decisions made each year upon these ancient grasslands set to the south of St Patrick’s Rock. This is Ballydoyle, the training grounds of Michael Vincent O’Brien, upon whose slender shoulders the grandiose plans of John Magnier and Robert Sangster would ultimately rest. Here in this private six-hundred-acre domain, five miles down the road from the historic town of Cashel, he has laid down perhaps the finest racing gallops in the world: some flat, some uphill, some dead straight like Newmarket, some curved like Epsom. But they are all perfectly cut grass tracks, white-railed as neatly as Ascot or Belmont Park, each stretch designed for the happiness and comfort of young horses, but ultimately designed to reveal them in all of their power and all of their vulnerability. Down towards the bottom end of the grounds stands one lonely ruin of a greystone Norman castle, a sentinel of another age and, in a way, a terrible reminder of the tolerance this land has for suffering.
This is not so much a training centre as a kingdom. And Vincent O’Brien is its ruler. On the mornings when the horses work, ridden steadily through their easy paces by men with timeless Irish names like Gallagher, Murphy, Rossiter and Doyle, the great trainer watches from his private little grandstand, alert to every nuance of the galloping racehorse. The twitching of ears which may signify worry, the slashing of a tail which may foretell temper or discomfort, the slight swerve to the left or right – ‘Is he still feeling that tendon?’ – the sound of their breath upon the morning air – ‘Is the chestnut horse clear in his wind?’ – and ‘Why did the big bay horse drop behind? Is he still too weak? Will he want another six weeks on the “easy list”?’
No conductor of any symphony orchestra requires more sensitivity, more powers of observation, more finely tuned instincts, more passionate desires for perfection than the great classic racehorse trainer. If Maestro O’Brien has a critic, I feel certain even that critic would nonetheless grant him one enduring and undisputed accolade: ‘Vincent misses nothing.’
He is a Cork man by birth, originally from a little village named Churchtown, forty miles south-west of Cashel, beyond the Galtee mountains, close to the town of Mallow. Vincent himself, like all Irish boys from that corner of the country, knew that a short distance to the south were the vast waters of Cork Harbour, which flow for almost thirteen miles from the Atlantic to the City docks. Cobh, they call it, the Harbour of Tears, the last sight a million Irish people ever had of their homeland, when they fled not only the Great Hunger of the nineteenth century, but also England’s shockingly cruel evictions of the people from their tiny tenant farms. Almost every family treasured the memory of relatives who were forced to leave.
Dan O’Brien himself, with his eight children, was very much a member of the Irish farming gentry. He had two hundred acres, deep in this horseman’s country. The world’s first steeplechase, which finished at the church steeple of Doneraile, was conducted close to the O’Brien land. Dan was greatly respected and in the Directory of Munster, published in 1893, in the section marked ‘Churchtown (Clergy and Gentry)’, there are seven people listed. One of them is D. O’Brien of Clashganniff House, Vincent’s first home. His father kept several mares on his land, and owned and raced horses locally. He regularly bought and sold prospective ‘chasers and hunters’.
All of the children were well educated. Vincent himself went away to college, and one of his sisters was sent to school in Paris. Upon Dan’s death, however, in 1943, the family suffered their first experience of a shortage of money. Farming in Ireland in the late 1920s and 1930s had been very, very bad. England, as ever, was at the root of their problems, trying to impose tax on these rural farmers. Eamon de Valera, the Brooklyn-born Premier, who had fought in the streets with a machine-gun during the Easter Rising of 1916, not altogether surprisingly refused to pay it. England hit back by refusing to buy Irish produce and there were years of great hardship for the farmers of Cork, and Limerick, and Kerry and Tipperary.
Vincent O’Brien took over the care of the horses, but there was little money when, the following year, he took out a training licence of his own. From these difficult beginnings he emerged from obscurity in the 1940s, when he was famous only locally for the magic he could work on horses, to international acclaim. By 1974 he was, indisputably, the best trainer of a jumping horse ever, with four Derby winners to his credit, three of them in the previous seven years – a record which may never be bettered and which carries with it the general accolade among most experts that Vincent is the finest horse trainer this world has ever seen. On the flat, over fences, sprints, marathons, hurdle races, colts or fillies. The beautifully tailored, slightly built Irishman, with his fast eyes, gentle speech and mystical touch with all horses, has proved beyond any doubt the master of the Sport of Kings in all of its facets.
Those who know him best swear he can see into the soul of a young horse. John Magnier says Vincent can look at a yearling and in his mind he can see the horse as it will be two years from now, preparing for a three-year-old classic race. His meticulous mind, his obsession with every tiny detail, has driven generations of assistant trainers mad. When he is preparing two or three top horses for championship races he rarely, if ever, speaks to his assistants. Everything is written down in clear, concise memorandums, lest anyone should forget anything. He once said, ‘It is quite difficult to remember everything yourself. To allow someone else to forget something you have already remembered would be rather silly.’
Like all of his family, Vincent is both a devout Irishman and a devout Roman Catholic, attending Mass each week. He has always resisted leaving Tipperary and training horses in England or even America, with their much bigger prize money and their markets for racehorses. His unyielding faith in the devotion and the horsemanship of his Irish stable staff have too strong a hold for that. But modern air transport, enabling him to take horses safely and quickly to the races in England, France and even America, also played a part in his decision to remain close to his beginnings. Above all, he cherished the quality of the land, and indeed of life, in this paradise for countrymen who like to hunt, or shoot, or fish the lovely salmon rivers.
But in Tipperary and in Waterford, Kilkenny and Cork, Kerry and Limerick, memories are long and the folklores are deeply ingrained. All across the sometimes sad, but heartbreakingly beautiful southern counties of southern Ireland there are ruins of great houses, which stand grey-stone frozen in the abyss of a seven-hundred-year-old quarrel with Ireland’s rich and imperious neighbours east across the St George’s Channel. Indeed, six years after the Easter Rising of 1916, Corkmen and Kerrymen were fighting with fearsome courage, shoulder to shoulder, in guerrilla warfare against England’s detested Black and Tans. Families like the O’Briens cannot escape their traditions, and indeed their very roots in this kingdom of saints and scholars. Their love for this land draws them together as children not of a greater God but certainly of J. P. Donleavy’s ‘Almighty Gaelic God, for whom this land alone is worthy of his blessings’.
‘I could never leave here,’ Vincent once told me back in 1975 when I was preparing an art book of classic racehorses. He was gazing west at the time, and the sun was crimson as it placed long shadows over the tranquil gallops of Ballydoyle. He stood quietly for a few moments, perhaps recalling the pounding hooves of the flying Nijinsky, or Sir Ivor, or perhaps Roberto. And he stared down at the old Norman tower, one of Ireland’s many reminders of conquest. And then I remember him smiling as he turned away and began to walk back towards the house. But he stopped once more, and he turned again towards the distant farmlands from which, down the years, so many had fled. And he was not smiling any more. And he just stood there, a five-foot eight-inch giant among Ireland’s patriots and said quietly, ‘Never.’
Empire building is not a basic ingredient of the Irish character. As a race they have usually been too busy trying to fight their way out from under England’s own historic ambitions to bother with any such delusions of their own. Men like Vincent O’Brien and John Magnier were the exceptions. In this land, the land of W. B. Yeats, Eugene O’Neill, Sean O’Casey, and the Dublin-born writers Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Brendan Behan, the pen has usually proved at least as mighty as the sword. All the same, Arthur Wellesley of Maynooth, later the first Duke of Wellington, scored a few points for the warrior
