THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:JOHNNY MURTAGH is all sinew and angles. The pink shirt narrows from the shoulders to a waist most men in their late 30s would have only a vague memory of ever aspiring to. Even in semi-formal wear, he looks like a jockey. If he were to be anything else it would be a boxer. Featherweight, you might say, but that would be too heavy. He was a boxer as a kid, a good one judging by his record then and his face now. Maybe that's where he learned the stare. It would wilt you if you let it.
There’s a giddiness, too. Crouching, in full riding gear, in the middle of St Stephen’s Green on a Tuesday morning, just to make a better photograph? His idea. No prompting. Offered as a way of livening things up a bit. On the day we first talk, he is doing his bit for Horse Racing Ireland, as their new ambassador for flat racing in Ireland. Sent out there to get a bit of press for a sport of kings in a land that is spawning too many new paupers. “Normally they pick someone with blonde hair and a short skirt,” he says. “They got me.” He grins. “Someone with a big mouth who won’t stop talking.”
They didn’t just pick him for his good nature, of course. Last year was his first as chief jockey for Coolmore/Ballydoyle. He described it as being signed by the Manchester United of racing. The best horses (Yeats, Henrythenavigator among them). The best trainer (Aidan O’Brien). What that says about him as a jockey is obvious. That he backed it up with 21 Group One wins in that first season was an emphatic way of obliterating any lingering doubts.
This day’s an oddity in Murtagh’s week, in his routine. When not racing, he’s up at 5am. It’s an hour and 20 minutes from his home by the Curragh to Ballydoyle stables, where he’ll be on the horses from about 7am. He’ll be done by 11.30am, “then I usually come home and I might have a bit of lunch. Go for a run. Run in the evening and I’m usually in bed by nine or 9.30pm. You know, it’s not very exciting”.
On a race day, he’ll get a run in the morning, followed by a sauna, and then on to the track. The flat seasons lasts until November, so he still has the promise of the unknown, and a hunger for success. “Happy with 21 Group Ones? No, I want to have 22 this year. The bar has risen again. It mightn’t happen, but that’s where I start off. I don’t hope that I’ve one. For me that’s not a challenge. Start at 22.”
April to November. A season of austerity. Of dreams of fish and chips, but a less mouth-watering reality. “Porridge made with water for breakfast. That usually keeps me going. If there’s no racing I can have a bit of lunch; if there’s racing I don’t have any lunch, I have dinner. I try and stay off dairy products. No sugar. Nothing from a can, so no fizzy drinks. I drink water. I eat fish and vegetables, or chicken and vegetables.”
It can get tricky off-season. He’s praised the way that minimum weights were raised in Ireland a few years ago as a means of addressing the unreasonable expectations that were a legacy of the age of poverty. Still, during the season there’s a cold discipline required. “When was the last time you ate because you were hungry?” he asks, then waits for you to flinch with an answer before answering it himself. “Just because it’s one o’clock, it’s lunchtime. You’re not even hungry half the time. That’s what I’m trying to say to myself. ‘Johnny, you’re not even hungry. Eat when you’re hungry, you’ll eat a lot less.’ Listen, I’m never starving. I’m always able to have that little bit that keeps me going. I never got beaten in a race where I thought, ‘Jesus I was weak there’. It’s like everything else, when the adrenaline kicks in, when you’re on top of your game.” Sometimes he’ll have a cup of tea (“or half a cup of tea”) with a bit of sugar and he gets a rush out of it.
“Listen, there are times I just say, f*** it, I’m going to have a dinner. But I know the next day I’m going to have to run that bit harder and put in that extra effort. But that’s the sacrifice. If I wasn’t enjoying it I wouldn’t be able to do it. But I have a different attitude. Instead of saying, ‘Oh I have to go for a run’, I say at least I can go for a run. I like going to for a run. So it’s been about changing my attitude a bit.”
THE CHANGE IN attitude is central to the Johnny Murtagh story. A couple of times in his career he has come perilously close to throwing it away. Most famously, there was an alcohol problem that took a few years to deal with, which finally came to a head in 2003. By then, he had looked exhausted, spent, a new addition to the list of greats who could have been greater. In 2000, he rode 12 Group One wins. It should have been time to kick on to greater things. Instead, he shifted down a couple of gears, drifted through a couple of years. He was well ahead of many other jockeys, but far away from his own potential.
The details, Murtagh says, are out there. He doesn’t want to go into it all now. “I’m after doing it so many times that it’s all people zone in on now,” he says.
