RACING:A jump jockeys' lot may seem glamorous, but it's a tough bloody life, writes MALACHY CLERKIN
The jockey’s life spins on the weathervane’s whims. Never more so than in the deep mid-winter. Ruby Walsh was standing in line for the 7.45am flight to Bristol on Thursday morning, knowing there was a fair chance he was about to waste his day.
Over in Exeter, 31mm of rain had fallen overnight but they were taking their sweet time about deciding to call off the day’s racing. Grand for them, not so grand for anyone about to hop on a flight to head their way.
Time ticked. Rain fell. Flight FR502 was called. Walsh was in twilight, 95 per cent sure that the card would be called off but beholden to the other five per cent that couldn’t let him turn on his heel and go home.
So he handed over his boarding pass and walked out the door and on to one of Ryanair’s finest. No sooner had the aircraft pushed back from the gate than he felt the phone buzz in his pocket.
Waterlogged course. Meeting abandoned.
Fifteen minutes, that was all. Had the card been nixed 15 minutes earlier or the flight boarded 15 minutes later, he’d have been at home with his feet up by nine o’clock.
As it was, the aircraft sat on the runway for another half an hour – just to bug him, obviously – and once he was in Bristol, the next flight back to Dublin wasn’t until 5.30 in the evening.
To kill the day, he headed to Paul Nicholls’ yard in Ditcheat, about 30 miles to the south.
The rain was so heavy he couldn’t even ride a bit of work dow n there. Ho-hum. “Sure I got a day out,” came his wry verdict on the day.
The whole caper would drive a man round the bend if he was of a mind to let it. But this is the life he chose as a boy and it’s hard to argue he hasn’t got the better of the give and take so far. The odd day stuck in Bristol, the occasional broken bone – you pays your money and you takes your chances.
In return, he gets to ride more of the best horses across two countries than anyone else, he makes a serious living along the way and his name will echo down generations of the sport when we’re all in the ground. Hardly the most taxing of trade-offs.
Ravenous
Still, the game swallows you whole when it feels like it and it hardly ever asks permission. Around Christmas it gets especially ravenous.
One time, the threat of fog enveloping Dublin Airport on St Stephen’s Day was so bad that he and his wife Gillian took a late flight out on Christmas Eve just so he could be in Kempton for Kauto Star in the King George.
This was 2006 and Tony and Chanelle McCoy played innkeeper that year, the Walshes’ first as a married couple.
“The pair of us were there like two orphans on Christmas morning with no presents,” he laughs. “It was different but it had to be done and we did it at the drop of a hat.”
Christmas dinner was no feast that year.
Ordinarily, Walsh never has much of a fret when it comes to his diet. He isn’t one of those jockeys who has to get by with a square of chocolate, a cup of tea and a box of fags a day. But that particular year, an hour before he rode Kauto Star, he had to do 10st 1lb on Bold Fire, the favourite in the Feltham Novices’ Chase.
When punters see that he’s gone down that low in the weights, they assume the horse is a shoo-in so Bold Fire predictably went off as favourite. Almost as predictably, the horse ran no sort of race and Walsh had to pull him up before the last.
For all the talk about it, Bold Fire turned out to be a dud and never won another race.
Stupid game.
Even allowing for the bad weather, there’ll be no pre-big-day dash to England this year. He’s still in Kempton on Wednesday but there’s more than just Gillian to be dragging along with him now. Isabelle is just gone three and Elsa is 20 months. Christmas is their day now, not his.
He might go and ride out a few for his dad Ted if he’s needed but otherwise it’ll be toys and games and lights and noise. The weather can do what it likes.
“Fog would be the only reason I’d ever go over before Christmas. The only thing you’d worry about would be serious heavy fog. To be honest, with Barry [Geraghty] heading over as well and both of us having kids at this stage, it’s very unlikely we’d go over and miss Christmas morning. However expensive it may turn out to be, we’d find a way over on Stephen’s morning.
“Snow wouldn’t have you over there early because if there’s a bad snow the racing won’t be on anyway. Fog won’t stop racing but what it will do is close airports.
Airports
“Over the years travelling through airports, you get to realise how they work. If you think there’s going to be fog on Stephen’s morning and you’re booked on the 7.40am flight, you make sure and change your booking to the 6.40 one.
“You can be fairly sure that by 10 o’clock, there’ll be at least one flight in the air and they will let them off in order. Make sure you’re on that first plane and you’ll be alright.”
Sounds like you have it all worked out? “Sure I have a Masters degree in airport travel! Which queues to stand in, which queues not to stand in. Never stand in a queue full of men after 11 o’clock. Never do it. Because men standing in an airport queue after 11 o’clock are going on holidays and they’re a pure disaster.
“Early in the morning, the people travelling are businessmen and women who travel every day. They fly through. Follow them to the door of the plane.
“But after 11, it’s people on holiday. Disaster.”
