Issuu

‘A gripping and incredibly honest insight into our sport, from one of racing’s most exciting talents.’

FRANKIE DETTORI

OISIN MURPHY SACRIFICE

A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A CHAMPION JOCKEY

SACRIFICE

Sacrifice

A Year in the Life of a Champion Jockey

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SACRIFICE

Beginnings

Because horse racing is a continuous and fragmented global sporting behemoth, deciding when to start this book of mine, which I hope will offer you the reader an interesting and entertaining insight into the day-to-day life of a sometimes frighteningly obsessive professional jockey, has caused me no end of worry. I’m not half as good at making decisions as I am at fretting, and so consulting me on what might be an appropriate point in time to kick off the proceedings was an act that I only wish the publishers had tried harder to resist. The end of the previous season? The Breeders’ Cup? Christmas? New Year’s Day? The Lincoln meeting at Doncaster?

‘Let me get back to you,’ I said to them eventually. ‘I need to have a think.’

Had this book simply been about my quest to become champion jockey again, which I only decided to go for in March, then the start of the Flat Jockeys Championship would have been ideal. It isn’t though. This book is an honest account of how a deeply flawed young man from the small town of Killarney in the south-west of Ireland, who it’s fair

to say has led a fairly eventful life so far, copes with being a jockey and copes with being himself. And I’m not sure which is the most hazardous, to be honest. When we’re not racing we’re often starving ourselves as jockeys and when we are racing we’re always being followed by an ambulance. Those two quite sobering facts speak volumes when it comes to demonstrating the precariousness of what we do for a living. My own personal form of jeopardy comes in the shape of a self-destruct button. A self-destruct button that’s omnipresent and varies in size depending on how things are going for me generally and how I’m feeling inside. I’m not sure which is worse. I’ll tell you one thing though, both tend to keep me well and truly on my toes.

A fourteen-month ban and £31,000 fine that I received at the start of 2022 for breaching Covid travel protocols and for failing two breath tests is by far the most infamous result of me pressing my self-destruct button.

In terms of breaching Covid protocols, which accounted for the £31,000 fine and eleven of the fourteen months, it all began on 24 August 2020 when the stewards at Ayr found me guilty of careless riding and banned me for seven days. Initially I was going to appeal the decision but then decided to take a short holiday instead with my girlfriend to the Greek island of Mykonos.

A few days into the holiday the island was moved on to the global pandemic red list which meant that on my return I would have to self-isolate for 14 days, which I’m afraid I did not. I just kept on racing as normal. The lying started before that though. While in Mykonos I was committed to doing a vlog for Sporting Life and as it was pretty evident I wasn’t in Lambourn I told them that I was at Lake Como, which at

the time wasn’t on the red list. I didn’t think much of it. I was just getting myself out of a fix.

Over the next year or so, as suspicion grew about my true whereabouts during that week, I was given probably hundreds of opportunities to come clean. But the longer it went on, the harder it was to tell the truth. Lying to people became the norm and there were times when I almost believed what I was saying. What initially had been a stupid error of judgement that would no doubt have been dealt with swiftly by the BHA had turned into a monster. A monster that over time involved dozens of people and would end up almost destroying my reputation and career. It was and still is the biggest mistake of my life so far.

With regards to the remainder of the ban, I returned two positive breath tests for alcohol, on 5 May 2021 at Chester, and on 8 October 2021 at Newmarket. I received a ten-day ban for the first offence, and a 90-day ban for the second. Once again, during the investigations I attempted to deceive the people involved and my only excuse for doing so was that at the time my drinking was out of control. It was, as I said at the eventual hearing, the rock on which I perished.

My addiction to alcohol and the destruction that caused, not just to me but a lot of people who are close to me, and which has all been very well documented by the press and the media, is something that, with a great deal of help from the aforementioned people and others, I have fortunately been able to control so far and will hopefully continue doing so. It is a daily struggle. My addiction to what I do for a living, on the other hand – and it is a form of addiction in my opinion and is one that I’d say the majority of people who work with horses are afflicted by – is a different beast

altogether. Being an alcoholic often involves drinking in order to remove yourself from reality, whereas my addiction to horses and horse racing is the opposite, in that it’s the reality I crave more than anything else on God’s earth. The alcohol helped me to cope with the parts of that reality that I did and still do find most challenging. There’s an irony in there somewhere.

