Beggy seals his redemption in one fell swoop

After failing a drug test in Australia, Derby-winning jockey had almost given up on a shot at the big time

CHIEF SPORTS FEATURE WRITER

at Epsom

With one thunderous surge, Padraig Beggy propelled himself out of left field and into the light. Never mind Wings Of Eagles, this effervescent, fast-talking son of Co Kildare had been thrust into the Derby on a wing on a prayer. And yet with glorious improbability, as his mount tore past vaunted stablemate Cliffs of Moher in the dying strides, he ended up clutching the most glittering prize in Flat racing. Seldom can the Queen, who has missed just two Derbys in her lifetime, have witnessed a denouement of such stirring romance.

By tradition, the Derby does not to tend to throw up long-odds bolts from obscurity. The highest priced winner in recent times was High Rise in 1998, at 20-1, even if Lady Beaverbrook’s 500-1 grey, Terimon, had almost fashioned a story for the ages in placing second nine years earlier. Wings of Eagles belonged to a similar realm of outer darkness, especially when one of Beggy’s few previous winners had come in a £7,000 race at Killarney. One could not have guessed at the scale of Beggy’s elevation from listening to trainer Aidan O’Brien.

From behind his reflective prescription sunglasses, the inscrutable magician of Ballydoyle described his jockey as a “world-class rider, strong, with a great mind and tactically very aware”.

Close your eyes and he could have been talking about Frankie Dettori, rather than a 31-year-old itinerant whose greatest previous claim to fame was failing a drug test.

Back in 2014, Beggy found himself at a personal and professional nadir. He had headed to Australia in a remote last tilt at proving his talents, only to be suspended for 15 months for a positive urine sample that showed traces of cocaine, as well as giving false evidence.

Beggy had first claimed the cocaine result came as a consequence of an anaesthetic used by his dentist, then tried to argue that it was due to the ingestion of coca leaves provided by a friend. Finally, he confessed that he had taken the drug at a barbecue three nights prior to the Kembla Grange trials near Sydney.

Foolishly, the Irishman compounded his offence by lying about his whereabouts, leaving the Australian authorities little choice but to throw the book at him. For almost all of 2015 he was banned, with any aspirations of advancing his career apparently scattered to the wind. “Yeah, I got into a bit of trouble – it was a bad mistake,” Beggy reflected. “I got knocked down and I picked myself up. The only priority for me was to get my licence back. I said to my brother, ‘This won’t be the last time you hear of me’.”

Thanks to this wonderfully unlikely triumph in the Blue Riband, his name is secure for posterity. Beaming like a man not quite grasping the magnitude of the moment, Beggy stressed how his achievement showed that “if you put in the work, you’ll get the rewards” but, as the plaudits rained down, he continued to speak of Epsom almost as a bemused tourist. Usually, he acknowledged, his only hope of seeing the Derby was on television at home.

Even a cursory tour of the track yesterday, he said, “made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up”.

Before this afternoon in the pristine Surrey sunshine, Beggy was at risk of being the most peripheral of footnotes, one of the legions of young Irish riders who nurse Derby dreams and see them swiftly dashed. “School wasn’t my thing,” he said, although racing hardly offered a more auspicious alternative. He worked briefly as an apprentice to Kevin Prendergast and the experience was enough to convince him to downscale his ambitions. As he put it: “Ireland’s a tough place for a jockey if you don’t land one of the big trainers.”

By merciful quirk of fate, Beggy rallied from his disgrace Down Under to grasp an opportunity at the feet of the biggest of them all, in O’Brien.

Although down the pecking order of O’Brien’s jockeys, he provided a glimpse of gifts in April by winning a Group Three at Leopardstown on Hydrangea. It was hardly the pedigree of a Derby winner in waiting, though. “To be honest, I had nearly given up on the big time, but Aidan has made it happen,” Beggy said, grinning. “It’s happy days.”

As evening gathered over Epsom, he took a walk along the course, trying to absorb every detail of the scene in his mind’s eye. Nothing he achieves from here, he recognised, could ever quite hold a candle to this. “I’ve going to have a big picture of this horse and I up in my house,” he said.

“It’s something I’m going to look at for a long time.” Not a soul among the 100,000 gathered across the Downs could possibly have begrudged him.