Issy Paul: The ‘Caretaker’ Enabling Haggas’ Impressive Sydney Success
Meet the 30-year-old who, as travelling assistant for William Haggas, is more recognised in Sydney than her boss.
WHEN DUBAI HONOUR won the G1 Tancred Stakes at Rosehill last month, few were more excited or more emotional than Issy Paul.
Paul is the travelling assistant to trainer William Haggas, who has built up an extraordinary record in Sydney in recent years. He has won 11 races from 23 starters in the city, including six Group 1 wins – three with Dubai Honour – and the rich Golden Eagle with Lake Forest.
She rides Dubai Honour daily and has become a familiar face during Sydney’s premier carnivals. For Australian punters, while Paul’s name may not be in the racebook, they would be more likely to be able to pick her at sight than Haggas, whose in-person visits to Sydney are sporadic and fleeting.
Haggas makes it clear that his Sydney success is as much down to his staff, including Paul, as it is to him.
“She’s excellent at what she does, not just with Dubai Honour but with all the horses she works with,” Haggas told Idol Horse. “She’s extremely good at her job, she came out of Godolphin Flying Start and as soon as she joined us she was switched on, you could tell. And she’s just good, she’s bright, she’s smiley, she’s charming, she’s efficient, she does all the things right.”
The admiration is more than mutual, though. Paul respectfully refers to Haggas as “the boss” and says that her role is to ensure that everything planned by Haggas is carried out effectively.
“The boss is an absolute genius,” she said. “He knows which horses are the right horses and he knows how to place them, so it’s amazing to be part of that. I always feel like my job is the caretaker role, just making sure nothing goes wrong. Every year, there is a drama of some description – that’s the nature of the game and we’re well used to it now.”
So who is Isabella Paul and what lies behind the driving force of such efficient success?
The 30-year-old comes from an agricultural background but she had little exposure to horses growing up.
“I actually have no idea where the racing bug came from,” she said. “I grew up on a farm with non-horsey parents, my great grandmother was very into racing and I used to go to point-to-points (amateur steeplechases) but I never really got into it until I did an English literature degree at York.”
She first rode out for Yorkshire trainer Tim Walford and his son Mark where, by her own admission, she was “absolutely useless” as a rider. Time at Lambourn with Jamie Snowden and at Newmarket with David Simcock saw her improve as a rider and learn about stable operations and, after a ski season where she considered doing something else entirely, she was encouraged to apply for Godolphin Flying Start.
Flying Start is the sport’s leading global internship. Each year, a cohort of 12 is given the opportunity to travel across the world, learning about different facets of the industry.
Graduates include G1-winning trainers Dan Blacker, Adrian Bott, Francis Graffard, Liam Howley, Tom Morley and Jerome Reynier; prolific bloodstock agents Stuart Boman, James Clarke, Craig Rounsefell and Andy Williams; Newgate Farm founder Henry Field; and Gina Bryce, whose storied broadcasting career added another chapter last week when she became just the second woman to commentate part of the Grand National.
“I didn’t think I’d get in, I didn’t think I had enough experience,” Paul said. “Jamie had first mentioned it to me and it had been a dream since then and then David and Jennie (Simcock) encouraged me too. Obviously, it’s a fantastic couple of years. You go all over and you see so much. I’d mainly worked in the stable or the training side of it, which was the part that interested me the most, but seeing the stud side was really cool, also the sales side. I got to go to some of the most amazing race meetings in the world and there were other aspects, like leadership, management, accountancy and legal modules too.
“You can see so many of the avenues you can go down and you are surrounded by 11 other people from all over the world who are really ambitious and keen and that keeps driving you. I still spend a lot of time with quite a few of them and I have friends all over the world.”
Paul’s ‘Class of 2020’ was due to graduate right in the middle of the Covid pandemic and completed most of their program before the world shut down. A desire to remain close to her home, near Newmarket, saw her forego potential roles in Yorkshire – and eventually led her to the Haggas stable, where she replaced Harry Eustace when he took out his trainer’s licence.
The role presents Paul with the best of both worlds: a natural base close to home where she spends most of the year, and the ability to fulfill a nomadic existence – something she says has always been part of her life.
The 2025 trip to Sydney is Paul’s fifth on behalf of Haggas and it has already proven successful after Dubai Honour’s G1 Tancred Stakes success. In fact, the stable has won a race on each of those five trips.
“I was really proud of the Tancred win,” she said. “I pushed quite hard for him to run in that and it’s amazing because his colours are now up at Rosehill on the winning post for the next year, so that’s awesome.
“I look back at my first trip and the horse that I was riding in the mornings, Favorite Moon, he won the Manion Cup. He was just this tiny little Sea The Moon handicapper and he managed to win a Group 3, so that was really exciting. And then, a couple of weeks later, Addeybb managed to win the Queen Elizabeth for the second time so that was quite a year.
“Remarkably, the boss was on the brink of calling that whole mission off. Our visas didn’t come through until the night before we left, at that time we still had to do two weeks of hotel quarantine so we had to leave Newmarket just as the horses went into their pre-export quarantine so that we’d be out to meet them. It was a nightmare and there were a few sleepless nights.
“The boss can be a bit like that – if things aren’t going to plan, it’s probably for a reason.”
Paul relates one story about Haggas’ “superstition,” or perhaps intuition, that saw Australia become the plan for Dubai Honour this autumn, rather than his original campaign through Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
“It was between the Middle East and Australia,” she said. “He was going to go for that rich race in Qatar in mid-February, and then about a week before they were going to take him out there, I got injured – a horse flipped over on me and I couldn’t walk for a couple of days, it took me about two weeks to get back riding again.
“I don’t think it entirely forced the boss’s hand because there are obviously others that can ride him, but I think the boss thought, right, this is a bit of a sign – and so they sent him to Australia instead. And then obviously there was all that drama in Qatar with the track and it would have ruled him out of running here because of quarantine.
“It’s funny how things seem to work out, and the boss always reckons there are signs for why that happens.”
Paul joins Annabel Neasham and Rachel King as British women to make a splash in Australia’s biggest city. A more permanent move to join them full-time, though, is unlikely – although she did not completely rule it out.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I quite like the ability to move around a bit. My younger sister is absolutely desperate to move back down here, she lived down here for two and a half years and loves it. I love it too, but I do like to be able to keep on the move and my current job fits in with that really well.”
The roadshow rolls onto Hong Kong later this month, although – as reported by Idol Horse – it remains to be seen whether Dubai Honour will actually be there. However, wherever Dubai Honour goes, so too will Paul – meaning that she is not yet sure where her next destination will be.
“If Dubai Honour goes to Hong Kong, I will go with him but if not, I’ll go back to the UK with him and then back out for the Champions & Chater Cup should he go,” she said. “I am flexible and it’s a great privilege to be able to work with a horse like him. It’s part of the job!”
For now, though, the focus is Dubai Honour and his bid to regain his title in the Queen Elizabeth Stakes.
“He’s feeling really good in himself,” Paul said. “On Wednesday morning, we had a press event and – having been to Hong Kong three times and here a couple of times, all over the world really – he suddenly decided that he hates cameras. He ducked out at them, which he’s never done before.
“So there’s a big picture of me on the back of one of the newspapers grimacing, trying to hold on to him as he’s got his ears pricked thinking it’s all a great big game. It’s usually when he’s being a bit cheeky that he’s been really ready to perform. He looks great, it’s a tough race and he has a wide draw but it’s a great race and I can’t wait to see it play out.” ∎
