A Fine Place to Daydream

by Bill Barich

  The AIG was a strange contest, with an upside-down result. Fota Island made much of the running and wound up third, while Georges Girl, who’d only won a single handicap hurdle ever, was second. Under a confident ride from Thierry Doumen, his French jockey, Foreman picked up at the last and soon had the measure of the others, a dramatic spectacle on the big screen because Doumen’s face was smeared with blood from a nosebleed he couldn’t staunch while riding. He was overjoyed to win, doubly so because Foreman belonged to a string of horses he trained in Chantilly. All the favored horses failed to place, including Spirit Leader, whose name now had a big question mark next to it in my Cheltenham notebook.

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE AIG, Willie Mullins put on a good suit and traveled to London, where on January 29 at Portman Square, the Jockey Club’s disciplinary panel began its inquiry into Be My Royal’s tainted win in the Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury. A total of thirty-seven horses had tested positive for traces of morphine in Britain during the period under scrutiny—sixteen were winners—and the source in each case was the same—Connolly’s Red Mills 14% Racehorse Cubes—so the outcome of the hearing would have a ripple effect on the other cases.

  Morphine occurs naturally in feed, often in trace amounts. All the parties agreed on that. At issue was the definition of a threshold level, or how much morphine it takes to affect a horse’s performance. On Mullins’s behalf, scientists had submitted papers with evidence that trace amounts of the substance have no effect, positive or negative, and yet the Jockey Club was resolute about its “zero tolerance” policy. A horse was disqualified if any morphine at all turned up in a sample—a rule Mullins and his attorneys objected to as antiquated, considering the sort of technology available in the twenty-first century.

  To get some background on the situation, I spoke with Noel Brennan of Connolly’s Red Mills, whose headquarters are in Goresbridge, Kilkenny. The company is family owned, with no outside shareholders, and has been around since 1908, initially selling seeds and later diversifying into horse feed in 1963. “With this morphine business, some of us feel like we’ve been here since 1908,” Brennan kidded, having a laugh at his own expense. The case sounded bad to the uninformed public, he admitted, a black mark on Connolly’s proud history, because morphine carries a connotation of race-fixing and doped horses.

  “Red Mills fed fifty-six percent of the winners in Ireland last year,” Brennan said, doing some image-polishing. “We also fed thirty-three percent of the winners at the Cheltenham Festival.” In truth, that’s a noteworthy accomplishment since Red Mills has as many as fifteen competitors. The morphine incident was predictable, Brennan felt, a grenade waiting to explode. Everyone knew about the potential for feed to be contaminated, but no one was willing to do much about it. “The science is there, but the Irish Turf Club and the Jockey Club won’t spend the money on testing,” he said. “They say it doesn’t occur often enough for them to bother.”

  As well as being a publicity nightmare for Red Mills, the disciplinary panel’s hearing was expensive. Not wanting to lose a big customer like Mullins, the company had agreed to foot all the legal bills, and that would raise the cost of their insurance premiums—a waste, in Brennan’s opinion. Red Mills would much rather have tossed the money into a kitty to fund the research needed to rewrite the rule-book. He believed the Turf and Jockey Clubs were blinded by tradition, age-old bodies resistant to change.

  The two-day inquiry did not go well for Mullins and Red Mills after their fourteen-month wait, despite the evidence compiled to support them. The Jockey Club stuck to its guns, upheld the disqualification, and ordered Mullins to reimburse the Club for its legal fees of about five thousand pounds. Mullins was aggrieved, as he should have been, since during the hearing Dr. Peter Webbon, the Jockey Club’s chief veterinary officer, stated that any concentration of morphine up to fifty nanograms per milliliter couldn’t possibly affect a horse’s performance, and Be My Royal’s level was far below the benchmark.

  In light of that, Mullins suggested the samples be tested again to demonstrate the point. His offer was rejected, yet there was a single bright spot for him. The disciplinary panel also heard that the Jockey Club had instructed the Horseracing Forensic Laboratory to apply the fifty-nanograms-per-milliliter threshold level to all samples tested in the future. Mullins’s solicitors grabbed at that as a hook on which to hang an appeal, but Willie was still bitterly disappointed, a scapegoat for a crime he didn’t commit.

