Best Mates Gold Cup winning jockey and trainer Jim Culloty on his Cheltenham days

J

IM Culloty’s career is spread out before me like a fist full of jigsaw pieces. It’s hard to know where to start when building a picture of a man who is a multiple Cheltenham Gold Cup winner and an Irish and English Grand National winner. The list goes on.

A few flecks of silver have stolen the black from Jim’s hair as he greets me at the door of his Cork residence. But the familiar smile - such a feature of winner’s podiums throughout the Noughties - hasn’t changed a bit. I suggest the best place to start our conversation is at the finish – otherwise known as the top of Cheltenham’s hill, a spot where many of racing’s stories - for better or worse - always finish.

It’s March

18, 2004 and

Jim Culloty and Best

Mate have just won their third

Gold Cup in a row, emulating Pat Taaffe and

Arkle. Both horse and jockey take a pull at the top of the hill and regain their composure having lived through the toughest seven minutes of their lives. It’s in those split seconds before TV cameras take over that one can appreciate the true economy of effort and raw exposure of equine and human achievement. Culloty’s face slowly thaws having been ice cool throughout the race, while the palpating mass of Best Mate shows a criss-cross of veins pushing through his bay coloured body. The dream is achieved. “All I remember is we hit the front and started to struggle on the soft ground. I was running out of petrol fast up that hill,” Jim recalls, holding a mug of coffee between his fingers. “I saw the other horses finishing around me to my left. Suddenly, just as I passed the line I saw in the corner of my eye Sir Rembrandt and Andrew Thornton on the far side. Crossing the line I thought I’d won but for about ten seconds I wasn’t sure. I don’t think there was any more I could have done. It was closer than people thought and another 10 yards and we could have been beaten.”

Few will disagree that all three of Best Mate’s Gold Cups represent every characteristic you could wish for in a horse. In 2002 he did no more than was necessary in an economical win over Ruby Walsh’s Commanche Court. “I get on great with Ruby and any time we’re on a night out he still says he has nightmares over that race,” Jim says with a smile. “Ruby was going to box me in coming down the hill as I was on the inside of Joe Tizzard on Sea More Business. I remember hearing Ruby shouting, ‘push in Joe’. I shouted back to Joe, ‘you’ll get a month’s suspension if you do me from here’. I got the run on the inside and held on.”

In 2003 Best Mate won with lengths to spare in a mesmerising Coronation up the Cheltenham hill. “He could have won the Queen Mother Champion Chase that year as the ground was like a road. It felt like he could have even kept going for another mile in the Gold Cup. Nobody appreciated how ground dependent Best Mate was. He hated soft ground.”

In 2004 the horse’s owner Jim Lewis described Best Mate as ‘a street fighter’. A footnote to Best Mate’s roll of honour up to that point suggested he was mollycoddled by trainer Henrietta Knight. Before that historic third Gold Cup in ‘04 the heavens opened. Add to the unfolding scene the most battle-hardened chasers in Britain and Ireland and suddenly the distance between Best Mate and racing immortality starts to widen.

Culloty walked the track the morning of the race and noticed a strip of fresh ground on the inside rail. That’s where he needed to stay for as long as possible. The race is famous for what happened next. Paul Carberry on Harbour Pilot aggressively pins Best Mate to the rail two fences from home. The 69,000 crowd gasp in disbelief sucking the air out of Prestbury Park. Even when retelling the story of the race over 15 years later, Jim still has that same sense of detachment from panic.

“Everybody panicked but I was probably the only one who didn’t. I knew I had plenty of horse under me. I went to make my move two fences from home just to keep the horse straight and Carberry kept me in. I had to take a pull and come round him. But really I had loads of time. From that position I was always going to win. Had I pulled him onto the soft ground sooner it would have been a different scenario. Carberry was entitled to do what he did as I was a sitting duck to get boxed in. People made a big deal of it but I knew it was still a long ways from home. For some reason whenever Best Mate won there was always a huge sense of relief,” he adds.

Jim Culloty was born in Killarney in 1973 and grew up near Fitzgerald Stadium. He is a cousin of former Kerry football star Johnny Culloty. He sat his Leaving Cert at nearby St Brendan’s College and even though he enjoyed hurling, he wasn’t smitten by Gaelic football. It’s thanks to his father that his love of horses blossomed as the late Donal Culloty kept a horse with a Kilkenny trainer named John Kennedy - a yard where Jim spent a summer working when he was 13. Jim also enjoyed two summers with John Jenkins in England and his career begins in earnest when he applied for a job in The Irish Field for a vacancy in a point-to-point yard in Cornwall owned by David Bloomfield. Jim takes up the story.

“I told my mother what I wanted to do and I was sent to Killarney Riding School on Saturday mornings for lessons. I was bitten by the bug, really. I just loved it. It was against all odds me becoming a professional jockey given my background. But if it’s for you it will find you. My brother Mike and I even bought a pony from our Confirmation money. Then dad had a horse that was injured so he brought it home. I walked that horse out before school in the pitch dark going up the Kilcummin road. I’m sure there will be people reading this who can still remember almost knocking me down. I got the job in Cornwall when I was 18 for £30 a week working from 6am to 9pm. It completely changed me in the sense I became a stronger rider. It was hard graft up on Bodmin Moor, which is one of the bleakest places on earth.”

Jim could never have imagined when applying for the job in Cornwall it would one day lead him to the gates of the burgeoning West Lockinge Farm of Henrietta Knight and the late Terry Biddlecombe. Jim shot to prominence by becoming Champion Amateur in 1995-96 with 40 wins. Knight and Biddlecombe were known as racing’s ‘odd couple’ because of Henrietta’s regal persona and Terry’s decadent approach to life during his heyday. It was a team that functioned better than any in racing and Jim has colourful memories of his time there, even if the start was a little bumpy.

“I started at the bottom as a stable lad. She (Henriet at all to begin wit outside rides I ha was watching my hadn’t given me Christmas 1995, house down the Eve party. I got d next morning I ar at 11am with my covered in wine. at about 100 mile knocked over po of horses. I reme ‘She’s gunning fo gunning for you’ Henrietta bulling mind you riding m and riding out at f***ing way I’m p lad’s wage when work, you’re alwa myself ‘yes’ as I’m hated mucking o sacked me, whic day of my life. So started giving me rode 13 winners 1996. Hen and Te but business was

The cast for on National Hunt dra finally complete i Mate walked off a come from the fa yard in County C time Terry Biddle