SIX BRILLIANT PAGES OF CHELTENHAM PREVIEWS
Moone trainer is armed with a prized team for another Festival assault
THE photographs which adorn the walls in Jessica Harrington’s household are mostly what you’d expect from a top racehorse trainer. There are montages of great days with Moscow Flyer and Jezki, of her three winners at Cheltenham last year, as well as a clatter of framed awards and citations.
And there, inside the welcoming kitchen on the edge of Moone village, there is a portrait of a full-bosomed nude, painted by Ronnie Wood, the Rolling Stones veteran. It’s not easy to miss. ‘Ronnie’s done some brilliant pictures,’ enthuses Harrington. ‘I have a book of his which has got a lot of his paintings, he gave it to me 15 years ago. It’s beautiful, it’s called “Wood on Wood”.
Harrington and Wood share a passion for art, for horses, and for work. Both were born in 1947 and show no signs of easing up.
As the Stones roll on, so Harrington is galloping to Cheltenham this week, and beyond, at a fierce lick. ‘I love it. Aren’t I lucky?’ she says with a blue-eyed twinkle.
‘I have loads of good horses to get up to every morning, and I have a great team here with Emma and Kate (two of her daughters) and Eamonn (Leigh, her long-serving head lad).’
Harrington is effectively a world champion at her profession as the only Irish trainer, and only woman, to train the winner of the Champion Chase, Champion Hurdle and Gold Cup. She has no intention of giving the reins a tug.
‘I keep going because you’re only as good as the last one that won – half an hour later someone else will have won,’ she says.
Harrington feeds off speed, whether it’s on four legs, or two, and got a huge buzz out of the recent Winter Olympics.
A competent skier, she’d have loved a crack at the Olympics if good enough. ‘It would have to be the downhill! The faster the better. I love it all. The fellas who sit on the tin tray, the skeleton and the luge. I think they’re mad.
‘I watched that Ski Cross, and there were four of them racing and knocking each other over. The speed skating too, they take each other out, there’s definitely a few stewards enquiries in that!’
Born in London to Brigadier Bryan Fowler, who fought in two World Wars, Harrington was raised in Ireland, and immersed in horses from childhood.
She was an international threeday eventer, classy enough to earn selection for Ireland at the 1984 Olympics only for her horse to go lame at the last minute.
When she turned to the training game in 1989, she had given all her rivals more than a head start. ‘I was 42 and pregnant. What was I thinking of?’
Almost 30 years later, she is revered as one of the finest at her profession, a winner of the very best races over jumps, and a Group One winner on the Flat.
Harrington doesn’t see herself as a flag-bearer for women in a sport dominated by men but rather as a trainer who is judged by how her horses do. Mostly, they do very well.
She still dreams of winning the Grand National at Aintree, or a Classic on the Flat, which explains why she’s up with the larks, overseeing her equine troops.
She will bawl out anyone who
steps out of line, but she’s also sharp-witted and wholly without any airs or graces.
This week, she’ll be armed for battle, complete with favourite blue coat, brooch and a steely visage. Her team is more about quality than quantity, which reflects her competitive attitude to Cheltenham. She is not there to take part, but to win.
‘When I send a horse to Cheltenham, I hope it’s going to win or be placed,’ she said.
‘When an owner really wants to go, I try and persuade them not have a runner just for the sake of having a runner.
‘The thing is, when you go to Cheltenham, a lot of the time the horse doesn’t run again that season, especially the young horses.
‘The travel, the excitement, for four and five-year-olds it takes a lot out of them.’
Of her equine team, Supasundae is a Cheltenham veteran. This will be his fourth successive Festival and he’s never run a bad race – sixth to Moon Racer in the Bumper (2015), seventh to Altior in the Supreme Novice (2016), first in the Coral Cup (2017). This season, the eightyear-old has eclipsed Faugheen over two miles and is one of the favourites for the Stayers’ Hurdle on Thursday. Should he win, Harrington will join her great friend Nicky Henderson and Paul Nicholls as the only trainers to complete a clean sweep of the Festival’s four majors. There is another landmark which beckons. In the distinguished history of the Gold Cup, only three trainers – Fulke Walwyn, Michael Dickinson and Nicholls – have won successive Gold Cups with different horses. Should Our Duke succeed on Friday and follow Harrington’s injured 2017 winner Sizing John, the trainer will add another chapter to her remarkable tale. Owned by the Cooper siblings from Culraine in the lee of the Slieve Blooms, Our Duke is proof that racing still has room for old-style owners of a rural background. This will be Our Duke’s Cheltenham debut and no one knows how he will take to it all but victory would put the eight-year-old alongside Arkle as the only horses to win the Irish Grand National and then the Gold Cup. After the unfortunate timing of Sizing John’s withdrawal on Thursday evening through injury, the Harrington team has become smaller, and a little less select but their capacity to leave a lasting imprint still remains. While her options have narrowed, the Stayers Hurdle-Gold Cup double remains in place.
3 Three wins at the 2017 Festival put Jessica Harrington behind only Willie Mullins and Gordon Elliott