  AFTER HIS SETBACK, Willie Mullins returned to a wet Saturday evening in Dublin. At our house, we had a coal fire burning against the inhospitable weather and a leg of lamb in the oven. I listened to the steady drip of rain on the roof, a pleasant sound if you’re not at Thurles, while Imelda sat on the couch reading the paper. The boys were in their rooms doing whatever it was they did in their private realms—the older writing in his journal, maybe, while the younger blasted through the streets of Vice City, playing Grand Theft Auto. The heart of winter, the hearth for warmth, the afternoon’s racing at Fairyhouse over and the races at Punchestown due tomorrow, on the first Sunday in February.

  I’d just come back from O’Herlihy’s after a pint and a deep analytical discussion with Reilly, so the kitchen table was covered with my notebooks and old copies of the Post. I was charting the arc of the season to date, a record of the usual vagaries, of the mighty ascending and then brought crashing to earth. What had I learned in the past four months? Mainly how difficult it is for any trainer to keep a good horse fit when faced with a vast array of perils—viruses, injuries, and a random dagger of misfortune that could strike anywhere, at any time—all in hopes that the horse would be ready to shine, however briefly, at the Cheltenham Festival.

  Best Mate and Moscow Flyer were idle now and wouldn’t be seen in public for another six weeks. After Jair du Cochet’s superior form in the Pillar Property Chase, Guillaume Macaire had signed on for the Gold Cup, after all. Michael Hourigan remained tight-lipped about whether or not Beef Or Salmon would run in the Irish Hennessy next Sunday, or be shelved until mid-March. The ante-post odds for the top horses, though they varied from bookie to bookie, made Best Mate the overwhelming favorite, as low as 4–7 in some shops, while Jair du Cochet was at 6–1 and Kingscliff and Beef Or Salmon at 14–1.

  As I carved the lamb, fragrant with rosemary, I remembered Tom Costello and his five sons in their enigmatic kingdom in faraway Newmarket-on-Fergus. No doubt they felt an emotional attachment to Best Mate—Tom Jr. had broken the colt and helped to raise him—and would eagerly attend to his Gold Cup bid, but I was curious about whether the Costellos were already focused on a future champion. Were they a few steps ahead of the ordinary mortals again? Their horse-trading had acquired such an air of mystery I couldn’t consider my education complete without a visit to their farm, although how many secrets they’d divulge to any outsider was an open question.

  FEBRUARY

  The Waiting Game

  Along the River Barrow in Leighlinbridge, County Carlow, magpies were flitting about over a field, their colors flashing—black, white, iridescent greens and purples—against a drizzly sky. It was the sort of morning that makes you want to stay in bed with your book or your lover, or both, but I was meeting Willie Mullins to talk about the Jockey Club’s ruling. He owns a hundred-acre farm near the river, where he lives with his wife and kids in an old stone barn he lovingly restored after his marriage. On the front lawn, I saw a sculpture of a horse and jockey fashioned from wire and hammered metal scaling a hedge, with some Christmas lights still threaded through the mesh.

  I found Willie at his gallops. He has a pair of them, a newer one of about a mile and an older one of two and a half furlongs. He keeps about a hundred horses at the yard and stood by a sand ring, supervising ten or so as they warmed up. He gave me a formal handshake, more reserved than the other trainers I’d visited, concentrating intently on the movement of his stock and not inclined to chitchat. Whereas Michael Hourigan comes at the job with a boisterous energy, a
nd Jessie Harrington with an equestrian’s ardor, Mullins is conservative and business-like, meticulous by nature.

  When the string had finished exercising, and the horses were cooling down, we left for his office in another converted barn to escape the rain. “Been here long?” I asked, making polite conversation.

  “Not long. About eighteen years.”

  “Did you grow up around here?”

  “No, the home place is about five miles away,” he said, as if it belonged to a different archipelago in the great ocean of Carlow. The measures of time and distance were those of a country person, reflecting Mullins’s deep-rooted sense of place.

