‘I was just too young to appreciate it’: Adrian Maguire recalls Gold Cup win

Adrian Maguire’s alarm will go off at 4.45am on Friday morning and he will be on the road from his home near Mallow at 5.20am.

An hour's drive gets him to Aidan O'Brien's Ballydoyle stable near Cashel. It leaves plenty of time to reflect on the afternoon's Cheltenham Gold Cup and another one from 30 years ago.

The 1992 Gold Cup was a new experience for a then 20-year-old riding sensation acclaimed as jump racing’s next champion jockey. Maguire’s mount, Cool Ground, was a 25-1 outsider in a race dominated by expectations about the giant Carvill’s Hill.

Ultimately, those expectations famously crumbled and the youngster from Meath picked up the pieces, all but lifting Cool Ground to a dramatic defeat of France’s The Fellow.

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"Do you know what, I wish it was [his greatest racing memory] because the Gold Cup is the blue-riband. But I think I was just too young to appreciate it. I was 20. At the time it felt like another winner. I knew it was the Gold Cup but I didn't get the same buzz out of it as, say, Viking Flagship winning the Queen Mother a couple of years later," Maguire recalls.

The Gold Cup came less than two years since his very first winner in Ireland and just a year since a first Cheltenham victory as an amateur on Omerta in the Kim Muir. A relatively new arrival in Britain, the Irish prodigy had reached the pinnacle in meteoric fashion and the world looked to be his oyster.

Often labelled the best jockey never to be champion, Maguire enjoyed many more highs, and some corresponding lows, during an injury-plagued career that ultimately yielded more than a thousand winners. It came to an end prematurely 20 years ago. A broken neck left doctors in no doubt it was too dangerous for Maguire to continue race-riding.

The scale of the injuries left some to speculate on what might have been, pondering even if it was Tony McCoy who enjoyed the career that might have been Maguire’s. The man himself didn’t dwell on such speculation and returned to Ireland to start training.

Based in north Cork where his wife Sabrina is from, he moulded the emergent talent of the 2008 Gold Cup hero, Denman, winning a point to point with the giant star before he was sold to Paul Nicholls.

There were racecourse victories too for good horses such as Celestial Wave and Golden Kite among almost 100 winners in total. But the increased concentration of jumps talent in a few hands led Maguire to call a halt to training in 2017.

“I would have loved to continue training but ends weren’t meeting. I probably carried on training a couple of years longer than I should have. I just had to bite the bullet, accept it and move on,” he says.

Moving on included a new job riding out at the world’s most famous flat academy in Ballydoyle.

“It’s a great place to work, the best of everything, you get paid every Friday, happy days. There’s no stress with it. Training is a stressful game and when ends weren’t meeting it was twice as stressful,” Maguire adds.

There's also the successful amateur riding career of his son Finny to concentrate on. Maguire Junior was 16 when he rode a first winner on his father's Mm Dazzler at Listowel in 2014. Since then he has racked up winners including the "Amateur Derby" at Epsom in 2018 and two victories of the Irish version at the Galway festival.

Such success on the track means that employing a Food Science degree isn’t required anytime soon.

Having ridden one Gold Cup hero, and prepared another outstanding winner, Maguire is well placed to know what’s required to win it.

“You need a horse that travels, jumps and stays. You need a lot in a horse to go for the Gold Cup,” he says. “Cool Ground was an out and out galloper, a fine big strong horse, a horse with plenty of talent.

“To say he’d win a Gold Cup on what he’d done previously would have been a very brave statement, but it fell his way on the day as it has with many horses in the Gold Cup.

“Denman was different, an out and out grade one horse. He always was talented as a youngster and the way he won his point to point on the day, I honestly thought this could be a Gold Cup horse. They were the words I said to Paul Nicholls when he came and looked at him.”

Maguire admits he isn’t totally on top of the Cheltenham Gold Cup picture these days, but wouldn’t rule out another surprise result 30 years later.

“It’s open but that doesn’t mean it’s not competitive. It could be a fantastic race because you can make cases for lots of them. I wouldn’t call it,” says a man whose racing life has turned to focusing more on identifying potential Derby horses.

“We might have a better chance of calling that!” he says, laughing.