A Fine Place to Daydream

by Bill Barich

  Lost in the uproar were the fine efforts of Pizarro and Sacundai, who also redeemed themselves. In the Grade One Neville & Sons Chase, Pizarro hung on to defeat Knight’s Rosslea, a boost for his trainer after the horse had been pulled up in the Drinmore, his last race. Under top weight, Sacundai beat a strong field in the Christmas Hurdle and was once again listed as a Festival worthy. For Edward O’Grady, it was a pensive afternoon. Had Pizarro’s jumping errors killed his chances in the Drinmore, or had O’Grady made a training mistake? “I honestly don’t know,” he said, after thirty-two years on the job. “I’m a slow learner.”

  ON MONDAY, I was at Leopardstown again for the Bewley’s Hotels December Festival Hurdle, a Grade One over two miles. An unusually spirited race, it featured such first-rate Irish hurdlers as Back In Front, Hardy Eustace, and Solerina, along with Jonjo O’Neill’s Rhinestone Cowboy, a favorite for the Champion Hurdle at the Festival, but none of them figured at the finish. Instead, the race was between two long shots—Flame Creek from Noel Chance’s yard in England and Jessie Harrington’s Spirit Leader—until an even longer shot, Golden Cross at 66–1, zipped past them like a greyhound to capture the prize on his first run of the year, with Spirit Leader second.

  That shouldn’t have shocked anybody, since nothing in racing is quite what it seems. While reading Richard Holmes’s Sidetracks recently, I’d come across an account of Théophile Gautier’s visit to Royal Ascot in 1842, a high point on one of his periodic trips to London. Gautier was enthralled by the sights. He celebrated the “vegetable velvet” of the turf where the “cherry-red horses” ran, while the brightly colored jockeys’ caps resembled “poppies, cornflowers, and anemones carried away on the wind.” Our Frenchman waxed poetical about the flock of white pigeons that flew about the course, too, only to hear later the birds belonged to the bookies, who used them to carry odds and results to their associates around the city.

  JANUARY

  Deep Freeze

  For Irish trainers, the New Year began with some distressing news. An equine virus was sweeping through their yards. It was a devastating one, too, and sometimes undetectable. Horses scoped clean and then ran badly, as Beef Or Salmon had done in the Ericsson, sick and gurgling because of the mucus in his throat. “He’ll be grand in a few days,” an optimistic Michael Hourigan told me, a better prognosis than Paul Nicholls delivered for Strong Flow, who had cracked a knee bone in his near-foreleg in the Feltham. Whether or not the fracture was due to his sloppy jumping, Strong Flow’s season was over, along with any chance that he might duplicate Mill House’s feat in the Gold Cup.

  Noel Meade’s yard was the hardest hit. On the Monday before Christmas, he had eight horses with fevers; on Tuesday, sixteen; and on Wednesday, forty-five. Meade went ten straight days without a runner, and that dealt a whopping blow to his operating costs. Jessie Harrington was also affected. The bug had knocked out Imazulutoo, her Festival hope who’d shined at Gowran Park, but she still had Moscow Flyer to cheer her up. There would be no more prep races for Moscow. He would go directly to the Queen Mother despite what I now thought of as the Pattern, a malign condition from the annals of science fiction.

  It’s crucial at any yard for “trouble to stay outside the door,” as Eamonn Leigh liked to say. Trouble in the form of a virus can be a nightmare, multiplying with astonishing speed and ripping through the barns like wildfire. Infected horses must be isolated, and all the others checked daily for coughs or dirty noses. The hours around breakfast become supercharged. This is when you hear the bad news, as Martin Pipe put it—that your best horse just broke a blood vessel on the gallops, say. With a bug, the stakes mount. Every horse is susceptible, and they don’t always recuperate quickly.

  In the Post, I saw that Andrew Leigh was still hustling rides. He had a promising one coming up at Thurles, so I was tempted to go. That would make me a pervert rather than a philosopher in the eyes of Voltaire, but a horse fancier always has an excuse. After the holiday banquet, the National Hunt was a meager meal in early January, mostly burgers and very little prime rib. Trainers were saving their big horses for the valuable races on the weekends. If you craved some action during the week, you had to lower your expectations. You had to consider Thurles.