  His office was well organized, as you’d expect from a finicky man who cares about every detail. His assistant sat at one end, while Willie’s desk was at the other, neatly stacked with faxes and mail, a laptop at the ready. The only farmer’s touch was a fly strip dangling from the ceiling over Mullins’s chair, dotted with dead flies. The shelves held rows of form books and stud books, and there were many trophies, plaques, and photos, including a montage of his four winners of the Champion Bumper at Cheltenham: Wither Or Which (1996), Florida Pearl (1997), Alexander Banquet (1998), and Joe Cullen (2000).

  Mullins had won some of the trophies himself as a jockey. In early middle-age, he is still fit for the saddle. He has a long-jawed face, and his reddish hair is thinning and thatched with gray. In spite of his serious demeanor—his hands were folded, as if he were about to suffer through an exam—he’s known to like a bit of fun. “You were a good rider,” I said.

  A half-smile. “Good enough.”

  He was being modest, a fitting trait for royalty. More than once, he’d been Ireland’s amateur champion. Although Paddy Mullins had carried on about how he wanted his sons to choose a career that didn’t involve horses, he was responsible for Willie riding in races. Arriving home from boarding school for a weekend visit in 1973, Willie learned that his dad had taken out a license for him. Not only that, he was booked to ride in a bumper at Fairyhouse on Sunday. He went on to win a big race at the Cheltenham Festival on Paddy’s Hazy Dawn in 1982.

  I’d heard similar stories countless times by now. So many Irish trainers shared a similar background, their lives joined to horses in childhood and linked to them forever after. Willie doubted he could do anything else, really. “I’d go bananas in a regular office,” he said, although he doesn’t find training easy. His season had been below par to date, I thought, with such horses as Hedgehunter and Florida Pearl just hitting their stride, but he disagreed. He believes a trainer is always going to be frustrated and must learn to cope with it or else. Some things just can’t be fixed, no matter how skillful you are. Six of his horses had failed to scope clean that morning, for instance, and would miss their weekend races.

  I glanced at the montage again. “Why do the Irish do so well in the bumper at Cheltenham?” I asked. The English have won it only twice in the past decade.

  “We have a better program,” Mullins informed me. “There’s good prize money in bumpers here. If you’ve got a good horse in England, you don’t bother with National Hunt races on the flat. You go off jumping right away.”

  Willie keeps a handful of flat horses himself, so he can race during the summer when the jumps game slows to a crawl. If a horse runs well, he might sell it, but he also turns some flat horses into hurdlers and even chasers on occasion. It’s a question of establishing a horse’s capabilities—of finding the right level, as Hourigan had said. Willie knows a Grade One type immediately, too, but he drops his novices and juveniles in wherever it seems appropriate. “Separates the wheat from the chaff.”

  “Lots of chaff,” I said, recalling the Tattersalls sale, and he nodded.

  When I changed the subject to Florida Pearl, Mullins brightened considerably. About Richard Johnson I was still curious. Why had Johnson flown in to ride in the Normans Grove Chase? Was his presence part of a master plan to skin the bookies? “No, it was just that all the A-list Irish jockeys were unavailable, and Richard had been on the horse before,” Willie said, and I felt strangely disappointed, robbed of the paranoia that has cost me so much money down the years. Was a belief in honesty and even justice the key to successful handicapping? If so, I’d go to my grave a loser.

  Given the Pearl’s age and his physical problems, Mullins was elated about his recovery and progress, all credit to Grainne Ni Chaba. On the Saturday just past, he had entered Florida Pearl in two important chases, one at Ascot and the other at Thurles, even though the horse would probably run next in the Irish Hennessy, but Willie likes to cover all the bases. Still, it seemed weird to me, and my paranoia, only half-dead, lurched back to life. “If you’ve got a horse that’s good enough for Ascot,” I asked, “why bother with Thurles?”

  Another little smile. “In case the grandstand at Ascot had burned down.”

  You can’t beat Willie Mullins when it comes to caution, I thought. In fact, he swears by multiple entries and plays a kind of poker at the Festival. He’ll enter a horse in two or three races, each at a different distance, then wait till the last instant, when all the cards are on the table, before he declares himself. The strategy has its merits. Since 1994, Mullins has more Cheltenham winners than any Irish trainer, seven to Edward O’Grady’s six.

  “I’ve got about twenty-five entries this year,” he reckoned, “but I may wind up with only four or five runners.” His guess was way off—he wound up with seventeen. If an owner has a horse that’s even remotely qualified for Cheltenham, you can be sure the horse will be on the ferry to Holyhead.