Kempton will be a little odd for him this year. Since 2006, every year he’s been fit to ride – including a couple where he probably wasn’t but did it anyway – he’s won the King George.
Ask him what was the last horse he rode in the race that wasn’t Kauto Star and he thinks for a minute but can’t actually remember (it was Royal Auclair in 2005). The days of him being able to say that Kauto Star was the best Christmas present he was going to get are gone.
It’s pure coincidence that his ride this time around is a half-brother to his old compadre, albeit that Kauto Stone has nothing like the class of his famous sibling.
“It’s going to be a hot King George,” he says. “Nicky [Henderson] will run three. The ground won’t take anything out. It’ll be tacky ground.
“Kempton is different to other courses. It doesn’t get heavy, it gets gluey. It gets holding. So it’ll be the same for us all. It won’t take anything out, they’ll all run. If they don’t handle the ground, they don’t handle the ground.
“Everything from Captain Chris onward looks to have a chance. Kauto Stone will definitely enjoy the ground more than the rest of them. The more rain that falls the better it will suit him. But it’s a very hot race.”
He’ll have better chances in lesser races that day. Dodging Bullets is a smart novice hurdler, Poungach an up-and-coming, if slightly maddening, novice chaser. His dance card for the rest of the week will be filled back home. Three days at Leopardstown, with the pick of Willie Mullins’ vast battalion under him, ought to pay out a hefty dividend.
Chief among them will be Hurricane Fly in the Istabraq Christmas Hurdle next Saturday. The horse that gave Walsh his sole Champion Hurdle win in 2011 and the current favourite for next March’s renewal of the race, he will present Walsh with the makings of a dilemma no matter what happens.
Hurricane Fly could be one of the greats and a second Champion Hurdle would confirm him as such. But Walsh’s win on Zarkandar in last Saturday’s International Hurdle at Cheltenham marked him out as a hurdler of significant promise. Walsh has already chosen against Zarkandar at the Cheltenham Festival once in his career and the horse went and won the 2011 Triumph Hurdle.
There’s a very real possibility that he might have to do so again in March. The way he sees it, though, that’s a problem for March. Not for today.
“They’re good choices to have to make but I don’t have to think about them anywhere near as much as people think I do. It’s like having four strikers at your club. Does Alex Ferguson sit down at the start of the season and go, ‘Right, I’m playing this lad in this game and that lad in that one?’ No, because his needs change from game to game and the players weed themselves out from week to week.
Big choice
“It’s the same with horses. You might think that you’re going to be left with a big choice to make come a certain race but between the hopping and the trotting something won’t make it.
“That’s just the way of it. People ask, ‘What are you going to do come Cheltenham?’ I always say I never worry about Cheltenham until the end of February.
“By then, all of these horses have gone and won their races or have shown whatever promise they are going to show. Right now, there’s no point wondering what I’ll do if both Hurricane Fly and Zarkandar turn up fit and well at the festival. They’ve both won their races well so far but they’ll have to do it again in the spring before we go to Cheltenham. People jump to Cheltenham far too quickly as soon as a horse wins in November or December.”
Yet Cheltenham is there always. Just in the past week, he’s lost one of his bankers for the festival in Big Buck’s and another that would have gone there with a fair chance of lifting a pot in Al Ferof.
“A disappointing day,” he says. “But they’re athletes. This is what happens. You just have to get on with it.”
One disappointing day won’t lay him low. He and Nicholls have been continuing as normal this winter, colonising the big Saturday races just as they did when Kauto Star, Denman and Master Minded were to hand.
Al Ferof won the Paddy Power, Silviniaco Conti won the Charlie Hall and the Betfair Chase, Zarkandar took the big hurdle races at Wetherby and Cheltenham. Week after week they banged them in, except for the week when Sanctuaire ran into Sprinter Sacre in the Tingle Creek. Walsh tried to run Barry Geraghty’s star turn out of his rhythm but the ease with which he beat him in the end was nearly laughable.
“Every horse is beatable, or so I keep telling myself. But Sprinter Sacre is incredible, just incredible. I had to take him on with Sanctuaire because it was the only way, just to see could we get him out of his comfort zone. The way it turned out, Sanctuaire was out of his comfort zone and Sprinter Sacre was fine. That’s what happens when you come up against a horse like that at that level.
“In a top two-mile race, it’s exactly like the 800 metres for humans. There’s no sudden injection of speed – it’s just all speed from the very beginning. Sprinter Sacre was like David Rudisha in the Olympics.
“He didn’t go faster and faster, he just kept going at full pelt and left it to everyone else to see if they could keep up with him. He just kept going the speed he was going and one by one the rest of the field cracked and fell off the back. That’s what Sprinter Sacre did in the Tingle Creek, that’s what Kauto Star used to be able to do.
“The great ones just burn the other ones off.”
At Christmas time, nobody knows that better than Walsh. His favourite present might not be under the tree anymore but for as long as he can stick the vagaries of pre-dawn airport tribulations, there will always be more for him to try out.
