As a jockey, to be crocked at Christmas is some dose to endure
Ruby Walsh is determined to make up for missing last year’s festive racing
RUBY WALSH is talking falls. He knows what he’s on about too, having spent most of the past year recovering from them. They’re a pain on so many levels, not so much physical (although they do hurt) but psychological.
The injuries rob him of his independence, turn him into Mr Misery at home and, most of all, cost him the leg up from Willie Mullins on good horses. For Walsh, racing ‘has always been about the big races’. Always will. He’s missed so many of them in the past 12 months. Leopardstown at Christmas, the Dublin Racing Festival, Aintree, Punchestown and Galway all galloped by without R Walsh.
He lined out at Cheltenham but only got as far as the second day before being carted off in an ambulance after a crashing fall.
Since October of last year, he’s had to recover from breaking the same leg twice before sustaining a badly bruised spine after a hefty summer spill in Killarney.
As a jump jockey, Walsh knows he’s many times more likely to fall than were he racing on the flat, but he wouldn’t swap saddles for a moment. During an engaging chat at Paddy Power HQ on Wednesday morning, he leans forward and dips his head towards his knees to illustrate the difference between falling on the Flat and over jumps.
‘Flat jockeys get very few falls, but when they get one, a lot of them break vertebrae because they never get a hand out (in front to break their fall). The first thing to hit the ground is their face or head. Most of them (falls) happen because the horse clips the heels of the one in front, it disappears under you and your hands are gone with the horse. If you get a fall on the flat, you’re not expecting it,’ Walsh says.
As a jump jockey they occur once every 14 or 15 rides, some worse than others.
‘You get a worse fall over a hurdle than you do a fence because the hurdle falls with the horse,’ he says. ‘A fence stops the horse a little bit and you get fired off whereas, over a hurdle, you don’t get time to get off, you go with it, you crash through the hurdle and you and the horse go to ground together.’
It is a reminder that these jockeys are doughty and durable. None more so than Walsh, who returns to Leopardstown this week – via a St Stephen’s Day spin to Limerick – in better nick than he was last year. ‘It was freezing,’ he recalled of his stint as RTÉ analyst.
‘I remember coming home after the first day and saying to Gillian, “I’m putting on three times as much clothes tomorrow, and different shoes”. Last Christmas was a completely different ball game. Trust me, if you had told me I could go to Down Royal last Christmas, I’d have gone, so going to Limerick doesn’t bother me.’
On crutches last Christmas, he was The Grinch as the four days of Leopardstown unfolded without him, although he says he was in better form at home with Gillian and their gaggle of girls.
‘Being injured is the worst place to be for any sports person. It doesn’t matter what sport you’re in to, there’s times of the year that are more important than others. To be crocked as a jockey at Christmas is a dose,’ he continues.
‘Same as a GAA star. If he misses January or February, he’ll take that, but it’s some kick in the rocks if he misses July, August and September. It’s the same in racing, there are times of the year when you think “if I’m going to be injured, this isn’t the worst time”. Christmas is a bad time – so is January, February, March or April.’
This could be a very good time for Walsh. He has Getabird to partner in Limerick, then Footpad, Faugheen, Bellshill and a raft of other equine elites trained by Mullins to ride at Leopardstown.
If he stays safely between the wings, he could boot home half a dozen winners, ideally the big ones. The Foxrock track is one of his favourites and he rides it as well as any pilot. It was the venue for his very first ride in public, three days after his 16th birthday in 1995.
‘Wild Irish, we were fifth in the Bumper, he went to Tipperary a fortnight later and he was second,’ he recalled in a flash.
Did it feel like he had won the lotto when he got that licence?
‘I don’t know what winning the lotto feels like, but I suppose that’s a way you could put it. I felt I had everything I ever wanted, just a licence, a little piece of paper,’ he adds. ‘It was much easier to get your licence back then, I just had to do an interview with Cahir O’Sullivan, who was in charge of the Turf Club, the week before and they issued the licence on my birthday. Now you have to do a course for God knows how long.’
While he didn’t know it then, Walsh accepts he arrived into racing as the stars were starting to align.
‘Charlie Swan had dominated and that had probably stifled the generation (of jockeys) under him but as he started to slow down, we (Walsh, Paul Carberry, Barry Geraghty, Davy Russell) were coming on.
‘The economy was the big thing; there was money in racing in Ireland. Willie’s yard grew, Frances Crowley was growing at the time, Noel Meade was flying and, as we got going through 18, 19, 20 and got established, the money turned.
‘Gigginstown came in, JP (McManus) expanded and we were there at the right time. I grew up thinking if I can get a few rides in Cheltenham in my career, it’ll be
great or if I ever get a chance to ride one in the National, it’ll be great. Did I think at 20 I’d win it? Did I f***! And it was my only ride at the meeting.
‘We probably changed it, Barry (Geraghty), Paul (Carberry), Davy (Russell) and myself. Charlie had started it where instead of the Irish bringing the English jockeys in, Charlie turned it the other way and was riding a bit for Martin Pipe.
‘When we came through, they wanted us, so rather than shipping in the big English jockeys here when I was younger, it went the other way and we started riding over there.’
Walsh is deep into his 40th year but riding as cannily as ever, as evidenced by recent big-race wins on Min at Punchestown and Easy Game at Navan.
Each time, he had to judge what proved to be decisive moves with split-second timing and might easily have made a mess of it.
Like his fellow vets (Geraghty and Russell – all of them winners of the Gold Cup and Grand National) from the class of ’79, Walsh is ageing at his own pace.
Retirement? Not for some time yet, he says. ‘People just expect you to stop at 30 because you’re a jockey, but Pat Taaffe didn’t. He won the Grand National at 40. OK, he’s probably not the norm but I’m not doing something that hasn’t been done before. Noel Fehily is still flying at 43. ‘The beauty for a jockey is it doesn’t matter how slow I get, I never have to move anyway. So, you’re getting all the experience mentally, dealing with situations and you’re a more mature person.
‘It doesn’t matter if my legs don’t move as fast because they’re not supposed to move anyway. That’s the advantage a jockey has over most other sports people.’
A bit like the great Franz Beckenbauer, who captained West Germany to World Cup and European Championship success in the 1970s, Walsh may not be the fastest from A to B.
But he has never started from A.