As we started to approach the brow of the hill, the race was being run at a furious pace and I could see considerable jockeying for position among the first four or five runners. Then, just before the third last fence, I deliberately manoeuvred Bradbury Star to the centre of the course coming down the hill. I knew the ground fell away at the back of the fences on the inside and the outside, and I knew how dangerous this could be for me. Second Schedual followed exactly the path I had tried to avoid, and when he fell, I knew it was my chance to pounce.
Inside, my head was pounding with an intensity so great that it was almost pushing my helmet off. As if my brain was trying to escape but couldn’t find its way out. I willed myself, willed every last atom in my being, to concentrate. I landed running at the back of the second last fence. Egypt Mill Prince had quickened again upfront. I slotted in behind him with one last fence to jump.
By now, I was riding on adrenalin and adrenalin alone. Turning into the straight, seeing Jamie Osborne on Egypt Mill Prince directly in front of me, I focused my gaze between my horse’s ears. I could feel the rhythm of blood pulsating inside my head. I winced, my brow furrowed, tight, not with pain, but with resolve. I was on the brink of collapse, but I couldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t let that happen. My mind converged on the eye of the storm. I was a horseman riding to win.
It was at this point that my eyes began to give way. I started to see two Jamie Osbornes. But, as things stood, I was going to beat them both.
Bradbury Star kept in a straight line, and with remarkable ease, cruised into the lead halfway up the run-in. He pricked his ears forward, loving every moment of those last victorious strides. There was an explosion in my head as if my skull had burst; as if my tortured brain had finally found a way out. With whatever little I had left in me, I continued to focus my eyes between Bradbury Star’s ears, drowning out the waves of crippling pain that threatened to swallow me up and eat me alive. My horse ran all the way to the line. We won by seven lengths. He had done it. I had done it. We had done it.
No safe. No pause. No predictable.
Crushing pain. Blinding headache. Double vision.
No retake. No rain break. No sitting out. No backing down.
See it, feel it, believe it. Faster. Higher. Stronger.
Looking back …
There was no good reason for me to have done what I did. In fact, it was nothing short of sheer insanity. Because the moment I passed the winning post, the adrenalin stopped. Just like that. I had been on the brink of consciousness, riding on the edge, and now that edge gave way. For the past seven minutes, my mind had been way ahead of my body; now the two equalized, giving way to crushing, indescribable agony. My legs buckled as I dismounted, and after that I could do no more. Even the walk to the weighing room seemed an insurmountable task and I had to be supported to the scales by my girlfriend, Joanna, and Althea, Josh Gifford’s wife, while I clutched my saddle and lead cloth, my teeth clenched in pain. If you had asked me, at that point, what race I’d run in, which horse I’d ridden, I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea. In the weighing room, I collapsed.
So why did I do it? Because I was desperate to win the Mackeson at all costs. Athletes are like that when they have an ambition – they are consumed by an unquenchable desire to fulfil that ambition, no matter how unachievable it may seem. I was like that. For me, the power of my mind, the power to put mind over matter, the power to position myself where I needed to be in my own head – that is what kept me going. But I wasn’t some adrenalin junkie on a suffer-fest. This was no swashbuckling display of valour. It was an intelligent, calculated decision on my part. The second I got myself on my feet after my fall, I had reasoned it through. I had weighed the risks and considered the odds, and I knew the rewards would be well worth it. And so there was nothing that was going to keep me from missing my chance. Especially not pain.
I believe that all of us, all jockeys, have an understanding with pain. So in control do we feel in the environment that we are in, we simply don’t see pain as it is perceived by others. This is the secret language between us; so we laugh off the broken collarbones and the concussed heads, the fractured wrists and the bruised ribs. We get up and we get on.