  Once bitten, twice shy. Here was another maxim I recalled on the train ride to Tipperary, looking out at fields layered with frost, Ireland’s deep freeze. The same old bookies sat across from me, as weather-beaten as their satchels. True winter had arrived with bone-chilling winds, peltings of sleet, and light snow high up in the hills. All the talk in the papers about a false spring caused by global warming went into the garbage can. Well, I reassured myself, it isn’t raining, at least. I’ll be cold, but not wet. I felt a twinge of sympathy for the jockeys, though, when I remembered a remark of Paul Carberry’s. “No matter how cold it is outside at Thurles,” he once said to me, “it’s colder in the weighing room.”

  Thurles on a cold, dry day was pleasant, really. Even pretty, a little. Once more the elderly crowd made me feel youthful, and with a bounce in my step and a hot whiskey in my belly, I bagged a couple of bets before Andrew Leigh’s race, a three-mile hurdle, rolled around. Leigh was on Sixtino, the people’s choice, who had “won on the ice at St. Moritz,” according to the Post. Had the horse worn skates? Clearly, my knowledge of the jumps was still incomplete. But Sixtino also had two wins in Ireland, not on the ice, so I had to take him into account considering the quality of the opposition.

  Sixtino faced a veritable bevy of nonwinners. Only the whim of an owner or a trainer kept these nags in competition. Like the supposedly gifted children who flunk every exam, they were being indulged. Moreover, they were untried at the distance and could not be expected to abruptly find their form. Any horse who could stay on his feet and last for three miles had an honest shot, and since Craigmor Hero had performed that marvel (although not much else), I cast my lot with him. The race set up just as I figured it would. Most horses were sucking wind after two miles, and that left Sixtino and Craigmor Hero to slug it out. The ensuing battle, hardly epic, devolved into a photo finish with Craigmor Hero in front, a belated Christmas gift I collected at 10–1.

  I was sorry for Andrew, but happy for myself. The trip back to the city was sweet. Having neglected to bring along Paddy Kavanagh for company, I picked up the Post again, but I’d read all the articles about horses and flipped to the greyhound pages I normally skipped. The classified ads offered Super Pups for Sale and, less ambitiously, Quality Pups for Sale, and Greyhounds for Under 500 Pounds ($900) in the bargain basement. I wondered what it would be like to own a dog, and if the fall from grace would be truly spectacular, although I guessed not since Noel Meade, a classy guy and a member of the Dog Gone Syndicate, held an eleventh share of a hound known as Springwell Arctic.

  Unfortunately for Meade and the other trainers, the virus continued to spread, and there were fears of an epidemic. Dr. Ned Gowing, who owns and operates Anglesey Lodge Equine Hospital on the Curragh, understood the situation well. He was so busy with sick and injured horses I had difficulty connecting with him, and when we did manage to speak and set up a meeting, I made sure to get to Kildare early and had a quick lunch at the Stand House Hotel, where there’s a collection of racing memorabilia to rival Reilly’s. Upstairs, I saw a photo of Arkle (yet again) and Tom Dreaper, who was petting his forehead and chomping on a pipe, as if the pair were hatching a plot to spring at the Gold Cup.

  The lodge, I discovered, is a white, one-story building opposite the racecourse, more like a ranch-style house than a hospital. A horse trailer was parked next to a vacant paddock, and a glum man in the filthy clothes of an overburdened groom paced around, evidently on edge about his appointment. My wait for Dr. Gowing—or Dr. G., as a staffer affectionately called him—wasn’t long. A big, easygoing, snowy-haired man, he has the sort of benevolent presence that often earns an endearing nickname from coworkers. He seemed tired at first, as if talking with me didn’t rate very high on his list of desires, for
which I couldn’t fault him, but he slowly warmed to the subject of veterinary medicine. It was his life’s work, after all.

  Dr. Gowing was familiar with the virus plaguing the yards. He hadn’t heard of anyone identifying it specifically, but he assumed it was a respiratory strain of influenza and quite contagious. The virus could be detected before a race about seventy-five percent of the time through a blood sample, but it stayed dormant in the other cases. Triggered by stress, it bloomed during a race, causing the horse to falter as Beef Or Salmon had done. There was no set recovery time. A horse might need a month or six weeks, depending on the symptoms—faster with a mild cough than with a full systemic infection. (Imazulutoo was still sick in March, in no shape for Cheltenham.) Rest and antibiotics were the only cure. “The economic losses are huge,” Gowing said. “I shudder to think of them.”

