Dan Skelton is the son of former Olympic showjumper Nick Skelton and the elder brother of former champion National Hunt jockey Harry Skelton. After serving a lengthy apprenticeship as assistant trainer to Paul Nicholls in Ditcheat, Somerset, Skelton took out a licence in his own right at Lodge Hill in Shelfield Green, near Alcester, Warwickshire in 2013. He saddled his first winner, Mister Grez, ridden by his brother, in a handicap chase at Ffos Las on October 13, 2013. A little over two months later, on December 21, 2013, he saddled his first high-profile winner, Willow’s Saviour, in The Ladbroke at Ascot, which he later acknowledged as the jumping-off point for his training career.
After saddling 27 winners and 73 in his second, Skelton trained over 100 winners in a season for the first time in 2015/16 and has repeated the feat every season since. Indeed, in 2018/19, he saddled 205 winners, thereby becoming just the second National Hunt trainer, after the record-breaking Martin Pipe, too pass 200 winners in a single season. In terms of prize money, on which the National Hunt Trainers’ Championship is decided, Skelton recorded his highest tally so far, £3.4 million, in 2024/25, but once again played second fiddle to Willie Mullins, having topped the table for most of the season, as he had done in 2023/24.
Skelton reached the milestone of 1,000 career winners with Faivoir, ridden by Harry Skelton, in a novices’ limited handicap chase at Ascot on November 19, 2021. On March 17, 2023, Faivoir, ridden by Bridget Andrews, went on to win the County Handicap Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival, the race in which he saddled his first Festival winner, Superb Story (2016), Mohaayed (2018) and Ch’tibello (2019). All told, Skelton currently has 11 Cheltenham Festival winners to his name, the most recent of which was The New Lion (ante-post favourite for the 2026 Champion Hurdle), again ridden by Harry Skelton, in the Turner Novices’ Hurdle on March 12, 2025. He is no stranger to Grade 1 success, either, with 13 winners at the highest level to his name at the time of writing.