It takes patience, strength, guts, determination to ride a racehorse. Courage. Tears, tantrums and everything else. So we deny physical pain by not recognizing it as such. Instead, we view it as an encumbrance. And when our adrenalin is pumping, when we are in this state of mind, we create an aura around ourselves that rejects encumbrance. We have to believe we are unbreakable. This is the state of mind one is in, as a competitive sportsperson. This is the state of mind one needs to be in, as a competitive sportsperson.
So, getting up to ride in the next race was one thing. It was getting up after that fall that was something else. Falls are falls and, in general, with a fall, in nine out of ten cases, you’re going to walk away absolutely fine, and never get touched by your own horse or any other horse. But two-thirds of the field in that race at Cheltenham had kicked me on the ground like I was a football. My condition was diagnosed as ‘general exhaustion’ but it was delayed concussion that I had really suffered.
Whether or not I was right in riding the race in the condition that I was in, I don’t know. But I had started something and I had to finish it.
How did I do it? I used my head.
The art of riding at any racetrack is understanding that there is only one winning post. A good jockey understands the subtle nuances of the tracks at different racecourses. At Cheltenham, races can develop earlier as a consequence of the contours, as a consequence of running off the top of the hill, which is still a long way from home. Because of this, there is a tendency for the jockey to get caught up in the momentum too soon and his horse ends up running the race as if the last hurdle is the winning post. This means, by default, that the horse is not doing its best work at the finish. In my opinion, to ride Cheltenham well you have to have a horse running all the way to the line. To have a horse running all the way to the line, you have to have ridden a perfect race.
Horses are naturally competitive animals, but they can become disillusioned if you burn them out too quickly. The trick is to fuel them, to give them a ride so they have enough left in them to channel that competitiveness where it counts. This was my overriding objective with Bradbury Star, and I knew that he would respond. I was betting on the fact that he would have enough left to give when I most needed it, because to win in the condition I was in, I depended heavily on the energy I had reserved. Had he needed any extra assistance from me, I would not have been in a position to give it. It was a leap of faith; I took it.
A lot of what you do in life is what you’re born with.
To everybody else around, I might have been looking into space. And whether or not I saw myself as a jockey or wanted to make a life from it, there was obviously someone inside me that rides races, rides racehorses, that was working away the whole time.
My ride made great copy. The next day there were news articles in the sports sections of every newspaper in the country extolling my audacity, my courage and my resolve. Colleagues, trainers and journalists alike expressed unreserved admiration for this feat I had pulled off against the odds. I was called ‘The Ironman’, ‘The Hero of Prestbury Park’, ‘Lazarus of Bethany’ and other such hyperbolic names. I won the Mackeson Meeting ‘Man of the Match’ award, judged by former champion Terry Biddlecombe, for the best riding performance over the two days at Cheltenham.
My star was burning bright.
I felt invincible.
But pride, as they say, comes before a fall.
Little did I know the fate that awaited me.
Little did I know that everything that I believed in about pain and control and courage would soon come crumbling down.
Little did I know that Arcot wasn’t quite done with me.
Horse and Pony
Kilteely, Thurles, 1981.
No matter how many horses I’ve ridd
en in my life, and how many races I’ve won, my first time riding point-to-point will be indelibly imprinted in my mind. It was a life lesson – but not for the reasons you would expect.
My uncle Mikey lived on our grandfather’s farm in Kilfrush – this is where my father was brought up – about 3 miles from Bank Place. We kept our cows at Uncle Mikey’s and we would often go and milk them by hand before and after school. Mikey also had horses on his farm and, being a formidable horseman himself, he would always encourage us kids to ride. And so the avid riders among us – Laurence, Pat, Eamon, Kathleen and I – would often go and ride out at Kilfrush.
It is easy to remember exceptional horses, just as it is to remember exceptional people. When I was about fifteen years old, Uncle Mikey had two exceptionally good horses – a mare called Luck Daughter and a gelding called Kilteely.
It so happened that he also had an exceptionally strong addiction to the bottle.
