A decade later, in January 1989, at the time I was riding for Barney Curley, our paths would unexpectedly cross again. I knew that Barney Curley and Tommy Stack were good friends from Barney’s Ireland days, and, to my delight, Tommy Stack asked Barney Curley if I would ride his horse in the big race in Ireland in a few days’ time. It was a huge honour for any jockey in my position – Tommy Stack was one of Ireland’s most widely respected trainers; he had been Champion Jockey, he’d won the Grand National, and Red Rum, who he had won the National on, was perhaps the best-known racehorse of all time in UK racing history. In my eyes, the man was one of the greats. I was elated.
I was to ride at Leopardstown in the Ladbroke Handicap Hurdle, one of the most competitive hurdle races of the year in Ireland. The horse I was to ride was Tommy Stack’s only jumper at the time, a big, tall, rangy, unfurnished gelding called Kingsmill.
The night before the race, the ex-champion-turned-trainer and I met up in my hotel and sat down to discuss tactics on how best to ride Kingsmill. It was not the most straightforward of situations – there was a huge punt on the horse – but having only run a couple of times before, he was still very inexperienced; essentially, a novice in a big handicap. And so we discussed strategies on the optimal way to mask his inexperience and get him to deliver.
Come race day, however, despite my best efforts, he finished third to Redundant Pal and Atteses. I realized after the fact what I could have done better. Every horse is different and it is very important in racing to factor this in, and then to understand, as partners, how much the two of you can give of yourselves, for as long as you can give and to where it will take you. With Kingsmill, it was all about rhythm and I had ridden him too forward in the race, a style which, in hindsight, didn’t do him justice. When I came back in, I remember telling Tommy Stack, ‘If I rode that horse again, I’d ride him with different tactics.’
It so happened that I did get the opportunity to ride Kingsmill again, at Leopardstown in the Irish Champion Hurdle, one month later on 6 February 1989. As in the Ladbroke Hurdle, he was once again the gamble of the race, being backed from 14/1 to 8/1. Both Kingsmill and I had learnt from riding Leopardstown a month previously, and I knew what to do differently this time.
As soon as the race started, I put it to the test. I held up Kingsmill as Master Swordsman set a fast pace, establishing a five-length advantage from an early stage, followed by Paddy Mullins’s Cloughtaney. For horses of that class, I felt that our rivals seemed to be going too fast early on and that it strung them out. In my opinion, there was only one way to ride Leopardstown and that was around the inner. So I decided to take a chance and drop Kingsmill out and let him jump and creep his way into contention when the leaders began to tie up. I was deliberately riding a waiting race and I was able to establish Kingsmill’s cruising speed, which I didn’t feel I had done effectively in the Ladbroke Handicap. The rain had loosened the ground and that also helped him.
After the third last, Cloughtaney took over from Master Swordsman, chased by Jim Bolger’s Elementary. I went third into the straight with Kingsmill jumping beautifully, travelling beautifully. It may have looked as though Kingsmill was the only one to quicken in the straight but it was more a case of keeping up the gallop as the rest faltered. This was a calculated piece of riding on my part and when I dropped Kingsmill in, making gradual progress from the fourth last, he was travelling easily.
We cruised up to take the lead approaching the last, and then it was over: in a dramatic improvement to his performance from just a month ago, he won the Irish Champion Hurdle by ten lengths. I delivered the 8/1 chance without resorting to the stick.
It was my first big winner for Tommy Stack. In a post-race interview, he would say, ‘I’m very impressed by Declan – not only by his riding but by his attitude before and after a race. He puts a lot of thought into what he’s going to do and his post-race explanations are first class. He should go a long way.’
Our trust and our friendship both began to blossom from that moment on.
He started bringing me over to Ireland regularly to ride his horses, and sometimes he would send his horses over to England when the ground in Ireland was too soft. One of the most outstanding horses he had at the time, that ran in England, was Gale Again.
