Jonathan Portman

That improvement is the most striking thing about Portman's recent trajectory. Last season his win rate sat at around 9% — just under 1 in every 11 runners. This season it has climbed to 15%, or 1 in 7. That kind of leap doesn't happen by accident. It suggests a yard that has found its rhythm, with better horses, better placing, or both.

The big-race record backs that up. Portman has won four top-level races in his career — the highest grade of race in Britain — at three of the most prestigious venues in the sport: Newmarket, Ascot, and Sandown Park. Ascot in October 2024, Newmarket in May 2025, Sandown in July 2025. Those aren't flukes, and they aren't races you stumble into. You have to have horses good enough to get there and be confident enough to enter them.

One track where Portman has developed a particularly sharp eye is Ffos Las in Wales, where he has sent out 4 winners from just 8 runners — meaning half his runners there have won. For context, most trainers would be delighted with 1 in 4. Four from 8 at any track is the kind of record that makes other trainers take notice.

His most reliable jockey partnership is with Rob Hornby, who has ridden 26 winners for the yard from 156 races together — winning at roughly 1 in 6 attempts, or 17%. That's a relationship built on trust and repetition, the sort that tends to produce results when it matters most. With 127 career winners already banked and the win rate still climbing, Portman looks like a trainer still very much on the way up.