Uncle Mikey would alternate between periods of total inebriation and complete sobriety, and in my eyes, I had two uncles.
When he was drunk – for two or three weeks at a time – he was the most irresponsible man you could find. He would neglect everything: his house, his horses, his farm; nothing mattered. Uncle Mikey Hyde.
When he was sober – for a month or two months, maybe three months – he was the most conscientious man you could find; a brilliant horseman, an impeccable farmer. Uncle Mikey Jekyll.
Just before my fifteenth birthday, Uncle Mikey was going to let me have a ride on Kilteely in my first-ever point-to-point race. I was terribly excited to try something I hadn’t done before, and I waited in eager anticipation for the day to arrive. On the morning of the race, however, when my father drove me to Kilfrush, I discovered to my dismay that my uncle had found his bottle the day before. He was in bed, dead to the world. The horses hadn’t been fed, the stables hadn’t been cleaned; the house, the farm, the animals lay in a state of neglect. Everything was in complete disarray.
The wave of disappointment that washed over me was powerful. And then pragmatism took over. Both the problem and the solution lay before me. If I wanted to race, I had to take control of a situation that had spiralled out of control. So I fed the horses, I cleaned the stables, I prepared Kilteely for the race, and put him in the horsebox myself.
Richard Shanahan, who worked for a local trainer, Joe Crow, and rode some of Mikey’s horses, helped me to drag my uncle out of bed and into the car. Richard then drove the car, with the horse in the trailer. I sat in the back and next to Richard, in the passenger seat, was my uncle, asleep, drunk.
On the way to the races at Thurles, Uncle Mikey woke up and decided that he had to stop at the pub in the village of Lattin. We tried to dissuade him, pleading punctuality, but what chance does logic stand against the maniacal urge of an addiction? Our arguments fell on deaf ears. Mikey promised not to stay long. We relented.
An hour later, we still couldn’t get Mikey out of the pub.
Once again, I felt that familiar wave of disappointment. But once again, a cool head prevailed. I was laid-back by nature, but I was also determined. I had a definite stubborn streak to me and when I wanted to do something, I usually found a way to make it happen. If we couldn’t get Mikey out of the pub, we couldn’t get Mikey out of the pub. But if I wanted to race at Thurles, I needed to be at Thurles. I wasn’t going to give it up so easily. So we decided to go without him. Richard Shanahan drove Kilteely and me to the races. I saddled the horse myself, weighed out on my own and I rode my first point-to-point on Kilteely while Uncle Mikey – of his own making – missed the opportunity of seeing both horse and nephew run the kind of race that he would have been eminently proud of.
This incident stayed with me for a very long time. But it wasn’t the ride or the win or the thrill that I remember most – it was the fact that my uncle had been too busy drinking himself into a mad stupor to care. I understood then how easy it is for a person to lose control, to let their weaknesses destroy them. I vowed never to let this happen to me.
In a lighter vein, I’d like to narrate a very different, but equally significant, story from those early years. Rewind to 1979, during which time I could still do the weight required for pony racing. The protagonist of this tale is a little grey pony called Bula Lady. I held the champion pony rider’s title at the time, and shortly after our experience below, my sister Kathleen, a supremely gifted rider, would win the title from me. Indeed, Bula Lady was Kathleen’s pony and my story is a tribute to her.
For me, one of the greatest and most unexpected surprises to come out of the pony-racing days was the time I got to spend with my father – just him and me – as he drove me back and forth from the various racecourses. One always underestimates the time one has left with one’s parents, and these were the moments to be cherished – the good times, the heart to hearts, the laughs.
‘The mystery of the missing pony’, for example, is one such childhood story that Kathleen and I still reminisce fondly over. I was thirteen years old at the time, Kathleen was twelve. We were driving back home, having spent a long day pony racing in Galway. Dad was driving, I was asleep in the front of the car, Kathleen and our friend Richie Farrell were asleep in the back of the car, and in the horsebox behind the car was Bula Lady. The journey from Galway to our home was a distance of approximately 80 miles, and dusk had fallen as we turned into 5 Bank Place. Just as Dad was parking the car in the drive, Kathleen woke up and looked behind her. Then she did a classic double-take. Then she patted our father on the shoulder and said, ‘Where’s the pony?’