I first had the pleasure of ‘meeting’ Gale Again at Sandown Park in the first week of March 1994. He was a black gelding, not more than 16 hands tall, with a short back, and a beautiful stride low to the ground, showing a real preference for fast ground. I had never ridden the horse, and although Tommy Stack had briefed me on him prior to the race, I was in for a wonderful treat. Because when I actually rode him for the first time, he stayed true to his name – he quite forcefully blew me away. I remember being so surprised at how electric he was over an obstacle; so quick, so efficient, so economical. He excited me no end and I remember thinking to myself, If I could ever create that perfect horse to be partnered by me, it would be in the image of Gale Again.
A victory so easily achieved at Sandown led to high aspirations for Gale Again. Tommy Stack decided to run him in the Grand National the following month. I was cautiously optimistic in the run-up to the day. I felt that with good ground, there was no reason why this horse wouldn’t stand a great chance of winning the event – he was such a class act, among the best of the best.
Regrettably, the weather gods conspired against us. Come National day, the heavens opened in Liverpool, and Gale Again was taken out, quite wisely, by Tommy Stack, for soft ground. He went instead to the intense racing theatre that is Cheltenham, where I rode him in the Silver Trophy Chase a few weeks later.
The thrill of riding a horse with such tremendous pace and the ability to jump as fast and as elegantly as Gale Again could is second to none, and I consider myself fortunate to have ridden him over the course of my career as a professional jockey. That it would turn out to be both the best, and the last, race of my life – as I knew it – makes it all the more poignant.
The Silver Trophy Chase is run over 2 miles and 5 furlongs and is usually the highlight of the first day of The April Meeting at Cheltenham. That year, the race was being run with six runners, all good horses, making it a very competitive field. It’s always great to line up in a race where you know there will be a contested pace, and Wind Force ridden by Neale Doughty for Gordon Richards was a guaranteed pacesetter, as was Garrison Savannah, ridden by Richard Dunwoody for Jenny Pitman. For me, this meant I could slot my horse into his cruising speed quite quickly and ride a patient race. We had seventeen fences to jump in all and this was exactly the kind of race where I could ride the race to suit my horse, very easily, very effectively.
Right from the start and through the top half of the race, Wind Force and Garrison Savannah were sustaining a good gallop. They were followed by Far Senior and Southern Minstrel. Graham McCourt on Elfast was riding, like me, a waiting race and I knew he would prove to be my biggest danger. To my advantage, he was tracking the field, riding tactically, and I slotted in behind him. My double advantage was that for a lot of the race he seemed to forget that I was behind him – I capitalized on this small lapse in his judgement.
As we set out on the final circuit, the next was a downhill fence, the eighth. It was still Wind Force that had made every yard so far, leading Garrison Savannah by a couple of lengths. Keeping tabs on Garrison Savannah was Southern Minstrel towards the outside, then Far Senior a couple of lengths down in fourth place. Then Elfast with Graham McCourt in fifth, and yet to make any sort of move, to the back of the field, I was patiently riding Gale Again.
Below me, Gale Again was at his glorious best – the dream horse that every race-rider wishes the genie would grant him. So perfect was his stride, when in rhythm with it, you felt you couldn’t meet a fence wrong. Hind leg, hind leg, fore leg, fore leg – the dance of his gallop, the beat of our bodies, as we raced together, man and beast, as one. To have that level of trust in a horse and to have that horse reciprocate with trust in you
is exhilarating, a feeling second to none. You ride to win, of course, you always ride to win. But in cases like this, you also ride for the joy of riding. You feel an intoxicating sense of freedom. You don’t want to be anywhere else, doing anything else. You feel – alive.
Six from home, I gradually started moving closer. Four from home, I had crept up to third place. As we raced down towards the third last, Wind Force was still in front, Elfast was stalking Wind Force and I was biding my time, waiting for them to play their hand.
When we rounded the final bend with two fences to jump, Wind Force seemed to be leading only on sufferance. Behind him, Graham McCourt was brilliant on Elfast, as savvy as a rider could get. At this point, for all intents and purposes, it was only him and me in the race, playing a game of poker on horseback. It was just a matter of who would outsmart whom, and when.