The question I was asked by various friends of mine immediately after agreeing to write this book was ‘Why on earth are you doing it?’ The assumption being, I think, that the life of a jockey is intensive and time-consuming enough without having to repeat it all again on paper. It was a fair enough question but was one I could easily answer. ‘I see it as being a form of therapy,’ I told those who asked. ‘Therapy’ being the first word that came into my head when I was approached about writing an account of my life in real time. Since October 2021, I have been having counselling sessions twice a week and without these sessions I would be in a very different place to where I am now. They are extremely important to me and my hope when I started writing this book was that reliving the days just past might become an extension of that therapy. And has it? Well, I’m not going to tell you right now. I might do at the end of the book. There is a difference, though, so I’ve learned, between simply recalling an experience you have been through and reliving every moment in your head. Learning to practise the former and resisting the latter is a skill I’ve had to learn very quickly indeed during this process and is one that I wish I had acquired many, many years earlier.

With regards to at which point in time I should start the book, I eventually came to the conclusion that, as with my

recovery from alcoholism, just getting on and doing it was the right way to go and so the book starts on the day that I made that very same decision. At this point in time I haven’t decided when it’ll finish yet, but the obsessive in me might keep it going forever. Either way, I very much hope you enjoy it.

one Riding Out

FRIDAY, 15 MARCH 2024

Somewhere between Newmarket and Lambourn

On the face of it, deciding to begin a book – a book that is supposed to demonstrate in detail what it is like being a jockey – on day three of a seventeen-day suspension might not be the best idea I’ve ever had. Then again, suspensions are part and parcel of what we jockeys go through (me more than most over recent years) so I’m actually OK with it.

This morning I was up at the crack of dawn and have been over in Newmarket riding out for two trainers, George Boughey and James Ferguson. I’m now in my car driving back home to Lambourn which I’ll wager is where many of these entries will be made from. I dread to think what percentage of my life I spend in cars either driving or being driven to or from racing yards or race meetings. Although it can get a bit monotonous sometimes it’s often the only time I get to myself.

The current ban I’m serving is made up of three different

suspensions, one that was served to me in Qatar, one that was served to me a week later during the Saudi Cup meeting which I’ll come on to in just a second, and then one that was served to me a week or so after that at Wolverhampton. I was actually in agreement with the first suspension in Qatar but thought the other two were quite harsh. The stewards’ decisions are always final, of course, but it doesn’t mean you have to agree with them, either publicly or privately. I didn’t and still don’t.

The Saudi Cup meeting first took place in 2020 but I made my first visit to Saudi Arabia in 2018 for a King’s Cup meeting. I remember feeling quite nervous when I first arrived there. I’m not sure whether they were police or army, but there were an awful lot of heavily armed and serious-looking men knocking about the place and I felt very much like an outsider. Which I suppose I was. Over the last few years as the Saudi Cup meeting has grown in stature and people have got to know each other, things have improved immeasurably and when I go there now I feel very safe and relaxed. My girlfriend Lizzy came with me this year and we had a lovely time. The non-drinking culture obviously plays in my favour and the restaurants and hotels are superb.

Results-wise, things didn’t go my way this year unfortunately. I finished third on Giavellotto, riding for trainer Marco Botti in the Longines Red Sea Turf Handicap, which was my best result of the meeting. A colt called The Foxes that I rode for Andrew Balding in the Howden Neom Turf Cup was probably the biggest disappointment. I was happy with the horse’s build-up to the race and my position at the start, but for some reason he couldn’t pick up the pressure and dropped away quite unexpectedly. It was a mystery to all

concerned as to why that happened, but you cannot legislate for these things. The vast majority of people are sympathetic to this fact but you’ll always get one or two who like to accuse the jockey of not trying. And what do they have in common? They’ll all have lost money, that’s what.

I went into the Saudi Cup meeting with a strike rate of 22 per cent since the start of the year (twenty wins from seventyseven rides), which is roughly what I’ll need to achieve later on if I’m to challenge for champion jockey. I’m a dreadful sleeper at the best of times and knowing that my strike rate has dropped can be lethal. It’s one of many things that keep me awake at night but is also what helps me to sleep when I’m doing well. My general routine tends to compound the former. For instance, because I had such a busy day yesterday, I didn’t get to bed until well after midnight and then I was up again this morning before six to ride out.