  Viruses come and go, of course, and Gowing ordinarily deals with a garden variety of basic injuries. For jumpers, a bowed tendon is the most common. The doc believes the length of the races, and the pressure that exerts on tendons, is responsible for the damage. A bloody nose is also a common complaint. But what about fallers? Those crashes looked so bad I imagined he must have a whole hospital wing filled with patients whose legs were bandaged or in plaster, but he doesn’t. “The soft ground protects them,” he said. “It cushions the fall.”

  In the old days, trainers would come to Gowing worried that a horse might have a heart murmur, and he would do an exhaustive exam to see if it were true, but today there are simple diagnostic tools to detect such problems. Among the easiest ways to assess a horse’s health is by its weight, he told me. During a race, a horse can lose up to twenty pounds while sweating, but should put them right back on through rehydration in three or four days. If the horse doesn’t, there’s a problem, most likely something latent.

  “Where’s the fun in this?” I asked, an angle I’m always exploring, and he blinked as if startled by the question, one he might never ask himself, and laughed. “Every day is different. You’re never bored.”

  “Not even with horses? You’re still fond of them?”

  “Well, why wouldn’t you be?” His fondness aside, he confessed he’d never been much of a rider himself, although he admired Ireland’s brave jockeys. I painted him a picture of Paul Carberry tearing across the countryside on his hunter, leaping over stone walls and thorny hedges, as wild and willful as Black Jack Dennis. “That would be a very dance,” he said appreciatively, then rose to show me around the hospital, moving with a big man’s shambling gait. Like Michael Hourigan, he started from scratch in a cottage that still stood by the road, and he, too, was proud of his achievements.

  Now Gowing has a pristine room for his lab work and also two surgeries, one for the messy stuff such as colic and abscesses and the other for orthopedic jobs. The horses arrive at a receiving barn and are sedated and anesthetized with gas before being transferred to an operating table. Farther on are two isolation stalls for horses with contagious diseases. The doc has fifteen stalls in total, and the overburdened groom waited by one. His horse was scheduled for an X-ray. I couldn’t tell who looked more nervous, the groom or the horse. In another stall, a young vet had a gloved hand in the anus of a mare—a bowel complaint, I guessed, but no, she had suffered a rectal tear when a stallion mounted her.

  Gowing keeps his modern equipment in a room close by. He was especially pleased with a new digital X-ray machine that permits him to see precisely what’s going on inside a horse. He had used it the other day on a poor, shivery little creature, who stood quietly in a stall across the way. From a distance, I thought the creature was a donkey, or even a weird half-breed, but it was a Thoroughbred foal. Its air of misery and loneliness was so tangible I felt a tug at my heart. The doc probed a shaved area on the foal’s ribcage, where he’d done some sector scanning. “He’s pretty sick,” Gowing said. “He was sick before he was sold. His owner got a raw deal. We’ll save him if we can.”

  I rubbed the foal’s nose. An equine vet’s job didn’t seem very different from a regular doctor’s, really. At the lodge, there was the same blend of hope, despair, relief, and even prayer you find at any hospital. The sad groom could be any anxious relative eager for some good news. That anybody at all cared about the wretched foal was a minor miracle, and his owner must have known it, because the foal would never win a race if he did survive. The caring was an act of obligation, another example of the ancient, honorable covenant between horses and those who ride them, a welcome thing in a world where life of any kind is often cheap.

  O’HERLIHY’S HAS MANY VIRTUES as a pub, not least its policy of elevating racing to a position above all other sports. In some places, you have to beg the barmen to show the jumps if a decent, or even halfway decent, soccer match is on, but at our local it isn’t an issue, because Reilly controls the TV clicker by common agreement, flicking among the channels with the exquisite timing he’s honed to a fine edge on his couch at home. The clicker means a lot to him, and he embraces it as he might a medal for valor he earned in some forgotten war.

  On a Saturday in early January, Reilly sauntered into the pub ready to do justice to three big meetings in England at Ascot, Haydock, and Warwick, and I was waiting for him. His seriousness could be gauged by a handwritten sheet he dropped on the bar. It was his memory aid, a list of all the televised races arranged by channel and time. He had tips clipped from various tabloids, too, and a stack of blank betting slips from Boylesports to be filled out after a look at the horses. On his feet were new sneakers to facilitate his sprint to the shop. His goal was to complete the round-trip before a race started, and if he failed and got back a few seconds too late, he groaned and let his slip flutter to the floor. “Can’t win now,” he’d say. Silly, yes, but it always proved true.