Then, just as Graham McCourt kicked on smoothly upsides Wind Force, thinking he would slip away from me, I stayed my pace, still directly in his shadow. He looked over his shoulder at this point to see the danger behind him, but he couldn’t see me, such was my position – my position to pounce.
But I still wasn’t ready to play my trump card.
In any race, you have to know the horse you are riding, you have to have established his cruising speed, you have to know exactly what that horse will find from the gear you are travelling in. And you have to know when to release that.
I released Gale Again getting away from the back of the second last.
And then it was Elfast and Gale Again stride for stride as we raced towards the seventeenth and final fence, and I produced Gale Again to challenge at the last. I had total belief in him when I fired him at this last fence. He sprang off the ground from outside the wing as if he was a bird in flight. Such was the intensity of that final mighty fight for the finish that, had either one of us fallen at the fence, we would still be falling …
We ended twenty-five lengths clear of Far Senior in third place.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a race where two horses have gone to that last fence at Cheltenham at the speed that those two horses went. Any spectator watching this race wouldn’t have had the heart to take sides. On display were two jockeys riding as well as they could ride.
A race of winners.
A true performance.
Many years later, Tommy Stack would recount the details of this particular race with both great nostalgia and great pride. ‘Declan is the one person you want on your horse in any race,’ he would say, his voice brimming over with genuine emotion.
And so, when I look back on this race, I feel a deep sense of fulfilment. And achievement. And joy. But also, sadness. Undoubtedly there is a tinge of sadness. Because if the person riding that horse was me, then I think I had reached a place in time on horseback that very few people get to. To be so at one with a horse, to be able to sit on a horse and travel its speed and jump like that and always be completely in rhythm with that horse, that is where I was on that ride.
And maybe, just maybe, this was the moment – that moment of imperturbable calm when the fires of desire have finally been quenched – when I was just beginning to want to be a jockey. Maybe I had reached a point, maybe I had taken it to a place that I didn’t expect to take it to …
People say it is easy to ride good horses, but to ride a horse in a way in which you are virtually controlling the entire event is a different matter altogether. I had achieved the ultimate goal. I had ridden the best race of my life.
Would there be better?
I would never know.
Five days later, on Bank Holiday Monday, in the direct line of sight of a grandstand full of holidaymakers, I would fall off a horse at the last hurdle.
A typical fall off a horse is no more than eight feet to the ground.
That’s how far my body fell.
What they don’t measure is how far the mind falls.
My mind fell down a black hole.
Deep and dark.
The wreckage could never be found.
But on this, the twenty-seventh day of April 1994, in the Cheltenham Silver Trophy Chase on Gale Again, I couldn’t be further from the bottom. This particular ride on this particular day on this particular horse, I was in a place in time I didn’t expect that I would ever be. The view from the peak was magnificent.
Christopher Goulding had once said of me that I have the appearance of being born astride a horse. If there was ever a time to live out his words, it was this.
This place in time.
Hello
‘The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.’
Mark Twain
Penumbra
Monday, 2 May 1994
It was all over before it even began.
The race had ended.
The dust had settled.
The air was still.
The racetrack stood eerily deserted.
Arcot lay on the ground, destroyed.
Next to him, I lay motionless.
Then, as if possessed, the left side of my body started convulsing uncontrollably. One arm, one leg, one side of my torso lifted themselves up off the ground and fell back again in rapid, violent jerks. The other arm, the other leg, the other side of my torso rested in blissful ignorance.
The signals generated by my damaged brain darted around dangerously as the two sides of my body lost equilibrium.
But even as the blood spurted from my brain and out of every orifice in my head, my eyes remained closed, peacefully, like those of a sleeping child.
Then, the paramedics arrived. To exorcize me.
It takes five minutes to boil an egg. It took four minutes to decide if I lived or died.
