Having just achieved his first century, double Cheltenham Festival winner James Bowen reveals the benefits of long-standing sibling rivalries
Fresh from Cheltenham Festival, the jump jockey tells Martha Terry about his racing childhood, the invincibility of youth and keeping a level head, in this exclusive article for H&H subscribers
James Bowen had waited years for a Cheltenham Festival winner. This time round, he left with two. For those who knew his roots, it felt almost inevitable.
Childhoods don’t come much more idyllic than the Bowen boys’. The three brothers spent much of their schooldays playing with ponies in the Pembrokeshire countryside: racing ponies, racing each other, racing their cousins, racing themselves.
When James was 13, he left school – ostensibly to be home-schooled while pursuing his racing commitments. In reality, the yard, not the classroom, was the real crucible for his education.
“I didn’t spend any time on schoolwork,” says James as we chat while he drives from a morning gallop at Newbury to racing at Kempton. “If I couldn’t be a jockey, there wasn’t much chance of another career to fall back on.”
He didn’t need one. Aged 16, James was crowned the youngest-ever winner of the Welsh National, followed by becoming champion conditional jockey with 58 winners. Nine years later, last month at Cheltenham, he franked that prodigious talent, bagging not just his first Festival trophy but a double. On day one, he steered Holloway Queen to win the National Hunt Challenge Cup before Jingko Blue galloped to victory in the BetMGM Cup Handicap Hurdle the following day.
“A win there is incredible, and I wasn’t expecting much – especially from Holloway Queen as I thought she’d hate the ground,” James says. “Nicky Henderson actually asked me before the race if I’d run her. I said, ‘It’s up to you,’ but I’m glad she did run.
“The atmosphere is amazing, but you don’t hear as much when you’re on the horse. It’s when you watch it back that you realise just what a big deal winning there is.
“I’ve watched it back multiple times,” he grins. “I’m still watching it back now.”
James is the youngest son of trainer Peter Bowen, brother of champion jump jockey Sean and trainer Mickey. Although riding was on offer as soon as he could sit up, James wasn’t interested early on.
“I didn’t enjoy riding much until I was eight,” he says. “I rode a couple of times, but my mum didn’t let me off the lead rope and I didn’t want to do it unless I was let off. But once I was on my own, I got into it.”
At the heart of this utopian childhood was a 12hh roan called Striker.
“Striker was incredible, bombproof,” says James, chuckling at the memory. “He was older than Sean and I put together, and we were always galloping around on him. He didn’t love jumping, so instead of hurdles, we’d put poles on the ground and race over those.
“We’d take it in turns racing around the gallop. Sean always won because he went first – and I was smaller and weaker than him. I even tried stopping the clock later, but I still lost.”
Mickey, who is more than six years his senior, lit the touchpaper when he started pony racing.
“I just wanted to do what he did,” remembers James, with a sense of youngest brother syndrome. “And once Sean was champion conditional, being a jockey is all I wanted to do.”
The brothers’ domestic races ramped up a level in sophistication when their two cousins came to stay.
“They’d bring their ponies and we’d set up a four-horse race,” James says. “We’d do four races – probably six furlongs to a mile – so each of us rode races on all the ponies, and we had a points system.”
Striker – “not fast enough” – had by this time been superseded by increasingly racy models. The first serious ponies came when James was 10.
“The first two we’d just hunt round at the back, and then Dad got fed up of us always being beaten, so he got Sean a 14.2hh, Cudlic Verona, and me a 13.2hh called Push The Button,” James relates. “They were both great ponies, but on Push The Button it was almost impossible to get beat. If I did, Dad would let me know about it! We ended up having so many wins.”
This included 10 in one season, including the 138cm finals at York – with Sean also taking the 148cm trophy – in 2013.
The moment James turned 16, he moved straight into point-to-pointing.
“I had five rides on my 16th birthday, had two winners and fell off two, so I learnt a lot about the ups and downs on the first day,” he says.
Surfing on the wave of the invincible Push The Button and some dead-cert rides, James admits his mindset at the start of his career was that “every horse I rode would win”.
“I thought it was so easy!” he says. “I had 50 rides point-to-pointing and 30 winners, but they were all steering jobs trained by my brother. They were unbeatable, long odds-on shots.
