Racing: Interview with Colm Murphy: Colm Murphy is a lucky man. In a different time Napoleon would have made him a general. And there is no doubting which horse he would ride into battle.
Brave Inca burst on to the wider public stage with a victory at Leopardstown last month that propelled him to the top of the Irish novice tree and started a lot of people dreaming of Cheltenham glory.
None more so than Murphy.
As an assistant to Aidan O'Brien, he was present at the festival for Urubande's SunAlliance success in 1996. He was also there for the initial flowering of Istabraq the following year. Except now, he knows they were just tasters.
"It was great to be part of all that, but when its one of your own, and you have the responsibility, there is no comparison. No comparison at all," he says quietly, anxiety oozing through the sentence like stress-laced oil.
The pressure of being in charge of a real festival fancy is something Murphy wouldn't swap though. It's what he has been working towards all his life. A prematurely bald pate can disguise that Murphy is just 29 and in only his third year of training racehorses.
The fact that the first one he takes to jump racing's Olympics holds an outstanding chance is fortune of the kind the Emperor would have wholly approved of.
Luck only goes so far, however. Securing Brave Inca's potential talent for just 14,000 at Goffs in 2001 suggests the cold-eyed shrewdness of the accountant Murphy so nearly became.
Completing a degree course in accounting at Waterford Institute of Technology in 1994, the Gorey-based trainer needed just two more exams to qualify as a certified accountant. Ten years later, he still has to get round to doing them!
The first of six years with O'Brien, whom he helped in the office in the afternoon as well as work riding in the morning, deflected from the books. Another year with Charlie Swan took him further from the nine-to-five route and soon he was on the road under his own steam.
"I swore blind to myself at O'Brien's that I would never go training," Murphy says. "I look at things now and I think I must be out of my head. I'm not married, but it must be like this because I am married to the 16 or so horses we have in training here. It's 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with no chance of getting rich. But then you get a winner and it's worth every minute."
Brave Inca's owners, the Novices Syndicate that comprises of the Crean and O'Tierney families from Goatstown in Dublin, were among the first to hook their hopes to Murphy and the Grade Deloitte victory last month was the best possible advertisement.
"There have been a lot of enquiries from people, but I don't want to get into the numbers game. My ideal would be to have 20 to 25 horses and concentrate on them," says Murphy who, as an amateur jockey, rode Lady Moskva to ninth in the National Hunt Chase.
"Cheltenham really is the be all and end all. The dream is to win there. Every time you buy a horse at the sales, you think Cheltenham, and how this might be the one to win there," he says.
"Brave Inca was the same. Our original plan all along this season was the Pierse Hurdle but when that didn't work out we decided to find out how good he was. There was a temptation to go with handicaps but every time he worked he'd frighten us with how well he went."
Confirmation of an exceptional talent came with that Deloitte defeat of Newmill and Mariah Rollins and the scene is set for what could be one of the feel good stories of festival. "The fact that we are going there so early with a chance is unbelievable," says Murphy before adding: "If he does win I think it will probably be the guts of a year before everyone sobers up!"
