Grumpy Golan Way out to cause shock in King George VI Chase at Kempton

Even in his own stable, Golan Way gets no respect. "We love him to bits," says his groom, Hayley Williams, asked for an assessment of the horse's character, "but he is a great pain, very boring and grumpy. He does nothing. He doesn't really have a character." But the seven-year-old chaser is by far the best horse in Sheena West's yard, up on a thoroughly exposed patch of Sussex between Lewes and Brighton. The winner of eight races, he has earned the right to take on Kauto Star and company in Monday's King George at Kempton and West will be proud to go there with him, though you sense she would rather he behaved a bit more like a fast horse should. "He's never, ever left the ground or squealed," the trainer says. "Any other horse that's as fit as he is would let you know. When you feed another horse, they'll pull a face, they'll have a bite or they'll try and give you a kick. All you see is his backside in the morning and he doesn't do anything with it. You can wallop him and he won't react at all." Golan Way saves it for the track, as when he made all to win a Listed chase at Sandown this month. Still, that counted as a surprise and it would be a sensation if he were to come home in front on Boxing Day, the bookmakers offering 66-1. "He's not the most obvious winner," West concedes before insisting he is in fact quite well qualified for the race. "He ran right up to his best last time out, he jumped well, no problems with him going right-handed or staying. "Come on, then, raise a question! You can only come up with, he's not good enough. But then all the runners in there start off with something to prove." If Golan Way proved up to the task, he would be the first Lewes-based horse for decades to land such a significant race. This used to be a major training centre but it is 45 years since Charlottown went up the road to Epsom and won the Derby, 90 since Shaun Spadah was the area's most recent Grand National hero. A handful of trainers are based on the long defunct Lewes racecourse, visible on the opposite hill from West's yard. They have no access to her facilities, 950 acres of downland including seven separate gallops, making this an enviable place to train. West, whose father owned point-to-pointers, has been based here throughout her training career, holding the licence in her own name since splitting from her partner, the ex-trainer Julian Poulton, a little over a decade ago. She started "with no owners and four horses", stuck to her principles about how the place should be run "through thin and thin" and, aged 47, is finally being rewarded with what is already her best season. She remembers a lecture given to her in the early days by another trainer, Albert Davison, who died in September. He told her, "It'll take you 10 years to get to know your gallops," a suggestion she smiled at but which she now recognises as accurate. Only in recent years has she become completely at home in assessing the fitness of her charges as they pound up the nearby slopes. Unlike many trainers, she never had the benefit of working as someone else's assistant, a gap she makes up for by picking up "little snippets" of advice where she can. "I talk to people, listen to people and everybody's got a little gem of information somewhere along the line. I read quite a lot of things and get ideas and try them." Now she finds herself building boxes and welcoming new owners with better horses. They bring unfamiliar problems and fresh tensions. "Everything gets multiplied but at the same time, if you don't take a chance …you can't swim with a foot on the bottom, can you?"