“And when I first turned conditional, Dad’s horses were running well and I won the Welsh National. I knew that was a big deal, but as I felt everything would win every race, it wasn’t unexpected. I probably didn’t appreciate it enough at the time.”
Aged 17, he was champion conditional, with a plum job based with champion trainer Nicky Henderson. While his peers were still sitting exams, James had been plying his trade for seven years, and was heralded as the brightest young talent in the weighing room.
“It was going so swimmingly, but when I lost my claim I was struggling,” he admits.
James went from riding 70-odd winners a year to 20, hamstrung by breaking his wrist and his arm in successive seasons.
Perhaps it’s an innate understanding of the precarious nature of the sport in which he’d been raised, or that first yo-yo day as a professional, but James seems to take the rough with the smooth with equanimity. He may have switched from assuming every mount would win to a more measured approach, but the winners are rolling in all the same.
“I suppose it took a while for me to get my first Grade One win [on Jango Baie at Aintree on Boxing Day 2023], but I never worried about it – I knew it would come,” he says lightly. “I’ve been injured a couple of times, I’ve rebuilt and now I’m on my best season.”
Nor has Cheltenham been the happiest of hunting grounds, with him missing several due to illness or suspension.
“I’ve not enjoyed the meeting that much over the years because you come away thinking, ‘God, I’m just a spare part,’” he admitted after this year’s Festival. “But when you do have a winner, it’s as good a feeling as you’re going to get.”
There have been other levellers. In January 2024, James would have expected to log another Grade One win when stepping in for the ride on the indomitable Jonbon, at long odds-on in the Clarence House. He’d won earlier in the day on Sir Gino and thought, “I couldn’t do anything wrong.”
But Jonbon made a bad mistake four out, nearly unshipping James, who clung on to rally the horse for an embarrassing neck defeat.
In the same race this year, James made amends, again coming off the subs’ bench to pilot Jonbon to the horse’s 12th Grade One success.
“Last time I’d ridden him, I got beaten and felt like an idiot,” he says. “There was less pressure this time, and it was good to put the record straight. It’s a pretty good feeling riding such a crowd favourite.”
James uses the word pressure, but he’d prefer to describe the feeling “less as pressure, more excitement”, giving an insight into the make-up of a top jockey.
“You have to keep a level head,” he says. “You can’t get too up or too down. Of course you get excited, but it’s not like you feel nervous. If you’re on a good horse in a good race, it’s normal to get butterflies in the belly but you can’t let it get to you. You need to ride every race the same, just try to win every one. That’s what drives me: riding winners, any winners.”
His other driver is Sean. Three-and-a-half years older, Sean has already virtually secured his second champion jockey title. But James emphasises that their rivalry is mutually beneficial.
“Sean and I push each other,” he says. “Sean is older and if I can eventually start to achieve what he’s achieving, that’s the goal. He’s a massive help in terms of tactics. We help each other out. I talk about every race with him, we go into depth, probably more than a lot of other jockeys can.”
Those outside the Bowen family like to tickle the fraternal rivalry, with Nicky Henderson saying after James’s first Cheltenham Festival winner, “He beat his brother to it. They’re the best boys you’ll ever meet. What a family. We have a great bunch of jockeys but it’s terrific for James.”
The man himself brushes it off.
“Sean is doing well enough for himself; there was never a race between us to get there first. When he gets one, I’ll be just as delighted as I would for myself,” he says.
The only area that provokes a little jealousy is weight management.
“That’s the hardest thing for me about being a jockey,” James says. “Sean is extremely lucky – he wakes up a stone lighter than me. I’d be so happy if weights were a stone or two heavier! It can get you down a bit but you find your own way.”
And find his way he certainly has. But with the Festival box finally ticked and Sean still setting the benchmark, I sense he’s only just getting started.
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Martha is an experienced journalist who is mad-keen on horses and dogs. Her reporting CV includes the Paris Olympics, European championships, Aachen World Equestrian Festival and World Cup finals. After growing up with assorted liver and white springer spaniels, she enjoyed 14 years with two rescue dogs. Now, her constant companion is Fidget, an extremely energetic and habitually muddy black and white springer. Martha has written on topics as diverse as a top horse’s clone to the best GPS trackers for dogs, as well as equestrian and rural matters for Country Life, The Field, The Times, The Spectator and The Telegraph alongside Horse & Hound.