‘I fell to pieces when our baby son had heart surgery’
Chanelle McCoy opens up to Barry Egan about feeling ugly as a child, her marriage to AP, and the guilt of not being there for her children as she built her internationally successful business career
‘IF you carry your childhood with you,” playwright Tom Stoppard once said, “you never become older.” Chanelle McCoy recalls her earliest childhood memory “was tearing around the roads on the outskirts of Loughrea in her dad’s car while he was visiting all the farmers testing the cattle. The farmers’ wives used to always take me into their house for orange and biscuits while dad attended to the animals”. Chanelle was always the first in the car when she heard dad was off to do a farm visit. “I was like ‘Shep’ the sheep dog, as soon as the car door opened, I was in it.”
‘Shep’ now runs the medical business of her dad Michael’s hugely successful global human and veterinary healthcare company, the Chanelle Group, which he founded in 1985.
Chanelle also carries her childhood with her with her children — five-year-old Archie, and Eve (11). Every evening at home in Oxfordshire, she and her husband, retired horse racing deity AP McCoy, and the kids have to try to make each other belly-laugh with jokes (“How do you make a tissue dance? Add a boggie to it”) and games.
The kids do little dance shows. Eve is usually lead dancer, Archie is the back-up dancer. They also do impersonations of their parents and, says Chanelle, “dress up like us and talk like us. The kids then pick an animal and I have to dance like that animal and make all the sounds. A lot of tickling. Put make-up on mum’s face... this can be hysterical”. Just as hysterical, it transpires, is when Eve and Archie “paint Daddy’s nails... and hide the nail varnish remover!” Chanelle and AP also have to try to make the kids belly-laugh.
“And if we fail to do this,” explains Chanelle, “we have to carry out a dare at the end of the day.” Asked what are the dares to be carried out if Eve (who now show-jumps at the weekends) and Archie (who supports Arsenal Football Club) don’t make their parents belly-laugh, Chanelle goes through a litany of chuckle-inducing challenges: pick a famous character and dress up as them using mum and dad’s clothes (“we have to guess the famous person”); hide behind a curtain and give daddy a fright when he comes home; Eve and Archie make an obstacle course around the house “and AP and I have to do it!”
“It has made me be more comfortable about being silly,” says Chanelle. “I am not so self-conscious about being silly and laughing at myself.”
There was a time, however, when Chanelle McCoy didn’t make the kids belly-laugh. “For the first 10 years of trying to get the medical business into lots of markets I was obsessed about work. I was obsessed about building the business. And I was obsessed about trying to prove myself to my dad. I was desperate to make my dad proud of me, you know? Because I wasn’t sure that he had a lot of confidence in me at the start.
“And,” she continues, “there were definitely times over the years that I did put building the business before the kids.”
Chanelle admits with characteristic raw honesty that she wasn’t the mum who was always there for the school drop-offs or knew the teachers very well; and sometimes missed Eve’s sports matches. It came to a stage where Chanelle had to say to herself: ‘Hold on a second here. You are now missing some special things.’
“That’s why I pulled back for a couple of years from day-to-day running of the business because I didn’t have a good work-life balance. I couldn’t switch off. I would come back from the office and I was rushing to get the kids into bed, rushing the bedtime story and then going back to working until 11pm at night... and then AP would be going to bed before me because he was sick of waiting up for me while I was clearing down my emails or sending out more proposals. My whole life was driven by winning more business.”
Then one day, Chanelle McCoy — star of RTE’s Dragons’ Den, award-winning high-flying businesswoman and Lady McCoy ever since her husband was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2016 — stopped to think about her life...
“I wasn’t fun any more. I didn’t make the kids belly-laugh. I was becoming agitated.” This came to a head when Eve was seven. She said to Chanelle that when she grew up she wanted to be like all the other mums in school because they are around all the time.
“That broke my heart,” says Chanelle. “She wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was just saying how it was.”
Saying it how it is, is Chanelle’s truth, her maxim. She doesn’t self-censor or hold back. The lowest point in her life, she says with unflinching candour, was when Archie was six months old.
“He had heart surgery. This was definitely a point in my life that I felt very low and the situation was out of my control. I fell to pieces. AP was incredible during this time as he was in his comfort zone dealing with the doctors and surgeons as he was very used to being in hospitals and looking at scans and dealing with medics. I am usually the team leader in the family but AP took the mantle during this time.”