  Yet the buy-in isn’t cheap. Each Festival entry costs about two hundred dollars and has to be paid far in advance, often before a horse has proven itself. The policy, reasonably new, had upset some trainers, who saw it as a way for Racecourse Holdings Trust (RHT), Cheltenham’s parent organization, to raise more prize money and increase the Festival’s profile—a move, that is, toward a more corporate, commercial approach. Phillip Hobbs was the most vocal critic. He had forty entries at that point, but only two confirmed runners in Rooster Booster and Flagship Uberalles.

  In response to the outcry, Edward Gillespie, Cheltenham’s managing director, suggested the racecourse wanted to stimulate the ante-post market. When there are more entries, there are more choices and longer odds, leading gamblers who dream of cashing a monster, life-transforming bet to plunge more recklessly, but the idea that RHT would be so concerned about the bookies’ welfare was a trifle farfetched. RHT’s decision to stretch the Festival to four days (and maybe pad it out with a few lesser races) also had many trainers scratching their heads. With his sense of history and tradition, Mullins was among them.

  “I’m on the anti side,” he said. “I prefer three days of top-class racing. If there are new races that ought to go in, I’d get rid of one or two of the handicaps to make room. I’m sure it will be financially rewarding for Cheltenham.”

  The rain was pounding on the roof now. Willie had some things to do, so he sent me back to the gallops, where Florida Pearl would soon appear. “I’ll be there in five minutes,” he shouted as I went out the door, but he was on farmer’s time. With only a flimsy fold-up umbrella for protection, I waited twenty minutes before he joined me, and he’d had the nerve to change into a waterproof outfit. The riders going around, all wearing similar gear, were amused to see me there, a stranger drenched to the skin. How the stranger must adore horses! As at other yards, many of the riders were from abroad—Pakistan, India, Finland, Ukraine. The heavy winter ground made it tough for the lighter ones. A jockey has to be strong to control a horse who acts up, and horses can be as contrary as us in nasty weather.

  I threw away my umbrella after a while, its spokes decimated by the wind, and resigned myself to a case of bronchitis. Florida Pearl came up from the stables in company with Alexander Banquet. The horses are pals and live in stalls next to each other. Every celebrity horse has a sidekick, apparently, a Tonto for every Lone Ranger. Did the pair always work
together? “Not always,” Willie said, as precise as ever. “But often. They can both be lazy, and they like a bit of competition. Alexander Banquet would do nothing on his own. Florida Pearl’s not so bad.”

  The horses trotted through the mud, off to complete two one-mile circuits of the newer B-shaped gallop. On Florida Pearl was Tracy Gilmour, an American and his longtime lass, as alert to his psyche as anyone could be. He is a beautiful athlete and seemed to know it, aware of occupying a niche above the others, and when he swung into action, he looked a proper consort for his trainer, all perfectly sculpted muscle and princely action. Alexander Banquet is a more rough-hewn type. There’s a hint of the barroom brawler about him, and he’s able to take a few knocks without coming unglued. He has stamina to spare, too. A little Rottweiler named Sybil nipped at Florida Pearl’s heels, and Florida enjoyed the game and whinnied, but Alexander Banquet had no use for the dog and scared it away.

  As the horses began their first circuit, Willie and I discussed Ruby Walsh, his jockey of choice, who rides out for Mullins up to three times a week, although he’s based mostly in England. Again I listened to a litany of praise for Ruby, yet Willie also expressed an almost paternal concern for him. Being away from Ireland for such long periods must be hard on Ruby’s soul, Willie thought. “It’s a difficult life,” he commiserated. “On the motorways day after day.”

  Somewhere on the farm Be My Royal, now retired, was roaming. Another irony of the morphine case was that the horse had suffered a career-ending injury in the Hennessy. I’d saved up until the last to ask Mullins about the scandal, imagining he might still be sensitive about the verdict, and he was. “Zero tolerance! That’s an impossible standard to meet,” he said heatedly. “Red Mills stated as much to the Jockey Club four years ago! Sure, we lost in court, but we got a jury of the people. It’s all out in the open now. What do they call it? Natural justice.”