RYAN MIGHTY RACING
Racing’s quiet man happy to ease off on the daily grind in favour of winning the sport’s biggest prizes
IT is late morning in a village outside Newmarket. Ryan Moore opens the door of the new red-brick house, offers his hand and smiles. In the kitchen, his partner, Michelle, is getting ready to go out. Their two youngest kids from their gaggle of four, Jessica, four, and Heidi, 21 months, are vying for attention. Their 14-yearold pug, Romeo, ambles in and laps from his water bowl. That’s all of us. A couple of public relations executives were supposed to be in attendance but Moore vetoed that.
No1 in a list of things Moore wouldn’t say: ‘The more the merrier.’ The jockey who is likely to ride Saxon Warrior, the short-priced favourite in the Investec Derby at Epsom next Saturday, is an understated man, quiet and thoughtful. People who dismiss him as dour or taciturn have got him wrong. He might not play it for laughs but he has got a beautifully laconic sense of humour.
I ask him about his sister, Hayley, who hit the headlines last week when she stood in the way of loose horse Give Em A Clump at Chepstow, and was knocked to the ground as she grabbed his reins. Her brother has never been one for extravagant praise and he doesn’t start now. ‘She’s always been a little bit different, bless her,’ he says.
Moore is watchful. He is wary of cliché. Slip into it and he might offer a raised eyebrow or a wry grin. He has won 10 English classics, the Melbourne Cup, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe and the Japan Cup, among others – though he had to settle for second in yesterday’s Irish 2,000 Guineas on US Navy Flag – but he is an implacable enemy of hyperbole.
I ask him whether his place in history matters to him. ‘I wouldn’t care about my place in history,’ he says. ‘I just want to compete in the biggest races and win them. I hope I wouldn’t care if there wasn’t a line written about me in any of them.’
Like many jockeys, he weighs his words carefully. His eyes only blaze once in the hour we’re sitting in his kitchen. That’s when I ask him why, given that he grew up in Brighton, the son of trainer Gary Moore, he supports Arsenal. He fires right back.
‘I’ll tell you exactly why,’ says Moore. ‘We used to be Brighton fans. We used to go every week when I was a kid when they played at the Goldstone. Then they lost their ground and moved to Gillingham. My dad’s mum is from Islington and she is an Arsenal fan so as a treat, we used to get taken to Highbury because he wasn’t going to take us to Gillingham in what was the old Third Division.
‘We were nine or 10. We started going to Highbury half a dozen times a year. So we started following Arsenal at that stage, which is a shame but that was down to the board at Brighton.’
Moore is regarded by many as the best Flat jockey since Lester Piggott. He has been British champion three times, although it would certainly be more if he chose to hurtle round every day in the pursuit of more and more winners.
‘To begin with,’ says Moore, ‘work was all-important. Race-riding took over. I would ride every race, every day. I enjoyed it. Now, I have today off. I had yesterday off. Even tomorrow, I’ve taken off because I had a couple of horses got withdrawn and I was left with one or two at the meeting. The ones I was going for didn’t run. Five years ago, I’d have gone regardless. Now, I think: “Hang on, give yourself a chance, take your time a little bit more and spend a bit more time helping out at home, picking the kids up and all that sort of stuff”.
‘For me, it’s always about getting to the biggest races and riding the best horses and I am doing that more often now so that is more enjoyable. When you get to the big days, you enjoy them more than the smaller days. If I am riding ordinary horses, it’s not as fun.
‘I ride horses because I enjoy it. It
was just a way of making a living by having fun. I didn’t ride horses as a business. I enjoyed the race riding. It takes over for a while and then as you get older, you get a bit more realisation about what’s most important. I enjoy my job and I feel very fortunate to have the people I have around me. I have a great family and a job I enjoy, so I am in a privileged, fortunate position.
‘What’s important? It’s kids, isn’t it? They’re the things that matter. As long as they are all happy and healthy. Sport is fun. The competing is fun. People watch sport because it’s not a problem. It’s not a real problem. I love sport. I want to see who the best is. That’s why we keep running the races and playing the games.’
Moore, 34, is the leading rider for Aidan O’Brien’s powerful Ballydoyle outfit – the best riding for the best. The backing of O’Brien and the remarkable Coolmore operation that dominates British flat racing, let alone the Irish scene, puts Moore in the mix for most of the top prizes in the sport, if not his domestic championship.
‘It is a privilege to get to a position where I am getting these rides,’ says Moore. ‘There’s no doubt, you cannot do it without the horse at all. I am very fortunate: I am riding the best horses for the best team essentially. It’s exactly where I want to be. I know how lucky I am to be there.’
If there is no hitch, his ride on Saxon Warrior in the Derby will be the second leg of the horse’s attempt on the Triple Crown. Saxon Warrior won the first leg, the 2,000 Guineas, at Newmarket, at the beginning of the month, with O’Brien’s son, Donnacha, on board because Moore was at racing in the Kentucky Derby on O’Brien’s hope, Mendelssohn.
Does he feel any sympathy for Donnacha, who is set to miss out on the ride on Saxon Warrior in the Derby? ‘Donnacha gave him a lovely ride at Newmarket, very smooth, and I thought he put up a very commanding performance,’ says Moore. ‘But it’s a tough game. I ride for the owners and it’s their call. I was sent to do another job that day otherwise I would have been on him at Newmarket.’
If Saxon Warrior wins at Epsom and in the St Leger, at Doncaster, in September, he will become the first horse since Nijinsky in 1970 to seal the Triple Crown. It would be a first even for O’Brien and Coolmore but it would be foolish to write them off.
‘Ballydoyle is the most amazing place,’ says Moore. ‘It’s a beautiful place to go and see those horses and watch what Aidan does. For someone like me who has been around horses their whole life, it is so special to see it done so well. Everything they can do to maximise the potential of the horse is done.
‘I love watching him work. The whole time, his eyes are on those horses. He is focused on those horses. He notices every little thing about those horses. He feels he has to be there every single day. And seeing what he needs to do with them to get them where they need to be, it’s a unique thing. It is artistry. Nothing’s left to chance.
‘The Triple Crown is something the owners haven’t achieved. They nearly did it with Camelot six years ago and if it’s something they want to do, it’s their horse. Whatever happens, it will be what is best for the horse and they won’t ask the horse to do something it’s not capable of doing.
‘It’s not been done for so long because it’s hard to do. The first race is a mile at Newmarket in May and it is hard to have a horse ready that early and to keep them on the go until September when you’re going three quarters of a mile further and in different conditions.
‘There’s not much point talking about it until he has got Epsom, which is as never as easy as people seem to think. There’s very much a job to be done there first. He has got a fantastic pedigree. Class is the most important thing a racehorse has to have and Saxon Warrior has a lot of it.’
Moore has a lot of it, too. He is in the prime of his career and as long he retains the motivation he will be involved in the sport’s biggest days for years to come.