Centaur

by Declan Murphy

  Faster. Higher. Stronger.

  See it, feel it, believe it.

  I was good enough then.

  I would be good enough now.

  The fragility of confidence versus the resilience of trust; the latter endured.

  Still, it wasn’t over. Given the absence of my right-side peripheral vision, it would have benefited me greatly if I had been drawn near the rail. Unfortunately, I was drawn in stall seven, in the middle of the track – there were seven horses between me and the rail on my right side.

  But I wasn’t going to let this shake my belief. I heard Pat Eddery’s voice in my head – I was thankful for it. Because more than anything, I couldn’t afford to let Jibereen feel my fear. Unlike most other sports, where the player or rider interacts with an inanimate object – a racket or a ball or a bike – riding involves working with a sentient being. And even the minutest of movements made by the rider – touches of the rein, shifting of body weight, changes in leg position, even a break in breathing pattern or a quickened heart rate – can be felt, and reacted upon, by the animal. I knew I could not afford for Jibereen to sense any misgivings I had.

  Fear was a hill. I was going to fight it.

  I narrowed my vision, and got my head into the zone, that state of single-minded immersion that was characteristic of me before any race. Serene and alert and totally in control. So completely focused was my mind that when my colleague Ray Cochrane turned to me at the starting stalls and said, ‘Declan, you haven’t pulled your goggles down,’ I replied, ‘Ray, I’m not going to need them.’

  I was in the flow.

  And when the gates opened I was out like the wind; poof, I was gone.

  I had one initial goal – to get to the rail. I got there quickly and within ten strides, I was able to find my horse’s cruising speed. As I had predicted during my workout, it was a little bit higher than the horses I was racing against. I knew that the most important thing for me was to keep Jibereen in his cruising speed, to sustain that pace for as long as I could.

  Ride the race to suit the horse and not the horse to suit the race.

  If I did this, I knew that even if a rival swooped in to take me on, I would remain confident in where I was. Exactly this happened at the 2-furlong pole; I stayed my cruising speed and it appeared for a moment that the field was going to swallow me up.

  There was a stillness in the air – a state of dynamic equilibrium – as if even a whisper would disturb the balance of the universe. I could feel it – the pent-up anticipation, the excitement, the expectation. Everybody was waiting. Everybody was watching. I could not let this slip.

  Then, a furlong and a half to the winning post, at that point on the track at Chepstow where the horses run downhill to the finish, I decided it was time.

  Time to let Jibereen go.

  Time to feel his speed.

  A racehorse in full flight is a thing of beauty; an artist, an enigma. An elite athlete that bursts into life in a bid to perform. Every minute at full gallop, a thoroughbred pumps some 1,800 cubic litres of air in and out of its lungs. Its heart beats 250 times – nearly five beats a second – to pump 300 litres of blood around its body, all to achieve that singular goal: speed.

  That day, the light shone on Jibereen. He was performing for me, one breath perfectly in time with one stride as he raced towards the finish, the organs in his body working together in exquisite harmony, pumping the oxygen from his lungs to his heart, from his heart to the muscles that powered his spectacular speed.

  And I felt it. At that moment, I felt it, like I had felt it my whole life. The spirit of the animal underneath me: the power and the pride, the swiftness and the strength, the majesty and the gentleness and the grace.

  I felt my horse.

  I was at one with it.

  I was a liminal being.

  I was CENTAUR.

  I let Jibereen go. He quickened half a stride. It was enough. He did it. He won.

  I threw my head back then, my eyes turned upwards to the sky. In the scattered blue light, I saw the sun on one side and the moon on the other; when I looked up, the heavens were mine.

  We had ridden a beautiful race. If I had gone half a gear faster than Jibereen’s cruising speed, he would not have had the finish in him to win the race. If I had gone slower than his cruising speed, he would not have picked up as well.

  How did it all come back so naturally? Because it was always this way. Whether or not I wanted to be a jockey, riding was in my bloodstream; it flowed in my veins.

  What nobody would know was that I had ridden this race using sound – my hearing – rather than sight – my vision – the whole way through. All of it, the whole thing, had been tactical, so as not to expose my weakness. It had been a risk of monumental proportions. But it had paid off.

  Here’s the thing about adversity.

  It either rekindles hope or destroys it.

  Which one wins? Hope or despair?

  You have to believe it’s hope.

  The story of my comeback victory was on the BBC Six O’Clock News. Rarely is there a sports story, let alone a racing story, on the Six O’Clock News. But there it was. I knew then that I had achieved the impossible.

  Everybody had thought me mad. ‘Why would you even want to? Why would you want to put yourself through that?’ they had asked.

  Because I had to. The power of the human spirit is indomitable. What was for me, would not pass me by.

  It hadn’t been an easy journey. Mentally, it had taken an incredible strength of will to get myself back into the physical shape where I could even allow myself to think it possible, let alone then actually do it. And then, to win it, had demanded something more than I had asked of myself before. But when things hit you the hardest, you find something within you, an intangible force that propels you forward. You draw immense power from this inner strength, but many times you don’t even know you have it until you are forced to depend on it.

