Fergal O'Brien

Photography by Debbie Burt

Trainer Fergal O’Brien is ending the 2020-21 season with a best-ever score of winners and prize-money earnings, and considering he moved only 18 months ago to a new and bespoke-built yard, he admits he is a...

A happy man

WHAT IS A GOOD SEASON FOR A NH TRAINER? One with a best-ever score of winners? One that has secured bestever prize-money? Ensuring that a new training base has worked out? Surviving in business, and taking that business forward for another year – particularly through the COVID-influenced problems we have endured for the last 12 months? One with Cheltenham Festival success? One that has challenged for championship honours?

This NH season trainer Fergal O’Brien has acheived four of those six targets, and he is not too far of the last two: he claimed honours as a rare British-based trainer who took a podium position at the 2021 Festival – Elham Valley was third in the Boodles Juvenile Hurdle (G3) – and he is heading for a top ten finish on this season’s British trainers’ table.

So it can easily be argued that the 2020-21 season has been a pretty successful one for the Irish-born trainer, who is based at Ravenswell Farm near Cirencester in the Cotswolds, a mere scenic half-hour’s drive away from Prestbury Park.

The trainer himself is understandably pretty delighted with the progress with the year – at time of writing he and his team, alongside partner Sally Randell, have trained 86 winners; personally he certainly does not feel the omission of a Festival winner (so far) to be a particularly weighty monkey on his back.

“If you said to me you can train 86 winners for next 20 years or have a Cheltenham winner and the next 20 years will be sketchy, I will take the 86 winners every year!” he laughs. “Plenty of trainers have had a Festival winner and don’t train any more, and there are plenty of good trainers who have never trained a Festival winner. I would much rather be consistent through the year, then the Cheltenham horse will come along.”

And, while not wishing to chase down the century, the team has that target firmly in their sights. To hit 100 winners through the 2020-21 season from a yard that was moved into just 18 months ago through the difficulties of a pandemic, would be a fair achievement.

“We came here in October 2019,” recalls O’Brien. “It has surpassed all hopes, we went from not really knowing what was going to happen, to then having a new yard with 80 stables, new gallops, and rented up to the maximum.”

“If you said to me you can train 86 winners for the next 20 years or have a Cheltenham winner and the next 20 years will be sketchy, I will take the 86!

Just five months later, the pandemic emerged and racing was halted; the new dream could have come to an abrupt awakening before it had even started to roll. “Our owners have been amazing, when racing stopped there was the feeling that racing was going to start again in July and they stuck by me – we were very lucky and very fortunate. We have had an awful lot of support,” says O’Brien.

The purpose-built yard, which was not even in existence just three years ago, is burrowed onto the Cotswold escarpment, and has been designed for the horse, staff and owners alike.

“I met our landlords Rupert and Nick Lowe in July 2018, and they could not have been more helpful. I think they have spent a lot more than they thought they would, but my rent is a lot more than I thought it would be, it works both ways!” laughs O’Brien

“The gallop was very expensive, but it wouldn’t have been the gallop we have got now if we hadn’t spent the money. We have a fantastic schooling strip, at the time I thought ‘I was at Nigel’s [Twiston-Davies] for 20 years and we never had a schooling strip’; I would be totally lost without it now.

“Apart from the gallop mornings on Tuesdays and Fridays we use it nearly everyday. We can school 30 horses in an hour, it takes half an hour to power harrow and then the surface is back to being immaculate.”

Of the yard itself, and referencing to the fact that when we visited that it was a cold and wet March morning, he says: “The yard is totally under cover – on a winter’s morning it can be three or four degrees warmer in there, everything is in the dry, but there is still plenty of air.

“It is an easy place to work, I know what it is like to work in the yard – the muck trailers are well placed so saves time, the whole yard is concrete so sweeping is efficient.”

O’Brien himself mirrors the change that the last 30 years has produced in horseracing and he reflects how NH training has changed over the last 30 years. He started out with the brilliant trainer Captain Tim Forster where one lot took an hour and three-quarters, the staff just looked after two horses, and those old-fashioned chasers probably only made it to the racecourse three or four times by the time they turned seven.

He then spent 19 years as head lad with Nigel Twiston-Davies where he learnt how to use a short hill gallop, a reflection of the dynamic change in training techniques brought about by the record-breaking West Country trainer Martin Pipe.

O’Brien is making good use of the knowledge learnt in the two very different environments.

“They have reinvented the wheel since I was at the Captain’s! I was very lucky to go there, he was very regimental, but I learned how to do things.

