A MAN APART AIDAN O’BRIEN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
A fourth Derby in six years, 22 Group Ones in 2016 and six already this year; the intensely private Aidan O’Brien has proved his genius, but is his dominance bad for racing?
KIEREN FALLON has played a round of golf in a squall at Royal Portrush and now he is sitting back in a little pub in Bushmills and talking about the Epsom Derby, won the day before by Wings of Eagles. More specifically, he is talking about Aidan O’Brien, the horse’s trainer, the man at the heart of the all-conquering Ballydoyle stable, the man many believe is a racing genius.
Fallon is one of the greatest jockeys in the history of Flat racing and he prides himself on his ability to build a relationship of trust with a horse. He does not yield to many in this regard but he does yield to O’Brien, who has now won the Epsom Derby six times, and for whom Fallon rode for three years.
He says that O’Brien, who was raised, like him, on a farm, is a horse-whisperer and that his ability to soothe an animal is sometimes startling to behold. ‘He is like a god around horses,’ says Fallon. ‘It is like magic. The way he puts them at ease... it is un-be-lievable.’
Two days later, the god of horses is sitting in a beautifully appointed office at Ballydoyle, deep in the glorious, lush land of Tipperary. It has been raining for much of the day but the gloom has cleared now and Slievenamon has appeared out of the mist.
A bronze of Nijinsky, trained here by O’Brien’s predecessor, the great Vincent O’Brien (no relation), and the last winner of the Triple Crown, stands just inside the entrance to the 500-acre complex, gazing over at the white railings of the gallops and the golden oak and the copper beech that help to guard them.
Further on, a statue of Yeats, which won the Ascot Gold Cup four times in a row, stands on a grass verge. And a likeness of Giant’s Causeway guards the entrance to the Iron Horseyard, a circular collection of 24 stables that is home to some of the princes of the equine world: Cliffs of Moher, Churchill, Highland Reel and Order of St George.
Then, off to the side, a door opens on to an ante-room and the office of John Magnier, the owner of the Coolmore Stud, of which Ballydoyle is the training, racing arm. And the god of horses sits there, waiting.
O’Brien, 47, is a scrupulously courteous man. Actually, he is scrupulously everything. He is careful, he is organised, he is watchful, he is brilliant, he is intense, he is loyal, he is driven, he is self-effacing and he is in control. Always in control.
If a conversation is going down an avenue he does not like, he builds a brick wall on the avenue and turns it into a cul-de-sac. This happens particularly when he is asked to talk about himself.
O’Brien, who was Britain’s youngest champion trainer when he first won the title in 2001, has a consuming dread of self-regard. His regime is as much about the mental wellbeing of the horses as honing their physical attributes.
He attempts to soothe his work-
force, too. For a while, he would issue every new employee with a CD of Desiderata, a poem written during America’s Depression. ‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste,’ one verse reads, ‘and remember what peace there may be in silence.’
O’Brien gives the glory to the people he works with at Ballydoyle, to the men and women who work for him and to ‘the lads’, as he calls them, Magnier and his Coolmore partners.
So he listens when it is mentioned that Fallon says he is a god of horses. He is asked if he understands what the former six-time champion jockey is getting at and when he replies, it is as if he is answering another question.
‘We are very lucky here,’ O’Brien says. ‘We always try and employ the very best special people and Kieren was one of those. Those kinds of people have a sixth sense with horses.’
To brag would cause O’Brien physical pain. And anyway, he has no need. Others, like his lead jockey, Ryan Moore, do it for him. ‘He’s got a great feel for a horse,’ says Moore. ‘He sees things from a different direction. They’re prepared so meticulously. He’s very special.’
The facilities at Ballydoyle are stunning and the attention to detail endlessly impressive. There is the circular swimming pool and the saltwater spa – for the horses, obviously – the individual turn-out paddocks, the communications system that allows O’Brien to talk to any of his staff at any given time, wherever they are on the estate.
There are the gallops built to replicate the undulations and turns of Epsom, complete with Tattenham Corner. There is another gallops called The Ascot. Great panoramas of green racetrack and pristine white railings, facsimiles of English racing’s most hallowed turf, nestle here in the Tipperary countryside like temples to Coolmore’s investment and O’Brien’s meticulous preparation for winning.
Coolmore gives O’Brien raw materials, including some of the greats of the last two decades, like Galileo, George Washington, Camelot, High Chaparal, Dylan Thomas and Gleneagles, and O’Brien repays their faith with winners.
This year, his domination of Flat racing has been, once again, impossible to escape. Earlier this summer, he became the first trainer to win the 1,000 Guineas and 2,000 Guineas on both sides of the Irish Sea in the same year.
SINCE 1996, when he took over at Ballydoyle, he has won 28 English classics. He has won three of the four classics staged this season. He ran six horses in the Derby and it was a sign of the strength in depth of the Ballydoyle challenge that Wings of Eagles, priced at 40-1 and ridden by Pádraig Beggy, was deemed the outsider of the six.
For some, Wings of Eagles’ victory in the Derby felt like confirmation of the fact that O’Brien and Coolmore now operate on a different level to their competitors. It is one thing being beaten by Balldoyle’s best entry in Britain’s most prized Flat race, another thing altogether being beaten by its worst.
‘What you have to remember,’ says O’Brien, ‘is that what is commonly perceived by the outside world might not be the reality. We believe all those horses running in the Derby had a chance of performing big. If any of them won, we were going to be delighted.’
That kind of success inevitably breeds resentment. Some say Ballydoyle’s domination is bad for racing. They say it is unhealthy. They say it is predictable. They say it is bad for competition. O’Brien demurs.
‘We do our best all the time and everyone here does,’ he says. ‘And that’s all we can do. Look, we’re not trying to dominate anything, in any way. We understand that we are trying to do our best with the horses that we have.
‘Everyone has to make a living. We don’t try and stop anyone from making a living. We do our best every race and whatever the result is, we accept it and move on. Whoever wins, we are delighted for them in a 100 per cent way.’
O’Brien gets up. He has to go. He has an appointment at the yard now being run by his son, Joseph, who won the Derby twice as a jockey and is following in his father’s footsteps as a trainer at the family farm in Owning, Co Kilkenny. Things end almost as they began. I ask O’Brien if he counts himself as an obsessive and he shifts, as always, from the singular to the plural.
‘An obsessive?’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t think so. I work here with the people. Some people are obviously unbelievably committed and I watch those people. We are just part of a massive team of people. That’s what makes this place.’
As he drives out past the golden oak and the copper beech, past the gallops and the white rails, his staff are watching the weather. The grass is soon to be cut and they want to judge it just right. At Ballydoyle, it is time to make hay.