I will never forget the look on my father’s face when he turned around that day. Engine still running, he jumped out of the car in a blind panic, but of course Kathleen was right – there wasn’t a horsebox in sight!
Oh, the state of fluster everyone was in!
I have always had a love of fast cars and fast driving, but even after all these years, I don’t think anyone drove as fast as my father did that evening. Within a split second, he had reversed feverishly out of the driveway and sped out on to the road. The quest for the missing pony had begun. Four heads turned this way and that as we retraced our steps, expecting that the trailer would have come off not far from home. Instead, we found ourselves some 10 miles back, all the way in Caherconlish. There, in a small park off the main road, was the horsebox, lying on its side, while Bula Lady, delighted with her lot, was being walked around by a group of young boys.
We learnt from them that the horsebox had come off the car as we drove up through the high street, then slid out between the two cars behind us and gone right through the entrance of the park, all the way in, without so much as a scratch. Then the towbar of the horsebox had hit a tree and turned it over. The guys had opened it up and led the pony out. Bula Lady was unscathed, none the wiser, and two carrots richer!
The four of us drove home – with the pony safely in the horsebox and the horsebox safely behind the car – laughing about ‘the mystery of the missing pony’ the entire way back. An insignificant blip in the story of life, but one that we would remember decades later. These were the great times, the stuff that sticks, the memories, the sound of our laughter …
1980. The torch passes. Kathleen winning the champion pony rider title from me.
I Soar
‘When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk; he trots the air.
The earth sings when he touches it.’
William Shakespeare, Henry V
That Place in Time
There is an attitude to winning.
I think after all the falls and scrapes, defeats and near wins, blood and bruises – to my body and my ego both – I had finally learnt this. There is a definite attitude to winning. And this comes only from experience, from confidence, from the taste of having won before. This is what propels you to win again. It inspires you, drives you, pushes you – almost to madness. And you don’t rest until you quench those fires of desire. Until you reach perfection. Until you ride the b
est race of your life. Then, you breathe. There is a stillness, then. A state of nirvana.
This is where I was, in this state of absolute bliss, on 27 April 1994.
I was at the last fence at Cheltenham, riding Gale Again for Tommy Stack in the Silver Trophy Chase, fighting to win the race of my life.
Five days later, I would find myself in a different place, fighting to win a different race. This time I would be at the last hurdle at Haydock Park, riding Arcot for Jeremy Glover in the Crowther Homes Swinton Hurdle, fighting to win the race for my life.
And so Gale Again would be my last horse, in my last race before my life changed for ever. Before the end.
But I take heart. Because every story has a beginning and an end, and if mine had to end, this is how I would have liked it to end – to be riding a horse who knew how to race, for a man who truly understood racing.
Before the end, however, comes the beginning.
The first time I ever saw – just saw, not met – Tommy Stack was at the Thomastown Castle Stud in 1979. I was thirteen years old at the time, working weekends at the quarantine with Francis O’Callaghan. I had accompanied Francis to help organize the shipment of horses from Tommy Stack’s stud that were due to fly abroad. Francis was responsible for their transportation from the stud to his own yard, where they would join the quarantine. Then, at the end of the quarantine, the horses would be transported from Francis’s yard to the airport. When Francis had told me who we were going to see, I had been unable to contain my excitement. And then, when I finally saw him, I stopped and stared, and stared and stopped because I couldn’t believe I was looking at him in the flesh: Tommy Stack, the Tommy Stack of Red Rum fame, was standing some ten metres away from me.
Some encounters only last seconds but stay with you for ever; this was one of them.
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