“Everything was slower, racing was slower, it was a different world then. I think it is the same in any sport, Olympic athletes are now different in size, and horses have adapted, too. We couldn’t train today as the Captain did – we’d be training ten horses and losing a fortune!”

THE TRANSITION from a longterm head lad to a leading top five NH trainer has not been seamless for O’Brien, even though the jump was tempered by some years training pointto-pointers alongside his leadership role for Twiston-Davies.

O’Brien set out on his own with his trainers’ licence moving from Twiston- Davies’s Naunton-based stables to rent a training yard from the former champion NH jockey Timmy Murphy.

“And we did ok when we first moved away,” he say, but adds: “Then the wheels fell off, my personal life went wrong, I split from my wife and we had a young family, all went wrong for me, we went from 50 horses down to 20 or so, and the yard was put up for sale.

“You need lucky breaks in life and perhaps my lucky break came then when Nigel rang me and said, ‘I hear Timmy’s yard is for sale, do you want to come back and rent my top yard?’”

The jumping strip is used nearly every day and O’Brien admits that it is an invaluable facility

O’Brien admits it was like pressing a reset button, the return to a yard and gallop he was acquainted with allowed him to get back to a structure that he knew worked, while also giving him the time and space to organise his private life. The first runner back at the Naunton yard was a winner. But it did not last for long.

“Though the two years at Naunton we quickly got busier again, we outgrew the yard and it was time to move on; it has all worked out because it has led to what we have ended up with here at Ravenswell.”

The yard’s young horses are mainly stocked from the Irish point-to-point field, and Irish consignors, who have endured a very difficult spring, will be pleased to hear that O’Brien found out very early on that

“the French-produced horses don’t suit our way of training for some reason”. Even more importantly, that he has orders to fill.

“We have slowed up a little bit with the buying this spring because of everything, but we have a couple of syndicates ready to go.

“Hopefully, they will get back pointing in April, we find it hard to buy without seeing them and going to look at them.”

Of the decision to stick with buying pointto-pointers O’Brien explains: “We have quite a few syndicates, and the pointers suit rather than the slow burn of a store horse. They don’t always work out, but you tend to know what you are getting, Sally loves, and knows, the Irish racing and we have some good contacts who help source the horses.

“We often fly over to Cork on a Sunday and go pointing. It is a really good day out – a couple of my brothers come down, and, as the maidens are always early, then we can go and have lunch ahead of flying back that evening.”

And although the sales headlines would have you believe that every decent Irish point-to-pointer costs something north of €200,000, O’Brien has had plenty of success buying away from the six-figure accountemptying prices.

“Alaphilippe would be a good example of one of ours – he ran in five Irish point-topoints and we bought him for 20 grand,” he says of the son of Morozov.

Since joining Ravenswell, the seven-year-old has won four races (second on his other start) for owner Nic Brereton and picked over £23,000 in prize-money.

O’Brien adds: “We were also very lucky with Silver Hallmark – he was a £115,000 purchase as a first-time-out-winning fouryear-old and is now a Grade 2 winner for us.

“We went back and bought Global Fame, who was fourth in the same point-to-point and had run three times previously. He has now won two for us and is rated 127.

“It is important to stick to what you know – the Irish pointers are the ones we know and the ones we like.”

“We have slowed up a little bit with the buying this spring because of everything, but we have a couple of syndicates ready to go

O’Brien admits to being “very ambitious”, but despite his current eighth placing (fourth by number of winners) on this year’s British NH trainers’ table, a push on to be champion trainer is not on the bucket list.

“It is not in me. To do that you need to be like Paul [Nicholls] and Dan [Skelton], you need that drive. Dan has got the mental capacity to train 200 horses and I wouldn’t, we have got 80 here with perhaps 100 horses on the books, and that is enough.

“If we can keep going with them and keep those numbers, it works for us. That is far more important. To be champion trainer you need ten Saturday horses – the year Dan trained 220 winners and he still wasn’t champion trainer, it shows how difficult it is.”

The team is now looking forward to the end of lockdown and some return to normality.

“We have a very open yard here, we love for owners to come in and see the horses. We are part of the leisure industry, it is a very expensive hobby, owners need to get more out of it than race day,” he reasons.

“Lockdown has been difficult for us. Of course, we do lots of What’s App videos and the like, but it is not the same as getting together here over a cup of tea and chatting over plans, working out why a horse has run well or run bad. We are looking forward to getting back to normality.”

The Ravenswell string walking down the hill gallop. Horses head up three times when getting fit, but once they have run, the work load is lifted