In-demand Russell in the hunt for more Festival glory
Irish champion-elect wants to maintain long winning run, he tells Marcus Armytage
Davy Russell, who already has one hand on the Irish jockeys’ championship this season, having ridden over 100 winners, may not yet have been leading jockey at the Cheltenham Festival – not even in 2014 when he rode a last-day treble – but he nevertheless boasts a remarkable record; a winner there every year since Native Jack gave him his first in the cross-country in 2006.
His 18 victories include the Gold Cup in 2014 on Lord Windermere and his most recent, Presenting Percy, who won last year’s Pertemps Hurdle, is favourite for the RSA Chase and looks the pick of this year’s rides, which will also include several for Gigginstown, Michael O’leary’s outfit which famously sacked him as stable jockey at the end of 2013 – after a winner, and over a cup a tea.
That he is champion-elect and now just about O’leary’s favourite pilot again, is a good advert for keeping your head down and your own counsel on the subject though, ironically, not even Ruby Walsh is in as much demand at Cheltenham preview evenings across Ireland as the entertaining and forthright Russell who, but for the weather, would have done half-a-dozen such nights in the build-up.
Brought up on a farm near Youghal, in Cork, the Russells had a few horses and a broodmare. He, his two brothers and three sisters were all into ponies, but while all his siblings lost interest, Russell stayed with it.
“We walked hound puppies for the local hunt which was good for a few contacts,” he recalled. “I’d hunt on Saturdays and go pointing on a Sunday.”
He added: “I show-jumped poorly and school suffered big time. I was tipping away doing a lot of schooling and one day a guy turned up with two horses, one jockey and asked if I’d ride the other.
“When the horse ran in a point-to-point at Tullow he asked me if I’d like to ride him. I was 19 at the time and I haven’t stopped riding winners since. I pretty much rode a winner every Sunday to the end of that year and tied for the champion novice rider with the man who is now Gordon Elliott’s head lad.”
His first winner as a professional was in England for Ferdy Murphy, who had offered him a job when he was 23. He won 25 races in his first year, but unlike a lot of Irish jockeys in those days, he never cut his ties with home, returning to ride most Sundays and after two and a half years he returned home full-time to ride as a freelance.
“The first really good horse I got on was the Charles Byrne-trained hurdler Solwhit,” he said. “As Charles grew, I grew.”
His first ride at the Festival was in the Kim Muir for Murphy. “I didn’t know where I was, how to get there and I had nowhere to stay until Ted Walsh offered me a bed which was going spare in the place he’d rented.”
Of course this meeting has gone on to become a second home for Russell and is where his sympathetic style of horsemanship comes into its own and is in much demand. “The main thing,” he pointed out, “is to be associated with very good trainers. Beyond that any horse I’ve won on has been very good.”
Back home, Russell is already looking to the future. “I’ve the makings of a stud without a stallion,” he said. “I trade a few and I’ve a nice broodmare who is three-parts sister to Douvan.”