Aidan O’Brien interview

Since Desert King’s victory in the 1997 Irish Derby, Aidan O’Brien has dominated the race. He tells Vincent Hogan that his success is down to teamwork and the expertise of his Ballydoyle ‘family’

HERE they come then, announcing themselves up the sandy rise with that frothing, rat-a-tat pant of sublime thoroughbreds in perfect harmony with the morning.

Aidan O’Brien stands listening. Behind him, washed in pale sunlight, the crook of Slievenamon looms in watchful majesty. This is a love affair. “Do you hear that sound?” he smiles. “That’s what you want to hear. You want to hear them relaxed in their breathing, nothing in their larynx, not struggling in any way.”

A line of perfectly sculpted two-year-olds goes juddering past, their riders stiff-backed and alert, almost waxwork forms in the cool, clean air.

“Phhhhwwwtt!” is the sound you hear off each one, like an imaginary whip cracking. “Phhhwwwtt . . .”

“All you want is a glimpse,” says the young master of Ballydoyle. “You want to see them just moving well with a happy expression on their face. It’s like human beings. You look into someone’s face, you know whether they’re stressed or not. You know whether they’re worried, you can see stress straight away.

“But they’re all lovely blows now, do you hear that? They’re happy working.”

A walkie-talkie crackles with the voice of Seamus Brady from the foot of the gallop. “All good here Aidan. . .” O’Brien instantly expresses thanks. His unceasing courtesy towards his workers has long italicised O’Brien’s reputation as an eminently likeable man. Now, as the horses come strolling down the other side, he harvests feedback. “Alright Jane?” “Happy enough, Nina?” “All okay, Seamus?” Maybe 50 horses ease past, names stitched onto their striped blankets. O’Brien logs information from every rider, using Christian names all the time. Remarkably, he does not stumble for the right name once. The jockeys wear earpieces so that walkie-talkie communication accesses all ears here. This is a place where life must, by necessity, be tuned into a single frequency.

So the rhythms are eternal, the mornings endlessly urgent and business-like.

O’Brien must compress his days to suit that ritual, ordinarily retiring to bed soon after the main evening TV News and always rising before 6.0. The schedule demands that he protects, not just his health, but the sharpness of his mind. Sleep is his comfort blanket.

“As you can see the morning is busy here, a lot of stuff happens in a very short space of time,” he says. “All I can do is try and keep myself as healthy as possible so that I can get the best out of myself every day. So my lifestyle is very simple. It’s go to bed early and get up early. If you didn’t do that, you’d have no chance of lasting.

“The way I look at it is I’m 45 now. I have all the experience, so the job is to use that experience. I’d usually go to bed after the 9.0 news. I have to. Because I find, with me anyway, if you don’t get sleep, you get emotional. And an emotional being is a little off, they will crack under pressure.

“I have to stay level and the most important thing is sleep. When I go to bed, everything is gone out of my mind. Because I know I have to get that sleep. If I don’t, I know I won’t last. Like you have to keep yourself physically fit, eat the right stuff and all that. So you’re hoping that’s going to take care of itself.

“But if you don’t rest your mind, you’ve no chance. Because you

IF YOU DON’T REST YOUR MIND, YOU’VE NO CHANCE. YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING HALF-HEARTEDLY HERE. IF YOU DID, YOU’D GET WIPED OUT