  I had to. So I did. And it was only belief that had made it possible. An unshakeable, unbreakable belief in myself. What we forget sometimes about belief is that it is self-fulfilling. If you believe you are capable of something, you give everything of yourself to live up to your own expectations. If you believe you are not, you give up before you even try.

  I believed.

  Chepstow celebrated.

  Family cried.

  Colleagues whooped.

  Fans cheered.

  Geoff Lewis eulogized.

  Photographers clicked.

  Journalists scribbled.

  As for me, when I passed the winning post that day, walking up the dew-sparkled hill of Chepstow Racecourse, I felt many things. I felt happiness, yes. And pride. Satisfaction. Triumph. But more than anything – more than all of this put together, overshadowing every other emotion with a force so strong it tore down my walls – I felt relief. Just relief.

  And as the tears streamed down, I didn’t stop them. Because with the tears came the ultimate realization: I had played my part. I had repaid what I owed to the universe. I was free. Free from the burden of expectation. Free from the shackles of my mind.

  I had done it – I had placed my flag on the top of the mountain.

  There was just one last thing left to do.

  My name was Declan Joseph Murphy. I needed to find myself.

  And when I closed my eyes, I was once again that little boy astride Roger, riding free across the emerald fields of Ireland with my brothers and sisters, my head thrown back in laughter, my blue eyes shining with the sun.

  Into the Lap of the Gods

  ‘Sports people in general are a breed apart from most people.

  But most sports people – footballers, golfers, cyclists – they are true “masters of their destiny”, in one sense of the word, as to how much they want it; then it’s mind over matter to go out and get it.

  But as a jockey, you are actually putting your destiny on to a horse’s back, you are offering it up. So yes, you are “
master of your destiny” when you decide you want to do it, but you are still back into the lap of the gods where you started in the first place …’

  Pat Murphy, brother, trainer and former jockey

  Declan Murphy announced his retirement from the saddle shortly after riding and winning at Chepstow on 10 October 1995, only eighteen months after his accident.

  His complete recovery from one of the most horrific accidents in sporting history is regarded by many as a ‘medical marvel’, and his comeback win can be considered as much a victory for him as a victory for medical science, in particular for Professor John Miles and his team.

  Jibereen was the last win of his career.

  Jibereen, Chepstow, 1995.

  Epilogue

  ‘Why now?’ you ask. My story. ‘Why twenty years later?’

  It’s an excellent question, one that I’ve asked myself so many times during the course of writing this book.

  And the answer lies in the realization that in life, as in a story, timing is everything.

  Timing changes the meaning of things.

  Timing gives meaning to things.

  Today, the only reminder of my accident is the ridged, crescent-shaped dent on the top right side of my forehead – the mark of the incision where my skull was cut open. My friends often joke about it when they introduce me to people who don’t know who I am: ‘Can’t you see he rode horses,’ they say, ‘he’s got a hoof-print on his head!’

  I have been approached on three separate occasions with book offers, and once for a movie deal, but I couldn’t bring myself to consider them. I have always been a deeply instinctive person and, somehow, something never quite felt right. But I do have my reasons, and I want to share them with you; perhaps you’d like to know, because by now, you have travelled this journey with me, alongside me, stride by stride.

  First and most important, I am convinced that if I had shared my story immediately after my accident, racing would always have defined me and that’s not how I want to be defined. I am a man, who happened to ride horses. But before all else, I am a man. I am just a man. My career was incidental.

  Second, there are perhaps few people in the world more private than I am, and I never thought I could have shared what I had gone through with anybody – it seemed too personal, too invasive, too deep. I am, by nature, elusive, and there is an honesty demanded with a project such as this. An act of faith. I didn’t think I had it in me, this ability to reach into the recesses of my heart, to bare my soul. Hand someone my life. What if they dropped it?

  Third, what happened to me on 2 May 1994 was not one event, it was the beginning of a passage. A deeply personal passage. It changed me as a man – how could it have not? Fame is fleeting, memories last for ever, but when you’re stripped of both, it really doesn’t leave you with much. I carried a lot of pain inside me for a long, long time. But I didn’t speak to anybody about it. Not anyone, not ever. I couldn’t allow myself to. Our minds are flighty creatures, easily trapped; and the ability to be vulnerable is a gift – it releases the mind. In the eyes of the world, I may have recovered in a miraculously short amount of time, but when all that you have is taken from you, it takes a long time to heal. So for me to survive, I couldn’t afford the luxury of vulnerability. I had to protect myself, from myself. And then, once I had got to where I wanted to get to, when I had achieved what I set out to achieve, it was over. Packaged and put away. A closed chapter, relegated to the dusty aisles of the archives of my mind – I didn’t need to be reminded of it.

  Until now.

  I still cannot recall very much about the career that almost defined me. I have to be told which races I won, when I had won. But for the first time in twenty years, I have gone through newspaper clippings about myself, read the journalistic adulation for my rides, granted friends and family ‘permission to speak’, and I have been overwhelmed by it all. It was almost as if my life needed to advance away from it for me to be able to reflect upon it. Before the book, I would look back on my past with the detached curiosity of an interested third party. For the first time since the accident, I have allowed myself the privilege to cross that line. I have allowed myself access. It’s OK, I’ve said to myself. It’s OK.

