet to taste success at the Festival.

And yet, such an elusive win, couldn’t be enjoyed to the full, due to Covid restrictions which didn’t allow owners to attend the meeting and the massive controversy around Elliott as the Festival approached.

“You try and forget about the noise that was going on and not being able to go over and all those good things, you just think we’re just going to enjoy the experience as best we can,” Page reflects.

“Gordon is brilliant at placing horses and he has a few guys that help him with that. Mouse was telling us close to the Festival that we should go for the Kim Muir instead of the Mares Chase, that she would be the stable’s number one hope there and we just thought that was amazing, to be going at all, never mind with a big chance.

Mount Ida and Jack Kennedy jump the last on their way to victory in the Kim Muir for owners KTDA Racing \ Healy Racing

“We’re based in West Sussex and it seemed like just about everyone we know around here had backed her and that made us feel even more pressure. I remember watching it at home and getting out of my seat and screaming, ‘Oh no! She has been pulled up,’ and my wife, was saying ‘No, sit down, she’s still going!’

“When she crept into the race, I was just going absolutely crazy. I did the weirdest dance ever when we won which was very strange and in some way I’m glad we weren’t in the winner’s enclosure. I’m not sure what we’d have done there.”

In many respects, it’s amazing what the Cheltenham Festival has become, an all encompassing behemoth of a race meeting that just encapsulates jumps racing fans and owners. The goal now for the Daves is to get back and they are fully immersed in Cullentra House to achieve that goal.

They are relatively young owners more than willing to support Gordon and that in itself has been one of the themes of the season. One of the big questions coming into this jumps season was how will Gordon come back?

Cast your mind back to early March, and some people couldn’t see a way back for him period, but there was also train of thought that a galvanised Gordon 2.0 could be an even better proposition than what he was before. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, as they say.

That is more or less how things have developed during a rebuilding phase at Cullentra because one of the main developments has been the investment by the likes of Bective Stud, Caldwell Construction and KTDA. Two of those three are based in Britain and that makes for a very interesting case study.

For Page, it’s Elliott’s passion and desire to win, clearly evident when the trainer’s emotions got the better of him following Galvin’s Savills Chase win this week, that create the lure.

“As soon as we stepped foot in Gordon’s yard, we could see it was an amazing place and a really amazing team. It seems a bit corny but there’s just such a positivity around the place. I’ve been to loads of yards and I’ve not seen anything like it - it’s the little details that makes it what it is.

“The will and the passion is still there for Gordon, it might be even more so now. Would we see more of our horses if we had them in training over here? We would, but it’s the overall experience you’ve got to think about, getting to the places that you want to go.

“We have an aspiration to have those experiences, those great days, particularly at Cheltenham. You have to align yourself to the best and we saw Gordon as the person coming from the pack and his desire to achieve is second to none.

"We can go to Ireland whenever we want and we spend a lot of time over there at the races and at the yard.

“When you’re having your horses in training in Ireland, you have to take heed of the overall picture as well. The quality is there. There has been a lot of noise about the whole Irish and British jumps racing scenes.

"I think Irish trainers make sure their horses learn and grow. It’s all about developing them to race and then when they do race, you’re racing against great horses.

“I think if you’re always running against good horses, naturally you get better and improve, and when you are going to the festivals you’re ready to race at that level. I think that’s probably what is missing from the UK at the moment - there’s lots of meetings, not many runners in a lot of races and owners are getting somewhat fed up with limited prize money.

“In Ireland you’re going to have two or three tough races before you get to Cheltenham and that makes a big difference.”

Promising

Mount Ida won the Grade 3 mares’ contest at Fairyhouse yesterday and she could go back to Cheltenham now, but she also has the Grand National on her radar and that is hugely exciting. Bellatior is likely to head for the Grade 2 mares’ bumper at the Dublin Racing Festival, while Page also believes there is another big win in Braeside who put up a big run to be fourth in the Paddy Power on Monday.

Braeside winning the Cork National for KTDA Racing earlier this season \ Healy Racing

After that, the ambition of Page and Rabson is to add quality to their squad and continue to grow.

“I think the focus is on quality and potential now,” Page explains. “Mouse is a great guy at spotting the right horses. He’s got a great link with the Irish point-to-points and that is key. We’ve made a couple of big purchases which we decided at the time that was the right one to go for and we pushed hard and went for those.

The presentation to Dave Robson and Dave Page of KDTA Racing by the Fowler Family after Mount Ida won the John & Chich Fowler Memorial EBF Mares Steeplechase (Grade 3) \Healy Racing

“We’ll just continue to grow the squad, we’re keen to buy mares because the programme is excellent for them and the post-career value can hold up but it’s not our entire focus, we just want to add quality.

“We don’t really have a number in mind, we’ll just grow it steadily and just try and do the right things. We’re busy guys at work from Monday to Friday, there’s a lot of stuff going on, but at some point we’ll be able to take a step back from work and enjoy the racing more.

“We’re not looking for world domination and having hundreds of horses but we’ll build a squad and we’re going to be around for a long time. We’re not planning to be in for a few years and then gone, this is very much the start of what we’re aspiring to do.”

Keeping the dream alive.