Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a racehorse trainer. In fact, he's the most successful trainer in Britain today.

For the last 14 years, he's trained more winners than anyone else in the field.

Success has brought criticism. There are some who

think his methods too rigorous, but this son of a bookmaker who never got on a

horse until he was 17 and who rode only one winner in a point to point is highly admired within his profession.

Recently he won the Trainers Championship based on the most prize money won in the year for the eighth time.

Winning is a drug for me, he says, and my appetite for it is insatiable.

He is Martin Pipe.

Have you always been competitive, Martin?

Very keen, very competitive. I want to win. But it's a kind of it seems to me your

competitiveness a kind of thing based on calculation you're not trusting to Lady

Luck are you? Certainly not being a book, you try and get the odds in your favour, try

and get everything stacked your way so you have a better chance of winning, a better chance of

succeeding. But what else does having been a bookmaker, which is where you started in life in your in your father's shops?

What else has it got in common with being a trainer? It seems to me there's quite a lot there really isn't there?

Of course I knew all the race courses. I used to go racing with my father

never dreamed of being a racehorse trainer. I'm always wanted to be a jockey. But I went around the race courses, saw what happened, all the betting, all the excitement,

and got really, really interested in it.

And then being a bookmaker, we handled about 45 betting shops and I was in charge of a lot of them

so we had to keep in touch with exactly what was going on and this helps me control so that I know exactly

...