  It is therapeutic to set the mind free. When Ami and I watch my races together on YouTube, I note the steady progression in my riding: the Irish Champion Hurdle, the Queen Mother Champion Chase, they were good rides; the Mackeson Gold Cup was a great ride; the Tripleprint Gold Cup on Fragrant Dawn was an even better ride; and then, when I watch myself on Gale Again in the Silver Trophy Chase, just days before my accident, I feel like I am at the zenith of my career.

  Could I have ridden a better race, or was that as good as it would ever get?

  But this I would never know, because in the very next ride, it would all be taken from me.

  And then, when I would eventually get it back – my life, my world, myself – everything else would have changed. Perspectives change. People change. And so it was with me. When I came back, what I wanted from life changed. Because I changed. The man who fell off the horse that day never really came back. A different man did.

  Sometimes, I wonder why I woke from that coma.

  I wonder why I am still alive. How I am still alive.

  When I look at it with hindsight, I think it almost impossible. When I was in the throes of it, I saw nothing as impossible.

  ‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’ wrote Dylan Thomas. ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’

  How did I do this, how did I defy death? I don’t know.

  And this raises those difficult, and not always comfortable, questions of science and religion and plain dumb luck. Maybe it was my strength of mind. My will. That unshakeable grit that defined me. Or maybe it had nothing to do with that. Maybe it wasn’t my time. Maybe Death visited me – in those days of unconscious darkness – and decided I wasn’t ready to go. Maybe I politely told him to come back another time. Maybe he listened. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe I just got lucky. Maybe …

  But I did wake from that coma. How and why, I will never know, but I lived. And despite everything that was taken from me, it is the simple fact that I survived, that survives.

  And so there was never a moment’s anger from the day I regained consciousness.

  Never a bitter moment.

  Never why me.

  Never ever.

  I don’t have a score to settle with life. I don’t feel encumbered by it. I don’t feel in debt. What happened to me was meant to happen.

  Because at the end of it all, I consider myself incredibly fortunate. I am living a life that I may not have had. This is the song in my heart. Most people who suffer brain damage to the extent I did are not alive to tell their stories. And yet, here I am now – a walking, talking man; two eyes, two hands, two feet, and a brain. I can speak, I can hear, I can see, I can feel.

  I can tell my story.

  Everybody, from friends to family to people who barely knew me, universally said I changed after my accident. They said I lost myself in trying to become the man in the newspapers, in trying to become the person the world said I was. But what no one knows, until today, is that I couldn’t remember who I was. I had no idea who I was. I was becoming who I was expected to be without any true understanding of who that person was. On the walls of my home hung the reminders of some former glory. Everywhere I turned, they were there. And yet I couldn’t remember any of it. My life before my accident was like watching a movie, watching the sporting highlights of someone, once famous, now long gone, long forgotten. I cannot even begin to tell you how hard it is to reinvent yourself just to be accepted. So yes, I did change. I had to change. If I lost myself, if I became the man in the newspapers, it was because the newspapers were all I had to go by. My only sense of self was coming from what other people said about me.

  No one knew this. There was no way they could. Nobody sees the fight within you. They see what they see with their eyes; they do
n’t see your spirit. On the outside I looked fine and nobody knew what was happening on the inside. No one knew the truth.

  This book is my truth.

  My first discussion of the book with Ami is a thirty-minute chat on a park bench. The next is at a Starbucks at Waterloo station, lasting a little more than an hour. I go into the first meeting convinced that I don’t want to write a book; I come out of the second convinced that I do.

  She asks me in the very beginning what the purpose of the book is for me; what is that one message that I want to leave our readers with. I tell her that it is simple. My purpose, my message, is Hope. I say to her, ‘I want to tell people that what happened to me is not something to be afraid of. When I was in a coma, I was happy. It wasn’t a bad place. I would have won either way. I was either going to wake up and be well again, or stay in the coma and be a child for eternity.’

  When I say this, the tears well in her eyes. I crack a joke and she laughs. I know then that we’ll get on. There’s very few who laugh at my jokes …

  Having someone write your story with you is not dissimilar to the act of riding a horse. In both cases, you are trusting another living being with your life. There are no broken bones, but there is all of the rest – dedication and courage and great skill. Sweat, blood, tears, passion, pain. Trust is everything. Mutual respect, paramount. My instinct is never wrong – it took under two hours for me to establish that we had all of this – an unspoken communication, an understanding, total and implicit. Our working dynamic has been the lifeblood of this book. Without it, Centaur could never have been.

  But even then, and at several moments in the months to follow, I was totally unprepared for the full implications of the commitment I had made. I consider myself a fairly intelligent man – I take decisions after great thought, after weighing the odds, after considering all possible downside scenarios. Yet, there was so much that surprised me, so much that overwhelmed me. Neither did I anticipate how people who touched my life more than twenty years ago would come back into it to offer their help and support with such warmth and affection. Nor did I anticipate how emotionally charged it would be for me to relive those moments of my life through their eyes.