“I had to go through it to get to where I am today and that’s what I zone in on now. Where I am today. Okay, with my past I can help a lot of people, and will, but I don’t want this article to be about just that.
“I’m here to promote racing, I’m here to say what’s good about racing. It is a big part of my story. I won’t deny. But I’m after going after it so many times, people will think, ‘Oh here we go again’. You know what I mean? The details are there, but as I said, I’ve nothing to hide. I’ve nothing to hide.”
He had entered the sport through an unlikely route – a schoolboy boxer beating up an opponent, when an onlooker suggested to his mother, Sheila, that he’d make a decent jockey. His rhythm, his size, his courage. The Murtaghs lived in Navan, Co Meath, but she wrote to the apprentice jockey school in Kildare and he was given a two-week trial.
The teenage Murtagh took to it immediately. “Whatever I did, I was always fairly competitive. I always wanted to be the best, I wanted to win everything, five-a-side soccer, boxing. The riding, I just liked the atmosphere of it straight away. I just knew this was for me. I used to say to the guys, ‘How far are we behind the other lads?’ And they’d say, ‘Ah you’re a bit behind but you’ve no bad habits yet. Just keep going’.”
He knew he had talent, but recognised the value of the work needed to back it up. And, yet, the confidence he has today was practised then instead of sincere. It was a front; a symptom of being dropped into a sport he had no roots in, and compounded by a shallow arrogance brought about by early success.
“You’re trying to get everyone to like you. Maybe if you’re not successful everyone will see through you, you know? You put a front out really, showing off. Deep down you don’t really feel this is the place for you. Because I came from no background with horses. ‘You’re just lucky to be here’, that kind of attitude. That’s what I thought other people were thinking,” he says.
As he won, he waited for the confidence and the satisfaction to come flooding in with the plaudits. But they didn’t.
“I always wanted to be happy. ‘If I’m champion jockey, I’ll be happy.’ I became champion jockey, I thought it would be better than that. ‘Okay, if I win the Derby I’ll be happy.’ I won the Derby, thought it would be better than that.” There was a cockiness too, which he has since admitted was a nasty trait he picked up as he moved up in the rankings and away from those who had helped get him there. Yet, if he had the chance to talk to his 18-year-old self, he’d let him be, send him off on his way through that same minefield.
“I wouldn’t change a thing. Without all those f***-ups along the way you wouldn’t be who you are today. ” There’s the briefest of pauses. “They weren’t mistakes, they were learning curves. If you don’t learn from them, they’re mistakes.”
He doesn’t use a sports psychologist, although as the big wins dried up he visited one. “And after about 12 seconds I said, ‘I’ve lost the will to win’. And after I cried for about half an hour, he said, ‘Johnny, you’ve lost the will to work. You’re going round in third gear. Push it up a notch’. Now I don’t know if it made a difference or not, but I was unbeatable that year.”
Even though he doesn’t use a psychologist now, he could do a bit of a job for anyone who needs it. He talks of giving it 110 per cent. Of refusing to allow in negativity. Of not carrying a disappointment into the next race. Of perspective. Of effort. Of knowing you’ve given your best whatever the result. Of not being one of sport’s could-have-beens.
He talks of patience, something learned after watching first Jamie Spencer and then Kieren Fallon get their chance with Coolmore. All the while Murtagh had to hold on to a bit of advice given to him when taking on the challenge of sobriety. “You can’t push the river.” Wait for it. It will come to you.
He looked at Tiger Woods and Pádraig Harrington, saw the structure they’d built around themselves and decided he needed a team. “I have a lot of positive people around me. To keep me pumped up. I’ve got an agent, I’ve got a driver, I’ve got a doctor, a dietician, so I’ve got a great team around me. So Johnny Murtagh just has to concentrate on racing. My wife Orla does all the accountancy and the books and all that. So I concentrate on racing. I just have to turn up then in good shape and good form.”
Now, he says, the racing is “easy”. “Great horses make great jockeys. How do you get to be on the great horses? I don’t know. Maybe you need a bit of luck along the way and I’ve been lucky at times. But at the moment I’m riding the greatest horses in the world, trained by the greatest trainer, and it is easy.”
Murtagh describes Aidan O’Brien’s methods in the simplest terms. “He sets the tone. Good, positive, solid. The horses sense that. People around him sense that. I sense it. Aidan treats them all very well. And he’s raised the bar. He knows how to get the best out of people.