Introducing more night meetings has been detrimental in this regard as they often prevent jockeys from getting to bed at a decent hour. Not that that means very much to me at the moment. Sleep deprivation aside, as well as helping me to identify talented horses, riding out, which is the term used for exercising horses (also known as hacking), sets me up for the day and gives me a sense of purpose and achievement. Feeling lazy is worse than feeling tired in my book, so regardless of how much sleep I’ve had or haven’t had, I just have to get on with it.

I had a counselling session yesterday morning and my therapist made the point, and not for the first time, that racing isn’t everything and that I should try and take what I do for a living a little bit less seriously. The trouble is that my world is so small and I allow it to take over. I am trying to change

my perspective on things but it isn’t easy. In fact, at this very moment in time I’d say it feels just about impossible, such is the hold that racing and horses have over my life. Suspension? What suspension. OK, so I’m not able to race for seventeen days, but I am still immersed in the sport every minute of the day. It isn’t always like this. Sometimes I can let go of things a bit and allow my mind to wander on to other things such as football and what’s in the news. It never lasts very long but the fact that it happens at all offers me some crumbs of comfort.

My therapist also asked me if I ever discuss any of the above with my fellow jockeys, which I most certainly do not. It’s not that we don’t get on with one another, as most of us do. At the end of the day though we are in competition, and so discussing possible weaknesses would be counterintuitive at best.

I often wonder what people think of me while I’m chatting to them. It’s just a question that pops into my head sometimes. How you are perceived by others is an important part of being a jockey – to fellow jockeys, trainers, owners and even horses – and regardless of how I’m feeling when I arrive at the gallops to ride out or at a race meeting, I will always give off the air of being confident and in good humour. It can be incredibly difficult to maintain sometimes but it has to be done.

Anything that’s said between us jockeys, either in or out of the weighing room, is almost always banter-related. Jokes at each other’s expense are the usual line, but there’s often a story going around about one of the younger contingent catching an STD or something. It might be light-hearted, but you miss it when it isn’t there. Ask a jockey what they

miss most when they retire and in many cases the weighing room will be right up there. When I got suspended for fourteen months I missed the banter of the weighing room as much as anything else. Racing can be a terribly serious business at the best of times, and the fact that any one of us could end up either dead or in a wheelchair is, while rarely spoken about, never far away. The weighing room injects the proceedings with some much-needed levity for us jockeys and creates an oasis of camaraderie within what is in fact a cauldron of competition and peril.

I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of serious conversations I’ve had with any of my fellow jockeys, although I do have an example of one that happened quite recently. The week before the Saudi meeting I was waiting at Doha Airport with Ryan Moore, Jim Crowley and William Buick (having all raced in Qatar), and we ended up having a four-hour discussion over dinner about the future of British racing. I don’t want to say too much as the discussion was private, but we were all in agreement about the potentially detrimental effect the government eyeing the racing industry for extra revenue will have on prize money while bemoaning the fact that other jurisdictions such as Japan, Hong Kong and even the USA have much better systems in place.

Anyway, on to these suspensions of mine (all for careless riding), which on the first two occasions were for failing to stay straight out of the stalls.

The first one in Qatar was a three-day suspension and the second one in Saudi, which I got riding Matilda Picotte in the Saudi National Bank 1351 Turf Sprint, was a five-day suspension. I was drawn fourteenth in that race which was the

widest of all, and as I pushed to get towards the inside, a rider behind me got a bit of interference which forced him to take a precautionary measure. In most countries a transgression like that would result in a two-day suspension at most or even a caution, so I was very disappointed.

Eight days after returning home from Saudi, I received a nine-day suspension for an incident at Wolverhampton that resulted in Joe Fanning coming out of the side door and being knocked unconscious. As we were approaching the finish line, he bounced off me twice, I bounced off him twice, and then he went flying. Joe bouncing off me was deemed to have been accidental whereas me bouncing off him was deemed to have been a result of careless riding, and so that was that. Because he became unseated, the minimum ban was seven days, but they gave me an extra two for good measure. Seventeen days total, though. We’re only a few pages in and you must be thinking I’m an awfully dirty rider.

The headline in some of the papers after I picked up the ban at Wolverhampton was that I’d miss the start of the season, which isn’t true. What they were referring to, and for the sake of creating a headline, I think, is the old Flat season that ran from the Doncaster meeting in March to the Doncaster meeting in November. The season that’s been in place ever since I’ve been a professional jockey runs from Guineas weekend at Newmarket at the beginning of May to British Champions Day at Ascot on the third Saturday in October. It looks like quite a short season on paper, but when you’re stuck in the middle of it, believe me it’s plenty long enough.

