My life with horses
Conor’s passion still burning bright
WEXFORD TOWN born Conor O’Dwyer has spent most of his life involved with horses and has been training in Kildare for twelve years now.
And he will always be remembered for his unique record as a jockey at the Cheltenham Festival where he had just four winners, but all were in the blue riband events of the National Hunt year, two in the Gold Cup and two in the Champion Hurdle.
He won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1996 on Imperial Call for Fergie Sutherland when he was already 30 years old; he won back-to-back Cheltenham Champion Hurdles in 2004 and 2005 on Hardy Eustace for Dessie Hughes, and he won his second Gold Cup ten years after his first when just short of 40, on War of Attrition in 2006, trained by Mouse Morris.
There was no history of horses in the O’Dwyer family before Conor’s time, but he developed a love of them.
His dad, Senan, died in October, 2009. He had been a radio officer on ocean-going liners before settling back home where he became a book-keeper/accountant. His mam, Kay (nee Gaul), was a nurse and ended up as matron at Wexford Hospital.
Risteárd was the only other child, and he developed a travel bug which he has never lost.
Conor was a friend of John Berry in Clonard (former great point-to-point rider and nephew of legendary Wexford trainer, Padge Berry), and they had horses and ponies so that was his first contact with them.
When he was just about ten, Conor used to ride his bike out to work at Liam Codd’s stables at Ferrycarrig before school, and went back out again in the evenings.
He left Wexford C.B.S. at 14 and the parents bought a pony trekking school in Rosslare, which he helped to run with his mother. After a year of that he got a place at the Apprentice Training School in Kildare, now known as RACE, and his love of horses was soon confirmed as a way of life.
He went on to learn his trade at the Frank Oaks and Francis Flood yards, and one of his companions at Flood’s was top jockey, Frank Berry, now racing manager with the JP McManus empire.
So was launched a very successful riding career which finally ended at the Fairyhouse Grand National meeting with a closing victory on Mister Top Notch on March 24, 2008.
He set himself up as a trainer at Rossmore House, Friarstown, Co. Kildare, the previous October, along with his wife, Audrey. They have two sons, David (aged 27) and Charlie (17), who has taken up riding.
David had spent a couple of years working in Canada and moved to work in New Zealand just a month before the Covid-19 storm broke. He decided to ride it out over there rather than trying to get home, and is doing well.
‘I had mixed emotions about retiring but I thought I’d got out on a good note. I’d started training and both jobs require one hundred per cent. Something had to go,’ Conor said.
Conor’s first winner as a trainer was with Hangover at Punchestown on January 12, 2008, while he was still riding. In fact, the next day he rode Mister Top Notch to win the €110,000 Pierse Leopardstown Chase.
He had decided to retire from riding to concentrate on the training, but he did not formally announce it. He told commentator and Racing Post columnist, Tony O’Hehir, at a meeting in Naas some time later, and Tony asked him to hold off for a week so he would be able to exclusively break the retirement news in his next Post column.
In the meantime, Davy Fitzgerald (the trainer, not the hurler!) asked him a couple of days before Easter to ride Mister Top Notch at Fairyhouse. He had already ridden the horse eight times in the previous two years, winning three times on him, and he decided “Why not give it one last shot?”
Mister Top Notch (3/1) was reverting to hurdles for this race, immediately before the Irish Grand National, and he and Conor won it without breaking sweat, ahead of David Casey on Charlie Swan’s Boulavogue (3/1) and Paul Carberry on Noel Meade’s Charlie Yardbird (10/1).
This was indeed fitting company, and a fitting occasion, to finally call a halt to a great riding career which produced over 700 winners, a whole host of them in the top flight.
He rode his first race in Roscommon in 1982, and two years and eight races later, he rode his first winner in a claiming bumper at Limerick.
In 26 years in the saddle he scaled the heights at Cheltenham, Aintree, Leopardstown, Punchestown, Fairyhouse and all points between. He was a model professional and it was now time to concentrate fully on the training side of the sport.
His one regret is that he never won the Grand National. ‘I was third in it the first year I rode, and I had another 14 goes after that. It’s not necessarily the classiest race but I still wanted to win it.’
Conor summed ups his riding career: ‘Ninety per cent of my riding career has been blessed with good luck, being in the right place at the right time.’
It could be said that the gods have not been so benevolent to his training career. He was just a couple of years into it and going well when the great financial crash hit the country and clobbered racing, as owners and syndicates suddenly could not afford to indulge their hobby.
He weathered the storm and in recent years has built up a nice team, diversifying into the flat as well as the jumps. He has 32 horses in right now, evenly divided, and was looking forward to running about ten promising twoyear-olds on the flat this year.
And then came the Covid-19 crisis, to deliver another serious blow to racing. He is hoping it will not go on too long and that some of the season can be rescued, and he thanked his owners for sticking with him.
His 17-year-old son Charlie has taken-up race riding and has had about one hundred rides on the flat so far. He is quite a tall lad and Conor feels his longer-term future may be over the jumps.
One of the proudest moments of Conor’s training career came last June when he gave Charlie the leg up on his first winner, Roses Queen, trained by Conor and owned by Audrey.
Charlie showed all his dad’s fighting qualities to prevail by a short head, and he received a great welcome back to the winner’s enclosure.
It seemed fitting that this was at Fairyhouse where Conor had hung up his boots eleven years earlier after his final win on Mister Top Notch.
It was not so much a case of the wheel turning full circle, though there was an element of that, it was more like the wheel just starting out on a whole new journey.