“When you turn up on the day the horses are ready to roll. All I have to do is turn up in good condition.”
Is there a concern that it can’t get better than this? “It does get better. It does get better.” Murtagh sounds almost affronted. “Why wouldn’t it get better? Twenty-one Group One winners last year. I didn’t win the Derby. I didn’t win the Breeders’ Cup. I didn’t win the Arc. So the aim is to win all those races again plus these ones. So it will get better.”
HE READS THE autobiographies of the sporting greats – Roy Keane, Diego Maradona, Michael Jordan – and tries to learn from them. Keane is the one he most admires, even if he’s “a bit too black and white. Sometimes there’s a bit of grey in there as well”.
Keane has talked about the fleeting sense of satisfaction that comes with victory, which is soon over-run by the drive to do it again, to quash complacency. How long does the buzz of a win last for Murtagh? “Sure listen, it lasts until you ride the next race and someone shouts in, ‘you useless idiot!’ But it depends on what you want to take back yourself. If you’re going home and you’re meeting the wife and kids, which do you want to take back? The guy who shouts, ‘You useless idiot’, or the guy who shouts, ‘Well done Johnny’? For years I’d come back, why would he say that about me? But I don’t take that back any more. I take back the positives. I’ve to go back home and don’t want to be dwelling on the ones you didn’t win and why did the fella say that about me. Well, you won’t be much use to your wife and kids, will you?”
Is he difficult to live with during the season? “I try not to be, because I have Orla and I have five kids and I have to be a dad as well. So if you’re going home full of crap, then that’s going to come out. If you come home positive that’s going to come out of me, too. So, when you’re eating breakfast, dinner and tea you’re probably be a bit more relaxed, but when you’re racing and you’re running everyday and watching your intake of food, you probably become a bit more cranky or snappy. I’m very aware of that.”
The kids – three girls, two boys – range from a 13-year-old to four-year-old twins. His career means sacrifices far bigger than missing a meal. On the Sunday of his daughter’s First Communion, he was in riding in France. “My wife is very good. She likes racing. She understands how the system works. We mightn’t have it on Sunday but we might have it Monday. So there are things like that.
“Orla understands it. She’s a big part of my team as well. I wouldn’t be where I am without her today. I know that. She’s very solid. Very strong. And she knows it’s not going to last forever, and now that I’m on the top of my game there are little sacrifices along the way. It’s not nice not being there. But it’s just one of those occasions when I can’t be there.”
His eldest daughter has been doing a few hunter trials, and she has been going to the racing since last year with her friends, and loving it. It perks him up. He loves the sport, he says. It’s been good to him, and he wants to share that. If he was running the sport, in a country where the weather is no great help, he’d like to encourage bigger gates by dropping prices, especially for midweek meets. Murtagh’s doing his PR job as thoroughly as he approaches his races. But you know he’s sincere.
“I realise how lucky I am now. You get surprised at the boost you can give to people. You know sport, racing, Cheltenham. You saw those people after Forpadydeplasterer won [the Arkle] at Cheltenham, I’ve never seen anything like it. Like, they didn’t give a damn if the rest of the world was ending, never mind a recession. For that split second, I don’t know how long it lasts, but for that moment in time nothing can take it away from them. It’s like Ireland winning the Grand Slam. People crying. I was almost crying myself. So, that just puts the whole recession in perspective. That bit of joy coming into your life.”
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, THAT JOY was thin on the ground. A mishandled race at Chester had led to jeers from punters. “I can see why Cantona jumped into the crowd,” he says over the phone afterwards. “You would need to be sound when you hear things like ‘cheat’ shouted at you because if there was anything bugging you, if you’d any bit of road rage in you starting out in the day that would tip you over the edge.”
Redemption, if it was needed, arrived swiftly. Last weekend at the Curragh, he won the 2,000 Guineas on Saturday, aboard Mastercraftsman. Twenty-four hours later he followed it by riding Again to victory in the 1,000 Guineas on Sunday. No jockey had done that double since 1946.
“When you’re young, you don’t appreciate what you have. But when I was sitting at home, looking back at those races, I knew it was a great achievement and one I’m really proud of. I gave myself a pat on the back for that one.”
“I always wanted to be happy. ‘If I’m champion jockey, I’ll be happy.’ Became champion jockey, thought it would be better. ‘If I win the Derby I’ll be happy.’ I won the Derby, thought it would be better