The third of five children growing up in Co Galway, Chanelle says that “of all the children in the family I was the only one my mother never took to the baby beauty show in Loughrea because I was by far the ugliest. I was too ugly to bring,” laughs the woman who won Best Dressed Woman at Ballybrit in 2005.
“I am probably an average looking person now, do you know what I mean?” Actually, I don’t, I say to her. “When I do leadership speaking now, I start with that story,” Chanelle says, “because I think it is important to have a bit of humility about you, and not have yourself in any way elevated too much because it is not an endearing trait. When people say you have a very successful husband, and racing has been a great life, and you’ve helped drive your family business and you’ve got kids, they kind of think everything fell into place in your life and everything is perfect.”
As if it was all handed to you on a plate, I say.
“And the reality is different,” Chanelle says. “I didn’t have a lot of confidence when I was younger. I was a very ugly child,” she claims, though I find it hard to believe from the beautiful woman sitting opposite me in the Intercontinental.
“That probably makes you a bit determined when you want to be better than you think you are and when you want to have a bit more self-worth about yourself — you push yourself a bit harder,” Chanelle says, adding that she had “a very, very bad kind of stoop, like a hunchback. And my mom used to buy me shoulder straps. You could buy them in the chemist. You put them on and it would straighten your back with them.”
Chanelle has a beautiful aunt, Joss Horgan — “they own the Man Friday restaurant in Kinsale” — “and she pulled me aside one day. I was probably only 13 at the time. Mum had tried everything to get me to straighten up. Joss just said, ‘Look, Chanelle, you’re a lovely girl and you just need a bit more self-confidence. Posture is such a good way to get that confidence out’.
“If you look in the mirror and you are standing tall, and you feel you look nice it gives you that inner-confidence,” says Chanelle who wore a strap under her clothes from the age of 11 to 13.
(Full of joie de vivre, the gorgeous Galwegian with perfect posture is so chatty that our interview over-runs by some time. She insists when we are finished that her driver takes me home. This he does, then goes on up to Belfast to pick up AP before driving him on to Adare Manor in County Limerick for a charity event.)
When she finished college, Chanelle Burke, as she was then, went to work as a sales rep for a company in the UK for two years. When she returned to Ireland, she said to her father: ‘I really want to come into the business.’ “It was a veterinary business. Dad had set up the medical business a year or two before that. He very much empowered me to drive the medical business.”
Far from being handed anything on the aforesaid plate, the task Chanelle was given bordered on the nigh-impossible. She had no clients. She would travel abroad to try to get to see business people by literally knocking on doors without an appointment. “Sometimes,” Chanelle
‘Never accept you are defeated. There is always a way around something’
laughs now, “in a way ignorance is bliss. I had my hit-list and I went off to lots of different countries like France, Finland, Sweden. “I just thought, ‘That’s the way you do it’. Because that’s the way dad built the veterinary business up. So when I went off to try and drive the medical business, I just did what dad did. AP was a good influence on me, too, because he would always say, ‘Never accept no. Never accept that you are defeated. There is always a way around something’. He is very solution driven.”
Is that why Chanelle was attracted to AP? Because he was as driven as her?
“Yeah, definitely. We were quite like-minded and maybe he liked my independence; that I had my own thing going on. And he was off doing his thing. But the funny thing was, what he was doing was on an immense scale and it was very much in the public eye in England and in Ireland in racing. It was incredible what he was achieving and the records that he was breaking as a champion jockey over 20 years. We all had so much fun on the back of it; it was a brilliant journey. It was brilliant to be exposed to that and to be on the coat tails.”
Having read AJ’s 2011 inspirational book, My Autobiography, it was a tough journey as well...
“Very tough. The health and safety aspect of it...“
I’m talking about for you, I say to Chanelle.
“Yeah, but you’ve got just look at the positive in everything. And I’m not just saying that. We knew before we got married that we couldn’t have kids — AP was very open about this in his book — so if we were ever to have children we would have to have IVF.”
Chanelle says she can “remember being told that news; we had just got engaged at the time. We went to get checked out because he was doing excessive sweating in hot baths and stuff [for his horse-racing] and he was thinking that there could be an issue down the road. I remember my first reaction was, ‘This is not a big deal. If you came home in a wheelchair with the job you do, that’s a big deal’. Maybe this is just an obstacle.”
What was it like being married to someone who was as driven as AJ?