  We were both keyed up about the Peter Marsh Chase at Haydock, a three-mile race regarded as a superior Gold Cup trial. Four horses had come out of it to win the Gold Cup in recent years, so the presence of Kingscliff, still very much in the Festival frame, was auspicious. He was stepping up in class, but the experts predicted he would handle it. Woe be it to those who listened, because Kingscliff failed to run or jump with his normal verve, and Artic Jack defeated him soundly. The result threw a wet blanket on Robert Alner’s ardor. The horse, he thought, must have a muscle pull.

  “That’s it,” Reilly said in disgust. He had a large ante-post wager on Kingscliff. “Might as well give Henrietta the trophy now and save us all the bother.”

  He hit the clicker and switched over to Ascot, where the featured race was the Victor Chandler Chase, a two-mile prep for the Queen Mother. The eye-catcher was Azertyuiop, who looked intimidating, quite tall and graceful. Unbeaten as a novice chaser last season, Azertyuiop hadn’t yet won a handicap for older horses, so Paul Nicholls and Ruby Walsh were hoping for a solid display after their gelding’s failure in the Tingle Creek, even though he was the top weight by far.

  Native Scout from Ireland held the lead until the furious pace found him out, after which the race was between Nicky Henderson’s Isio and Azertyuiop, whose terrific jump at the second-last put him in front. Yet the gritty Isio fought back and held on to win by a neck. Still, Azertyuiop’s performance was exceptional, given that he carried nineteen pounds more than the winner. Ruby Walsh had insisted his horse wasn’t fit at Sandown when losing to Moscow Flyer, and the Victor Chandler seemed to confirm it and generated some fear and trembling in those of us who were already concerned about Moscow’s ability to transcend the evil grip of the Pattern.

  In the late afternoon, we had the Tote Classic Chase at Warwick, a marathon for stayers at three miles five furlongs, with twenty-two fences to be jumped. In general, I am more skeptical than Reilly, ever alert to the possibility that things aren’t what they appear to be, but he surpassed me for once. He was sure the “villainous” Martin Pipe was about to broker a betting coup. After a close scrutiny of Pipe’s three entries that required the assistance of dime-store reading glasses,
he was convinced that Jurancon II, the least fancied of them, was the key to the plot. Tony McCoy, the stable jock, had picked the favorite Akarus to ride, but that was part of the cover-up. How could I be so blind? Didn’t I see that McCoy was in on the scam? Take Control, Pipe’s third horse, was mere window dressing. Hadn’t won a race in ages.

  “Twenty each way,” Reilly said, lacing up a sneaker. (An each-way bet covers a horse to both win and place.) True, he knew his stuff, but I refused his entreaties and asked him to put my ten bucks on Bindaree, a Grand National winner, who could do the distance in his sleep.

  The Tote Classic was a gruesome spectacle. Fallers were everywhere, and some were good horses, too. Take Control fell at the sixth fence and had to be put down, while Behrajan fell at the second-last, broke his neck, and died. We didn’t hear about the deaths until after the race, and when we did they cast a pall over Reilly’s brilliant gamble. Though I doubted Pipe had planned it, Jurancon II was there at the end to slug it out with Southern Star, another prize pupil from Henrietta Knight’s academy, who landed the heavier punches. Reilly’s payoff for his bet was substantial, anyway, but we didn’t have it in us to celebrate, not when so many horses had come to grief.

  WINTER MARKS THE TRUE BEGINNING of Ireland’s point-to-point season, so when Sunday dawned in a wash of radiant sunshine, Imelda and I decided to drive to County Wicklow for the Shillelagh & District Hunt’s annual meeting at Tinahely, a first for both of us. Imelda packed her sketchpad, a camera, and a picnic lunch, and we left before noon and took a highway past Dun Laoghaire and Bray, tracing the coastline of the Irish Sea. We were your typical carefree lovers on an outing until we crossed over into Wicklow and encountered a profound change in the weather, with dark clouds massed on the horizon. A minute later, showery rain drummed against the windshield. “It’ll probably blow over,” I said, more a wish than a belief, but Imelda, being Irish, knew better.