Redemption on O’Keeffe’s mind

Sam Spinner looms into view for shot at Festival glory

TRAINER Jedd O’Keeffe has forgotten most of what he learned as a student when he studied Russian but he still recognised a few words in McMafia, the recent BBC drama about Russian organised crime. That was a programme with a complex storyline full of dramatic twists. The same could be said of O’Keeffe’s real-life story that is potentially on the verge of a glorious chapter if Sam Spinner can land the Grade One Stayers’ Hurdle.

No one would have bet on even the remote possibility of that happening eight years ago.

Problems with his eyesight caused by the onset of diabetes probably felt bad enough for O’Keeffe but, after heeding the advice of his optician, former jockey Andy Orkney, to have his blood pressure tested, the news got far worse.

The irritating lump in his throat that O’Keeffe had ignored for a year was caused by cancerous tumours on a tonsil and in his saliva gland.

Having worked to establish a stable in the North Yorkshire training town of Middleham, O’Keeffe was hit for six and wife Andrea handed the Herculean task of running the show and looking after her sick husband along with their three young sons, Joseph, Jonny and Nicholas.

O’Keeffe, 49, said: ‘I remember saying to the consultant: “How long will this stop me working for?” He said: “Mr O’Keeffe, I’d forget about work, you have stage three cancer.”

‘Andrea was training the horses, driving me to hospital every day, looking after the kids and driving the horsebox to the races.

‘I don’t quite know how she managed it and we also had to employ other staff to cover. I would place the horses but I lost my voice so could not speak to the owners.

‘Andrea had to do the lot and I was more ill after the treatment. There was a time I couldn’t get up and down the stairs, I was so weak.

‘Andrea was taking on so many roles, her normal role of controlling the finances slipped.

‘We owed a little bit of money to the VAT man and, one day, there was a knock on the door and it was him. I remember him going into the yard and valuing the muck trailer. I was thinking: “Blimey, if they take the muck trailer off us, we really are in trouble.”

‘It was then Andrea and I had a chat and said we were finished. We were just exhausted.’

That nadir, in August 2011, was also a turning point. When O’Keeffe told his owners he was giving up, they talked him out of it.

Caron and Paul Chapman, owners of Sam Spinner, who were on the verge of selling their business, told him they would ‘half fill his yard’ if he soldiered on.

And former trainer Sally Hall reduced the cost of the stables she rented to O’Keeffe.

Jedd, christened John Eamon Declan Dunderdale O’Keeffe, said: ‘We got enough encouragement to just keep going. I have no idea what I could have done. I was just unemployable — a diabetic, recovering from cancer who had done nothing other than work with horses. I used to joke all I could do was stack shelves in Tesco.’

That seems a long time ago. O’Keeffe now has 50 horses. In 2017, he enjoyed his best ever year with two wins in Listed races on the Flat, one courtesy of Lord Yeats, who also finished fifth in the Irish St Leger.

Sam Spinner, who cost only £12,000, gave O’Keeffe his first win at the top level in the Grade One Long Walk Hurdle at Ascot.

The chestnut was even picked out by Ruby Walsh, the Cheltenham Festival’s most successful jockey with 56 wins, as the horse outside his prospective Festival mounts he would most like to ride.

O’Keeffe said: ‘I couldn’t believe that. I could feel myself shaking. Someone like Ruby picked out Sam!

‘It still does feel a little bit like we are dreaming, winning at Ascot and having a real live chance in a championship race at Cheltenham.’

O’KEEFFE has a daily reminder of one of the main rivals for the Stayers’ Hurdle.

When Sam Spinner exercises on Middleham’s High Moor, he gallops in the shadow of the 1,800ft peak of Penhill, which was formed by Ice Age glaciers and commands the southern side on Wensleydale.

The Willie Mullins-trained horse of the same name, which won last season’s Albert Bartlett Novices’ Hurdle and heads back to Cheltenham in search of a second Festival win for his owner, Brighton chairman Tony Bloom, was originally trained in the North Yorkshire training centre by James Bethell.