RUBY’S READY

Cheltenham king Walsh is out to defy his critics once more

RUBY WALSH is sitting in the lobby of a Dublin hotel. A knowing grin is spreading across his face as he listens to questions about 40th birthdays and thoughts of retirement and falls at Thurles and Naas and Punchestown and age and grey hair and broken legs and leaving Cheltenham in an ambulance.

Ordinary people have a habit of foisting their ordinary expectations and ordinary worries and ordinary parameters for ordinary lives on extraordinary sportsmen like Walsh. In the last year or so, the narrative that he has had to listen to over and over again is that he should turn his back on his brilliant career to escape time’s advance.

As he is talking, a stranger’s hand appears as if on cue from over my shoulder and reaches out for his. ‘Be safe the next couple of weeks,’ the fellow says, with a meaningful look, a funereal tone and a firm grip. Walsh thanks him for his concern.

Everyone seems to be fretting about him as Cheltenham approaches. It makes him smile. Everyone wants to hurry him towards the finishing post of his racing life. When the stranger moves on, I conform to type and ask Walsh if he is thinking about his legacy yet. Or what people will say about him when he has retired. ‘Grumpy old b ***** d,’ he says.

He plays up to that persona every so often. He has a laconic way about him, certainly, but if you like dry wit and a man who’s not so carried away with his image that he’s beyond

some nice lines in selffall deprecation, you’ll like Walsh. He does not feel the need to boast or defend himself. He is content and self-contained. He needs to be prodded about his legacy.

He is not filled with the same dread of leaving his sport that gripped his friend AP McCoy. Maybe that’s because he has no intention of quitting any time soon. ‘I don’t think about legacy,’ he says. ‘When you’re gone, you’re gone. This is sport. It’s not about the past. It’s about the future. When you’re retired, it’s about who’s coming next.’

People mean well when they worry about the way he keeps coming back for more despite the broken bones. Walsh is a racing deity, one of the greats of modern sport, not just National Hunt racing. He has ridden 58 winners at the Cheltenham Festival, more than any other jockey. More than McCoy and Richard Johnson combined.

But riding over jumps is not a forgiving pursuit and it has not stopped battering his body. Walsh is a smooth stylist in the saddle, the racing purists’ favourite, but like many of his rivals, he has levels of mental and physical resilience that inspire disbelief in normal people.

‘However brilliant Ruby is,’ McCoy told a journalist as he watched Walsh being helped to an ambulance after he broke his leg in a at last year’s Festival, ‘people have no idea how tough he is.’

Between November 2017 and October 2018, Walsh was only injury-free and available to ride for 39 of 338 days. In that period, he broke his wrist, his right leg, twice, and suffered an injury to his vertebrae. He fell at the last on the favourite twice on the same afternoon at Naas in November, and again on the punters’ favourite, Faugheen, at Leopardstown at the end of December.

But through it all, as critics circle and fans fret, Walsh does not let the demons gather.

‘I have no self-doubt,’ he says. ‘Maybe the more people start to doubt me, the more I feel I have to prove. Not self-doubt, just prove them wrong. What’s that? Stubbornness?’

He fixes me with a stare and waits for me to answer. I mutter an inconclusive response that doesn’t change his opinion. ‘Stubbornness,’ says Walsh again. ‘It’s always about the next ride. You learn from a very young age to look forward. The past can’t be changed. It’s what next and how you can affect it.

‘Does it get harder as you get older? I don’t think so. I’m sure it does for other athletes because you physically start to slow down, but as a jockey it doesn’t matter how slow we get because we were never really moving that quickly anyway. We’re more like golfers. Does golf get harder?’

Injuries are a jump jockey’s constant companion but when you are 39, others start to worry about their impact on you on your behalf. They start mentioning the fact that Walsh has four daughters, as if he is somehow being irresponsible by continuing to ride. He has a withering put-down for that. ‘They’re not the first jockey’s kids in the world,’ Walsh told the Irish Times last year.

He has an answer, too, for those who talk of the sport’s dangers. ‘Yeah, but it was dangerous when I was 19,’ he says. ‘It’s no more dangerous now that I’m 39. I knew the dangers of this game long before I started at it. I knew everything that would come with it. The injuries, the falls, the highs, the lows. I knew what could happen.

‘My girls love going racing and they love watching me ride. I’m sure they hate watching me fall, the same as my wife, Gillian, does. But I can’t change that. I’m a jump jockey. There are going to be falls. Hopefully there are going to be winners. There’s definitely going to be losers. There are no guarantees you won’t fall. You hope not to get hurt but you can’t really control that either. That’s why I do it. I love it. ‘People have been asking me when I was going to retire since I was 30. It’s been happening more since I was 35. It’s happening even more now. It’s the same for any sportsman. ‘I feel like when you answer a question, you’ve answered it. Why do people keep asking it again?

I’ve already answered it. How many times? What do they want you to say? I’m obviously not giving them the answer they want but I don’t have any other answer.

‘When you do something and you like doing something, why would you stop doing it? That’s the question I ask myself. I still love competing. I came back last year for Cheltenham. I had six or seven rides and rode two winners. That’s a good strike rate for Cheltenham. The two I rode that should have won, won. I could have won one. The rest of them ran to the best of their ability. So you are thinking: “Why would I stop?”

‘It doesn’t get any easier recovering from injuries but that hasn’t changed. You just get on with it. You analyse why did an injury happen? Well, I know why it happened: the way it fell, I ended up with my leg caught under its neck and it rolled over and half a ton is going to break your leg.

‘Move on. Fix it. Let’s go. So you know why it happened and then you do the rehab and get back and see how it’s going. You go back and you ride a winner and you give a few horses rides and you think: “You know what, I haven’t lost it yet,” and away you go.’

Walsh laughs when I call him the King of Cheltenham. ‘I’m Irish,’ he says. ‘We have no king.’

He concedes at least that it is not a bad record he has at the Festival. ‘I’ve been lucky there,’ he says.

‘I’ve had great days there.’ I suggest that not even he could get lucky 58 times and he smiles again. ‘Maybe not,’ he says softly. ‘I like it round there. It’s incredible.’

He won his first race at Cheltenham aboard Alexander Banquet 21 years ago in the Champion Bumper and since 2004, he has been the meeting’s leading rider 11 times, with four Champion Hurdles, three Champion Chases, five World Hurdles and two Gold Cups.

No one else gets close to his record of success at the majestic racecourse in the shadow of Cleeve Hill.

His partnership with the trainer Willie Mullins is as strong as ever and Walsh is aiming to add to his tally this week and in years to come. ‘I hope I can f ***** g add to it,’ he says. ‘I better be able to add to it. It is tighter this year than in other years. The one outstanding ride I have is Benie Des Dieux (Mares Hurdle). If that can win and I can bag another one, it’ll be a good return.

‘Sooner or later, somebody will ride more Cheltenham winners than me. Of course they will.

‘Pat Taaffe held the record for years at 25. I have been lucky enough to ride 58. Somebody will come along and beat that but so what. That’s all records are. Someone’s going to run a faster time than Usain Bolt some day. All you can do is set the best in your era.

‘The only record that won’t be broken is AP winning the jockeys’ championship 20 years on the trot. That’ll be around for ever.

Twenty times champion jockey, uninterrupted: now, that’s a legacy. I do think someone will eventually ride more winners than AP. Do I think anybody will ever be physically or mentally strong enough to endure what he endured

The more people start to doubt me, the more I feel I have to prove