You might be wondering what a jockey gets up to while they’re serving a ban. For me personally, I tend to go into overdrive. This week, for instance, I’ve ridden out for Owen

Burrows and Sir Mark Todd, I’ve been to Kempton to ride out for David Menuisier, I’ve been to Newmarket this morning to ride one for George Boughey and one for James Ferguson, I’ll go to Andrew Balding’s tomorrow to ride five or six, and then next week I’ll ride out for Joseph O’Brien in Ireland as well as for lots of small trainers whom you’ve probably never heard of.

The reason I do this is to try and identify horses that I can win on in the future. Two-year-olds who are unraced and have their whole futures ahead of them. It’s a numbers game, obviously, and if I don’t put the hours in and help to find the talent, you can guarantee that somebody else will. One thing’s for sure, there will be no downtime whatsoever during the ban. That’s the safest bet of all.

One thing I stop doing quite so much while I’m serving a ban is monitoring my weight, the irony being that because I’ve got so much going on, it tends not to fluctuate too much. At this very moment in time I’m still under 9 stone which is very good for me.

Another erroneous headline that’s been doing the rounds just recently is that I’ve been riding out regularly for Aidan O’Brien and according to one of the papers am apparently ‘in pole position to pick up some big rides for the allconquering O’Brien family’. The truth of the matter is that before I moved to England, I used to work full-time for Aidan and I’ve been riding out for him on a casual basis for donkey’s years. Our arrangement hasn’t changed at all, in that I will continue riding out for Aidan as and when he asks me to, but I will not be moving to Ireland. I also ‘pick up’ rides for Aidan’s sons sometimes, a notable example being a Group 1 win I had for Donnacha O’Brien at the back end

of last year. Donnacha also has a very promising filly called Porta Fortuna that I’ve ridden a few times and should run in the Guineas trial in April. Anyway, with regards to the headline, it must have been a slow news day or something. Talking of journalists, I was asked by one the other day what I was looking forward to about the Classics this year and I had to answer, not very much at all. Things can obviously change, but at this very moment in time I don’t have a confirmed ride for any of them. The only light at the end of the tunnel regarding the Derby at the moment is one of David Menuisier’s horses called Sunway. I won a Group 1 on him in France at the end of last year and he’s been bred to stay. Before he even raced I remember telling Sheikh Fahad, who is the chairman of Qatar Racing and one of my main employers, what a good horse I thought he was. Then, after he won first time out at Sandown, Sheikh Fahad managed to buy a piece of him, which was good. He might end up being a Derby horse, although when I won on him last year I didn’t think he’d be a very strong stayer over twelve furlongs. Before we get there, I have got nothing definite for the Guineas at the moment, which is a worry. Anyway, we carry on.

Incidentally, I’ve now made the decision to go for champion jockey this year. I’d been in two minds for a while now. After all, the workload and mental strain involved in going for the championship are off the scale, and once you decide to go for it, it occupies every minute of your day while you’re awake and sometimes while you’re asleep. You don’t take any days off (unless you’re suspended) and even if you find yourself in a social situation, all you’ll be thinking about is where the next win is coming from. For six whole months it owns every single bit of you.

Somebody asked me a couple of years ago why jockeys who aren’t necessarily going to win the championship carry on pushing themselves to that level.

‘What’s the motivation to keep on chasing?’ he said.

Put very simply, the more winners you ride as a jockey, the more opportunities you’ll have to ride better horses which in turn will improve your chances of winning the championship. A good example would be young Billy Loughnane. His work ethic over the past couple of years has been incredible and sooner or later he’ll be far enough up the ladder to be able to go for the big one.

Only time will tell if I’ve made the right decision by going for it again. I’ll be putting a heck of a lot on the line, that’s for sure. Not least my sanity, such as it is.

FRIDAY, 22 MARCH 2024

Lambourn

I was asked yesterday how I first became interested in horses. It’s probably one of the most popular questions jockeys are asked, so I thought I would cover it here if that’s OK.

I don’t remember any of this, but according to my mother I was exposed to horses from a very young age. Her father, my grandad, absolutely adored racing and on a Saturday afternoon I’d sit on his lap and watch it with him. He’d pretend to ride the final furlong of every race with me as the jockey and apparently I loved it. My uncle is the former jump jockey Jim Culloty, and my mother said when he was on the TV, my grandad used to become very animated. Once again, I must have had no idea what was going on,