Trainer Ken Budds leas in his winner Anyway and jockey Michael O'Sullivan© Photo Healy Racing
Last Monday was the anniversary of the famous Gay Future gamble at Cartmel and it wasn’t lost on punters who spotted many similarities with the carry on at Downpatrick on the same date.
In the infamous Gay Future case the horse was trained by a little known Scottish trainer Anthony Collins, while at Downpatrick it was a horse from the similarly obscure yard of Ken Budds that produced the headlines.
The horse named Anyway was punted as if defeat was out of the question from an early morning price of 28/1 down to an SP of even money favourite and duly bolted up.
Anyway had shown very little ability on five previous racecourse appearances before the plunge on Monday. He first ran on the racecourse for Ken Budds in February 2023. After three moderate outings over hurdles in the space of four weeks he attained a handicap rating of 93. Beaten 21 lengths off that rating at Wexford in May and a further 42 lengths in another handicap hurdle at Punchestown in June there wasn’t much in the form to suggest that he might be about to strike so decisively at Downpatrick on Monday.
What added extra intrigue to Monday’s punt was that renowned gambler and racehorse trainer Charles Byrnes, who coincidentally trained a treble at Downpatrick the same day, had once owned Anyway which he bought at the 2021 Goffs Land Rover sale for €20,000. The horse never raced for Byrnes and when questioned by the Downpatrick stewards Ken Budds said he had the horse for over eight months and his father had bought him from Charles Byrnes.
Another twist, again somewhat reminiscent of the Gay Future case, was that Byrnes himself was due to have a runner in the race that Anyway won, but he withdrew his horse, Karloss, as it was ‘injured in transit’ to the races. When the stewards asked if Karloss was at the racecourse they were informed that when Karloss slipped in the trailer and sweated up enroute to Downpatrick his owners came along in a jeep and took the horse home. The stewards’ report states: “He further stated that the owners of Karloss were travelling behind him so they brought Karloss back to his yard and that is why he did not arrive at races with his other runners.”
Many people took to Twitter to comment on how fortuitous it was that the owners happened to arrive on the scene with the capabilities to transport the injured horse home.
The following day Charles Byrnes’ official twitter account offered an explanation to this by stating: “It appears people have let their imaginations run wild last night. We were towing a horse box behind a 2 stall horse van. The owners had a jeep. The horse box was then attached to the hitch on the jeep and the horse was taken home.”
Considering Bynres was actually due to have 5 runners at Downpatrick and was making a 476 mile round trip from his Limerick base you would think he’d have organised a bigger horsebox for the journey rather than a 2 stall horse van towing another horsebox. They also drove a second 2 stall horse van.
Charles Byrnes subsequently gave an interview to the Racing Post (Wednesday’s newspaper) in which he put forward a different version of events to one the Downpatrick stewards had issued. He said that Karloss had actually arrived at the racecourse with the other four horses before he was then transported home by his owners.
Byrnes is calling for CCTV footage from Downpatrick racecourse in order to verify his claim, but the only official way a horse ‘arrives at the races’ is by having its microchip checked by the IHRB and presumably that never happened in the case of Karloss.
Charles Byrnes also refutes the suggestion that he had any connection with the gambled on winner Anyway. “I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I did buy the horse initially and he had a lot of problems. He kept going lame and I actually sold him on last year.”
An indication of how far ahead of the handicapper Anyway was going into the Downpatrick race came just 48 hours later when the horse he beat by 8 ½ lengths in the race, Gwan Tadhg, turned out again at Bellewstown and won.
In another throwback to Gay Future, Gwan Tadhg is trained by Edward O’Grady who had trained Gay Future prior to the 1974 gamble at Cartmel.
Another benign coincidence between Anyway’s victory and that of Gay Future is that both runners had a jockey change on the day. In the case of Anyway it was out of necessity rather than any attempted ruse as the intended jockey, Donagh Meyler, picked up an injury when falling at Killarney on the Saturday.
The raceday stewards at Downpatrick held separate enquiries into both the non-appearance of Karloss and the apparent improvement in form of Anyway, but were not entirely satisfied with what they heard and have referred both matters on to a Senior Racing Official for further investigation.
I can’t see anything coming from the further investigations, but I suppose the IHRB has to be seen to be doing their job even when it’s a futile exercise.
Changing the subject, I’m more than a little surprised with what has unfolded in the space of just six weeks at the Racing Academy and Centre of Education (RACE).
In mid-July a health and safety check of the RACE campus in Kildare found serious electrical issues with one of the two dormitories and an order was put in place to vacate the accommodation block.
All the former graduates of the Trainee Jockey Course and some foreign students that had been staying at the facility were found alternative accommodation in the surrounding area and it was announced that Horse Racing Ireland (HRI) was sending in one of its staff to help sort out the problems.
RACE has been one of the shining lights of the horse racing industry in Ireland since its inception in 1977. Over those 50 years the Trainee Jockey Course in particular has been the envy of most other racing jurisdictions across the globe and has produced not just a steady stream of recruits to the industry, but also a long line of distinguished jockeys including many household names such as Johnny Murtagh, Brian Hughes, Seamie Heffernan, Daryl Jacob, Chris Hayes, Shane Foley and Sean Flanagan.
I had naively presumed that HRI would simply throw some extra money at the under-resourced facility and everything would continue on as before, but somehow faulty electrics have ended up costing 21 of the 31 staff at RACE their jobs.
It’s like going into hospital with an ingrown toenail and coming out missing a leg.
HRI must have known before the electrical issue that there were other problems at RACE and it seems likely that they had been simply waiting in the wings for an opportunity to go in and restructure the centre. That said, I’d be very disappointed to think that culling the workforce was already a done deal when they first set foot on the campus.
I can understand that, while the Trainee Jockey Course did produce a number of successful jockeys over the years, it was probably a very inefficient way to unearth these gems. Housing, feeding, teaching and transporting twenty students to and from racing yards for 42 weeks in the hope that one or two out of the batch might make the grade as apprentice jockeys was a bit of scatter-gun approach, but on the other side of the coin around 70% of the course graduates did go on to gain full time employment within the industry in a variety of roles.
The new slimline version of RACE will have no on site living accommodation or food and the three proposed new courses will each only last a fraction of the length of the former Trainee Jockeys Course.
An elite apprentice course with 7 or 8 students is the headline-grabber for the new regime and there is no doubt that this hand-picked group will produce some future jockeys, but with just 6 weeks of tuition and 6 weeks of placements in racing yards it will be something of a stretch to claim they wouldn’t have succeeded without the aid of RACE.