“I’ ll tell you why I think it worked for AP and it is because I understood totally what he was going through. I would come back from work and I would have bad days. When you are working in a business, dad and I work alongside each other to keep the business going, big decisions have to be made. There is a lot of stress and pressure that comes with that. So when I came home and I’d had a bad day and AP would come home and he’d had a bad day — I got it.
“I understood his bad days. When he had a bad day and he was grumpy and he was in bad form and he wasn’t communicative, I got it. I get those days.
“I didn’t take it personally. I wasn’t like, ‘What’s wrong, honey? Have I said something?’ And you’re suddenly then insecure and wondering is it my fault? You just leave him alone.” Chanelle says “yeah” when I ask her was she OK with the level of jarring honesty in AP’s book. (“What a shit I was,” he writes at one point in the book. “What a bully. What a control freak. I wasn’t in a good place in my life. My head was wrecked, my fixation on being champion, the wasting — not eating to lose weight rapidly to race — that was frying my brain, and Chanelle bore the brunt. It was a horrible way to behave, a terrible way to treat the person you are supposed to love.”)
AP told me in an interview in 2011 that he found it almost healing to get that stuff out, some of which was against himself in a sense.
“Yeah,” Chanelle says now, “because he was hard on himself, but the good thing, I think, for me was that work was an absolute saviour through all those 20 years because there are times you go home and if you are married to a successful businessman or businesswoman or sportsman or sportswoman and they have to be selfish to be at the top. So there were times when what I was doing in my life wasn’t that important from time to time to AP. So, I would go into work the next day and I would have a team of people say to me, ‘Chanelle, what about this?’ I got a lot of my self-worth and self-confidence from my job in the office. Then you go home. So it is OK that AP was like that.”
What’s it like living with a man who is no longer getting that validation because he is retired? “Year one for any sportsman is all a bit of novelty. You’re out and it’s ‘Oh my God, I can eat, I don’t have to train, I don’t have that discipline, I can go anywhere. Fantastic’. Year two is like, ‘Is this it? Is this life? This is really not that fun. We need a purpose’. So, then it is that seeking, how am I going to fill the gap? And then year three is kind of like ‘this is the new life. I have got used to the new routine. I have a new purpose. I am involved in X, Y and Z’.”
What year is AP on now? “He is on year three. So it is all good. Touch wood. I think in racing there is a big thing where there has been fatalities and he has been so appreciative of that. I think he is so grateful that he is out in one piece. There are a lot of jockeys who are badly injured, retired or had to retire. He went out on his own terms.”
Chanelle is a woman who has always operated on her own terms in business. What advice would she give to young women starting off in business?
“Be passionate about your business or your job as you will get lots of knock-backs but it is passion that will make you get back up and keep going. Don’t be guilty about working hard for what you want but keep the right balance, don’t get over-absorbed in work, don’t let work or your career be all-consuming, keep time for yourself and family. Work for a company or build a company that really values their people and has a great culture that makes you want to come to work every day and where you feel that everyone genuinely has your back, a high trust work place.”
Has Chanelle suffered from sexism in her career?
“Our medical business in now in 96 markets, there were often times when I visited potential customers in the Middle East and the lack of respect I experienced because I was a woman was sometimes difficult and would rock my confidence. They would talk amongst themselves in the middle of a meeting and would walk in and out of the meeting as they pleased. I became more resilient each time I returned to the Middle East and learnt to command attention and respect, mainly by banging a few tables and walking out of a few meetings.”
Would Chanelle describe herself as a feminist?
“Am I a person who supports the quest for the equality of the sexes, yes I am, that probably makes me a feminist. For me, being a feminist simply means I am an advocate of the rights and equality of women, you don’t have to be anti-man to be pro-women,” she says. “In the workplace men and women need each other, and a company is much more powerful when both men and women are part of the senior management team, as men and women bring different attributes to the table that are very critical for the success of a team, department and company. We are more powerful together than we are apart.”
How does she think people see her? “I am probably seen as efficient, organised; friends always get me to organise girls weekends away or nights out; loyal — I would take a bullet for family and friends — relatively calm, sometimes steely... I get annoyed when things don’t go right. I’m a good communicator, a go getter...”
What are the misconceptions about her?
“People might find me a bit ‘stand offish’ initially, but I’m not. I am still shy sometimes when I meet people and then I warm up,” a very warmed up Chanelle McCoy says as her driver arrives to take me home.