The quiet head of a racing empire

Horseracing might be a notoriously bitchy business but the queue to scratch John Magnier's eyes out is a very short one indeed. Even the most verbose tend to clam up when asked to give any sort of opinion on the intensely private master of Coolmore.

"No one is going to shit on their own doorstep," was the succinct reply of one racing professional when asked this week to venture an assessment, positive or otherwise, of the man who owns tomorrow's Budweiser Irish Derby favourite Galileo.

For racing professionals, defecating on the Magnier doorstep can be a very expensive pastime. The 53 yearold, easily the most powerful and compelling personality in the Irish horse industry, has a considerable reach.

Having the world's top stallion operation, centred on his Coolmore Stud in Co Tipperary, means that even the smallest breeder can come into Magnier's ambit and as one of the world's richest owners, every trainer, agent, seller and hanger-on from Kill to Kentucky can claim a stake in wanting to remain on the man's good side. Tomorrow's big race is a good example of that racing clout.

In Galileo, Magnier owns the hot favourite along with his principal syndicate partner, Michael Tabor. The apparent main danger, Golan, was the subject of a successful £15 million stud rights bid by Coolmore just days before he ran second to Galileo in the Epsom Derby.

Two other horses, Pebble Island and Ice Dancer, accompany Galileo from Ballydoyle. The Tommy Stacktrained outsider March King runs in the Magnier colours, Morshdi's dam is by a Coolmore sire and Cashel Bay was sold out of the O'Brien yard, so it's long odds Magnier will not be able to take some solace from whatever wins.

It's a remarkable position to be in and a remarkable personal success story for a man who first came to prominence in the mid-1970s. Along with his fatherinlaw Vincent O'Brien and the English businessman Robert Sangster, Magnier hatched the plan to buy yearlings in America and turn them into sires in Ireland where stallion income remains tax free.

The result initially was a string of champions that included The Minstrel, Storm Bird and Golden Fleece and since Magnier's installation of Aidan O'Brien into the Ballydoyle training centre in 1995, the flow of ultra-valuable bloodstock has. if anything, increased.

Yet all through the years, Magnier has determinedly remained shy of the limelight. Sangster's public elan allowed his business partner to remain in the background and now Michael Tabor, the East End East London-born former bookmaker who was banned from British racetracks for almost three years in the early 1970s, is by far the hungry hack's best chance of a quote.

Magnier's friends and business colleagues, JP McManus and Dermot Desmond, also have an infinitely higher public profile. When Magnier purchased a Jack B Yeats portrait for over £1.1 million in May, his name emerged from the lips of Ireland's favourite tabloid broadcaster Gerry Ryan as a grotesque Closeauesque Inspector Clouseau-style mispronunciation: "Mann-yee-eaah."

"The cult of personality is not encouraged at Coolmore. John is not into that," says Matt Mitchell, managing director of Goffs Sales. "It's fair to say he does not like publicity but he does treat the media on a very professional basis. Some of the Coolmore success can be attributed to the marketing techniques of their horses."

However Magnier's dislike of personal publicity has resulted in possibly an even greater aura surrounding his business abilities which now extend far beyond racing and breeding. He is a major player and that has sometimes seen him drawn into newspaper headlines, an area he would rather avoid.

In March 1999, the Moriarty Tribunal revealed that a euro £10,000 cheque from Magnier to the Aer Lingus chairman Dr Michael Dargan had ended up forming part of the startup capital of for Celtic Helicopters. Magnier vigorously declared he had no idea the cheque would end up where it did but the dreaded media still smacked their lips.

It had been the same in 1990 when the Magnier Family Trusts were a beneficial shareholder of United Property Holdings, a company at the centre of the controversial deals surrounding Telecom Eireann's purchase of its headquarters site in Ballsbridge.

At the same time, Magnier was reported to have benefitted benefited from the investment in Ireland of Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfuz who was granted Irish passports by the Government in return for a promised £20 million investment. Some £4 million went to Leisure Holdings, a company which started life in 1988 as Leading Sires and whose largest single shareholder was John Magnier.

Such headlines are not welcomed by Magnier who is described by friends as "a quiet family man, quite a good wit and good company." It's that distaste for the limelight that which probably contributed to his him making just one speech when appointed to the Seanad in 1987 by the then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey.

But Magnier is not slow in letting his feelings known when he feels the need. A prime example came during last year's lengthy struggle over the Government's offer of cash for ammalgamation the amalgamation of racing's ruling bodies.

The Coolmore boss lashed the Turf Club, an organisation he has been a member of since 1985, as a "handful of amateurs" and proclaimed: "Never before have the decisions of so very few amateurs affected so many professionals." Magnier's influence was widely regarded as being vital to a huge 2,000 strong crowd marching on the Curragh racecourse in October.

It's all a long way from the farm near Fermoy where Magnier was brought up and where he nostalgically remembers milking cows before helping with the other family business of breeding mares. Last year, close on £50 million was spent on yearlings by the Magnier-Tabor team and the cost of keeping them at the Ballydoyle stables is about euro £2 million a year.

In such circumstances the significance of actual prizemoney is neglible. The aim is to make stallions, like Sadlers Wells who generates income in the region of £15 million each year all of which is tax free. Sadlers Wells is one of 33 Coolmore stallions operating in Ireland with 17 in the USA and 14 travel to the Southern Hemispehere to do double stints.

The dual-hemisphere stallion is a Coolmore innovation that which has helped the stud become increasingly dominant in the world market and almost all-consuming in Ireland where critics point to some stallions covering colossal books of remunerative mares.

"Success always brings its detractors who are either envious or afraid. People who are anti-John have their own agenda and have come up against him in the commercial aspect. It has to be said Coolmore's growth is taking the market share from other studs and in the commercial world that will always result in jealousies," says Mitchell.

Dermot Weld is one of the country's top trainers, has had Magnierowned horses in his yard and is in doubt as to the Coolmore supremo's international impact.

"He is the most successful man in world racing," Weld says simply. "His impact has been huge and we are fortunate he is in our industry because he would have reached the top in any business. He is just a highly intelligent, articulate and brilliant man."

It's the lucrative breeding element that must make Galileo's emergence as racing's next potential superstar so satisfying for Magnier. As son of Sadlers Wells and the Arc winner Urban Sea, Galileo is something of a holy grail for a breeder but the ultimate plan to run him in America's Breeders Cup in October is just another sign of Magnier's commercial instincts.

Friends say part of the motivation for this extremely wealthy man is to find a successor to Sadlers Wells whose success is so linked with Coolmore's.

Last year saw a vintage class of possible successors from the racetrack. Giants Causeway's six Group 1'sOne wins allows him start at a covering fee of E£75,000 which should generate an income of at least £7.5 million a year. Since it will be three years before anyone knows if his progeny will be any good, his capital value is enormous.

If Giants Causeway is as successful as is being predicted, Magnier's influence is guaranteed even further since he purchased breeding rights to the colt's sire Storm Cat in 1999.

Magnier may not shout about such a scenario spectacularly vindicating his judgment and is also unlikely to shout from the stands if Galileo wins tomorrow. But that is only proof that while money may indeed talk, real money whispers.