Patrick Harty

When my father and I became joint-licence holders last May I became the fifth generation of the Harty family to be a licenced trainer in Ireland so it was certainly a proud moment. I suppose as I’ve got older I’ve become more aware of the rich history of our family in horseracing, and in equestrian pursuits more generally, and more conscious of what our name means to people and what it stands for.

Michael ‘Boss’ Harty, who was based in Alston House in Croom, Co Limerick in the latter part of the nineteenth century, was the first in the family to hold a trainer’s licence although I’m sure some of his predecessors were also involved with horses. He was also the first licenced trainer to be based outside 'The Pale'. He had five sons who were all trainers and jockeys including my great-grandfather Cyril who was the first man to represent the Free State Army in showjumping. He later trained from a yard in Chapelizod near the Phoenix Park and my grandfather Eddie rode in three-day events and in showjumping and represented Ireland in the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. Grandad changed his focus to race-riding over jumps and had a very successful decade or so in Britain in the sixties where he rode a lot for the Rimells and Fred Winter. He sourced a lot of horses in Ireland for Fred Winter, horses that had run well in, or won, bumpers, and sometimes they would both come over to have a sit on a particular horse before a sale was completed. Killiney was a notable example of a horse that Grandad sourced for Fred. He had a lot of success for Toby Balding as well and won the 1969 Grand National for him on Highland Wedding and, to this day, we are very friendly with the extended Balding family in Britain and meet them quite often.

Grandad later trained from a yard at Strawhall, on the Maddenstown side of the Curragh, and he and his wife are in good form and looking forward to getting out and about a bit more after the pandemic. Our own yard is in Pollardstown, quite close to the racecourse and to several of the many gallops that the Curragh has to offer. I learned to ride fairly young but, initially, I was probably more into rugby or football than racing. I always enjoyed going racing with Dad, though, even before he started training and then when he got a licence my interest grew. We had a horse called Summiteer that I was allowed to trot around the field on, and then on Saturdays I would bring him out for a canter and I think I was bitten by the bug from that point.

Captain Cee Bee, named after my great-grandfather, was a special horse for us in many ways. George Coogan was his regular work-rider but I used to ride him in a lot of canters myself. I was 16 when he won the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle which was Dad’s first ever Cheltenham Festival runner and when the horse came back to the winners’ enclosure I was in floods of tears. He was a very fragile horse who had loads of different problems throughout his career, but at the same time he was made of iron in that he kept coming back and was still winning good races at the age of twelve. Two years after he won the Supreme he bled so badly when favourite for the Arkle that, after weakening out of contention up the hill, he had to be walked back in by AP McCoy. But Dad managed to get him right and just six weeks later he won the Grade 1 Ryanair Novice Chase at Punchestown which I still regard as his best achievement, so far, as a trainer.

At the age of nineteen I got a position with Nicky Henderson in Lambourn and I absolutely loved my time there. I ended up spending five years there and it was a great learning curve in a yard that had a very young and vibrant atmosphere. Having been involved in preparing a Festival winner with Captain Cee Bee, I kind of thought I knew it all when I arrived but I soon realised that was far from being the case. When I became assistant trainer, there was a lot of responsibility entrusted in me in a top yard with 150 horses. The yard was very successful during the time I was there, including seven winners at one particular Cheltenham Festival, and I could have stayed on or spent time in other yards. Sometimes, though, you can almost over-learn and see too many different ways of training racehorses to the extent that your knowledge can become a little clouded, so ultimately I felt it was the right time to return home and start working alongside Dad.

In fairness to him ever since I had begun to show an interest in training he had been quietly lobbying the authorities about reforming the system to allow for joint-licence holders so it has been a process that has taken a good few years to come to fruition. Percentage wise, we'll have roughly a 70/30 split in terms of Flat horses to jumpers for the year ahead. There can be good commercial opportunities on the Flat in terms of selling horses on and the attrition rate is high with National Hunt horses. Three or four years ago Dad had about 20 jumpers in for the summer campaign but roughly half of them picked up various injuries, often just niggly things.

We had a discussion subsequently and decided to increase our number of Flat horses. In essence, though, we love training good horses in either code and trying to nurture them to realise their potential, be that winning a premier handicap or a stakes race on the level or competing at Cheltenham, the Dublin Racing Festival or Punchestown over jumps. As it happened, our jumpers held their form well last year and had a good strike-rate whereas the Flat horses were just a little off colour in mid-season before refinding their form in the autumn. We had a good few hit the crossbar towards the backend and the hunger is burning to get the first Flat winner with the joint-licence. The Flat horses did their first half-speed this morning and having them ready to do battle from the 1st April onwards is the rough target. If a few of them are ready before that for the Curragh and Naas at the end of March, all well and good.

I have a good working relationship with Dad. It’s like any family business and we thrash things out from time to time but we quickly make a decision and move on because we’re both striving for the same thing. We have teamed up this year with another family business, Bermingham Cameras who are based in Dublin, and they have come on board as new sponsors of the yard.

Prize-money has certainly improved a lot in Ireland in recent years but I don’t think we should necessarily be benchmarking ourselves against what’s happening in Britain, and there’s still scope to increase it. I have a friend who’s training in New South Wales and the prize-money levels, even at the country tracks there, would make you weep! I know that it’s good to keep the standard of racing in Ireland at a high level and there’s no doubt that it’s much harder to win even an ordinary race here than elsewhere, but I would like to see more opportunities for horses lower down the scale. Balloting is an issue for trainers trying to ready their horses for a race and also for owners who, with all the uncertainty of getting a run or not, find it hard to make plans to see their horses run, particularly at midweek fixtures when they might be working. I know from my time in Britain that owners there are well looked after when they go racing and their raceday experience is something that could be improved in Ireland.

We were delighted to win a maiden hurdle with Grandero Bello at Punchestown last weekend and he’s a horse we acquired on the online sales platform Thoroughbid.co.uk. We won a Point2Rules 5k bonus, which is divided between owners, stable staff and trainers, for a point-to-point graduate that wins its first start under Rules. Barry Geraghty had seen and inspected the horse at its previous yard and recommended him to its owners and after that it’s a case of putting in your bid as you would on ‘eBay’. It’s nice to sit back at home, then, with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and wait and see if your bid is successful. It was a good start for us in terms of buying a horse in that manner and we tend to go back to sales where we’ve been lucky and avoid those where we haven’t been so fortunate, so I would certainly consider using them again. In terms of more conventional sales, Peter and Ross Doyle buy a lot of horses for us and we’re delighted to have them on our side.

I think it’s beneficial to the horses to vary their routine and we can bring them to different gallops on the Curragh to just perk them up and keep them mentally stimulated. We were using heart monitor technology for a while and I’m sure, in the long term, it has a place in training racehorses but for the moment we’ve left it to one side. If, like my uncle Eoin does in Santa Anita, you were doing all your training on a uniform surface on the track then I could see that the technology would have clear benefits. But here on the Curragh a horse could be moving from a deep sand gallop to a faster woodchip gallop to a grass gallop with two dips and an incline all in the space of a week, and that makes it difficult to interpret the data when the surfaces are so diverse. For the moment we're happier to trust our eyes and our instincts when it comes to assessing how a horse is getting on in its preparations for a race.