With the speed and efficiency of experts, the paramedics on site identified that I was having a seizure caused by bleeding from the brain. Look at that photograph of me in the global ‘Panorama’ section of Hello! magazine – sharing page space with Brigitte Bardot and Bill Clinton – lying on the stretcher in a neck brace, eyes closed, nose and mouth gurgling with blood. One of the paramedics has his hand under the right side of my head, along the length of my face, trying to stem the flow of blood from my brain. I never knew this man, nor would I ever meet him again, but these are the unsung heroes of one’s life. Whoever he is and wherever he is, I know now that his expertise in knowing exactly what to do at that moment in time was what kept me alive. Even if just for that moment. In the next moment, everything could have changed, such was my state of flux. But it didn’t matter. Every moment that I wasn’t dead, I was still alive.
From Haydock Park, I was transferred swiftly into the waiting ambulance and rushed to Warrington General Hospital. At Warrington, I had the second of my two seizures. A team of experts put me on a ventilator and stabilized my vitals so that I could live long enough to be moved to The Walton Centre for Neurology. They had one goal and one goal only – to keep me alive through the journey.
Later, I was told how fortunate I had been: had I arrived at Warrington four minutes later, I would have died. Four minutes; not three, not five. How it is possible to estimate someone’s chances like that, to narrow down their window of life or death with the precision of a clock, boggles the mind. And yet, they could; it was science.
When I met Charlie Whittingham for the first time, in the summer of 1985, he paid me one of the biggest compliments of my career. He said I could ride 4 furlongs on a horse in 11 seconds, 11 seconds, 11 seconds, 10 seconds – that I had a clock in my head. How I was able to do this, to break down the pace so precisely, I cannot explain, but I knew the fractions completely by instinct. This was not something that you could teach somebody, it came from within. You either had it or you didn’t; it was art.
My art, their science.
Which one was greater?
I question it not.
The answer is too humbling.
The Walton Centre for Neurology and Neurosurgery, part of the NHS Foundation Trust, is an institutional-looking building, every
bit as sombre in appearance as the business it conducts inside its red-brick and algae-green walls. At the time of my accident, it was one of only two hospitals in the country equipped to deal with brain trauma to the extent I had suffered; the other being Southampton, 240 miles away – as far south of England as Liverpool was north. To my great luck, The Walton Centre happened to be located a mere 26 miles from Haydock Park. It was there that I arrived, on a ventilator, in an ambulance, under police escort – such was the urgency of ‘now’. It was there that an innocuous-looking Welshman would be summoned from the golf course to save my life.
I wouldn’t meet Professor John Miles until much later, until after he had operated on me, until after I came out of my coma, but if you asked me to name the people without whom I couldn’t have survived, he’d rank top of the list. I cannot think of him or say his name without feeling immense gratitude towards him, for his skill, for his science. Perhaps he was just doing his job, living by the Hippocratic Oath, fulfilling a call of duty, but for me, it was enough to build faith. I put my life in his hands. No, actually my life was put in his hands. And he saved it. That’s faith.
When Professor Miles got the call, he was in the midst of a far more hazardous undertaking than trying to save lives. He was on the 5th hole at Heswall Golf Club, Wirral, trying to save par. Over the phone he was apprised of my condition from the CT scan that accompanied me from Warrington – it showed multiple fractures to my base-of-skull bone, and two blood clots on the inside of my skull, close to my brain. These clots were taking up space in my skull and, in so doing, were squeezing down on my brain. Because the brain – a soft cheese-like organ – is enclosed within the rigid skull, there is danger of compression caused by leaking blood. With enough bleeding, there can be so much build-up of pressure that oxygen-rich blood is prevented from flowing into the brain tissue, causing the brain to swell. Knowing from his experience that it would take at least twenty minutes to raise the bone flap sufficiently to give access to the blood clots, it was his decision to get the operation started straight away, before he even arrived on the scene. You cannot reverse damage to the brain – the clots had to be removed quickly.
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