The man that gets inside their heads

TOM HUMPHRIESmeets a master of his trade and learns how his life in the heavenly surroundings of Ballydoyle is devoid of distractions and is devoted to his work, his passion, his horses

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings. (Inisfree, WB Yeats)

HOME OF the horses. Ballydoyle is a beautiful, serene fold of the earth, a domain which should really be enclosed from all trespass. A place of perfect green and a haven of ancient peace. Cotton mists carpet the gossamered gallops for the early morning ride-outs and, later, winter sunshine dapples the meadows and makes promises of cherry blossoms to come. The gentle Galtees cradle Ballydoyle, this immense acreage of perfect patchwork nestled into a natural amphitheatre.

Ballydoyle is one of those places of the soul, the sort of sanctuary which everybody would find were everybody so lucky. It seems selfish not to share it with the rest of the world and yet you know that would be a betrayal. Intruders would alter Ballydoyle’s nature – that’s just what the trampling feet and the empty chatter of rubberneckers does.

And Aidan O’Brien, the master of this place? He is less master of it than curator. He has the same untouched aura as his home. O’Brien should be a national treasure, a central fixture on the grand stage of Irishry, but celebrity would alter and diminish him. He is of Ballydoyle and he is Ballydoyle. He is so at one with the spirit of the place that he offers the most comfort to us by just letting us know that he is there, still in happy communion with the horses and the land, living a life which absorbs him, a life which is monastically empty of distraction.

He is a winner of course, a relentless, driven winner; a man whose clients and employers are rich people and wealthy merchants. Sometimes his working day requires him to become visible and he appears wearing a top hat and tails or a bespoke suit and tie. These are threads in which he looks distinctly uncomfortable.

Hey? Remember when we had money? Before the music stopped and our vulgar notions of ourselves had to be destroyed by means of lethal injection? We didn’t feel uncomfortable. We smeared our wealth all over ourselves like tribal paints and did the cha cha cha of new money. We were comfortable with all that nonsense.

O’Brien is different. He offers a nourishing sense of humility and a dutiful remembrance of where he came from. He says things which are more important than what he does even though he doesn’t mean them to be.

“Where I am,” he says, “I am lucky to be here. I am only here because of the whole line of circumstances. There are always two questions that you have to ask yourself. What I want to do? And what I should do? Being human and because we can be tempted, doing what you want to do isn’t that hard an option.

“I am lucky. I think I was taught to do the right thing. But it’s hard. It mightn’t always be the nicest thing for yourself. Usually the right thing isn’t the easy thing. If we try to do the right thing, though, we will be better off. You can do the right thing for the longest time and then something will fall into your life and you won’t understand why it happened, but it is because you did the right thing. I believe that.”

You lean forward. He asks you, gently, if you understand what he means. It’s been so long since somebody spoke about doing the right thing that you hardly do.

IT IS EARLY afternoon. A time of quiet in Ballydoyle. The horses have been ridden out. Now they rest. In a while the music will start. A little Van Morrison to begin. All the long faces will reappear. Waiting for their attention. Yeats . . . Soldier of Fortune, Frozen Fire, Mastercraftsman, Fame And Glory, Septimus. Fransicco Goya. And on and on and on.

The horses enjoy music and in Ballydoyle they’ve found perhaps the key element which separates animals from human beings – the horses actually enjoy the idle chatter of DJs. They seem happier when there is a human voice talking nonsense between the tunes.

Around this precinct, the state-of-the-art yard which they have called after a famous resident, Giant’s Causeway, millions of pounds worth of thoroughbreds take their siesta. The yard was built just four years ago to five-star standards. O’Brien sits in a room decorated with the photographs of great triumphs and remembers harder times.

When he was 15 his dad got sick and in those days nobody in Ireland walked in a world underlaid with soft money. Denis O’Brien was laid up and couldn’t do much work. His son, Aidan, was in school where his major talent was staying out of trouble.

“What was I good at? I was good at disguising how stupid I really was and disguising how little I knew of what was going on around me,” he recalls.

“It is frightening when I think back. No interest! My head was always on the horses. I can remember sitting in the class and the head, Master Furlong, would look down at me and say, Aidan, it might never happen! Obviously I was on a different planet.”

His life back then was a series of intervals between the deliveries of the Coolmore catalogue. Ah! That glorious, glossy publication would drop with satisfying heaviness through the letterbox and young Aidan would almost have caught it before it touched the ground.

He would doodle the names of horses and draw their form on his copy books. He adored Sadler’s Wells and remembers his favourite picture of the horse, head turned as he sailed past the post. “I just knew his head was turned not because he was ungenuine but because he was trying so hard. I loved that horse.”

With the circumstances at home he had to leave school to go home and work for a couple of months. He worked, labouring for farmers and got a job for a spell in Waterford Co-Op, labouring in the mill. He started off sweeping and graduated to driving a forklift. He got some good overtime and earned a good wage there. It could have been a life.

Yet when things got better in Killegney, the Wexford townland he called home, his father had the sweet wisdom and the great generosity to let his son grow towards what he loved. His first job with horses lasted just a week before the home sickness brought him under. He recalls his dad coming to collect him and there was not a trace of disappointment in his father’s conversation on the way home. Just love and support.

And when he was home a while . . . “My dad let me train six horses at home. I was a 15-year-old boy! He had a couple of his own, a couple from a friend called Tony Rothwell and two from a first cousin of his, Maurice O’Brien. He let me train those six horses all by myself and, do you know, I broke them all down. They never made it to the track or near it. Not one of them. But he gave me that. He let me fail so I could learn to succeed. Do you understand?

“He helped me every day. Times were hard. To even buy feed for them was a big problem moneywise. But he helped in every way he could. It wasn’t easy for him.”

Eventually Denis O’Brien’s son got a job in PJ Finn’s yard at the Curragh. He was there for three months and then PJ retired from the racing game and Aidan was back home again. The story could have ended there, but Pat Kelly got him a job at Jim Bolger’s.

And after a year and a half in Bolger’s yard he met one Anne Marie Crowley riding one of Bolger’s horses at the start of a race in Galway. He fell for her harder than he had fallen even for Sadler’s Wells.

“So many circumstances have to come together to make a life,” he says. “So many random things that make you what you are.”

On the day they got married, well, he and Anne Marie rode out that morning. They got hitched that evening and were riding out again the next morning. That was the way.

“After 20 years,” he grins ruefully. “Anne Marie mightn’t be saying it’s good, but sure that’s the way it is!” And it is the way it will always be. Aidan O’Brien is unimaginable, untenable, unfeasible without horses around him.

“Aidan?” you ask. “Your last holiday completely away from races and horses?” “Ah come on,” he says. “Don’t be embarrassing me. I never did that in my life.” A weekend? “No. I’m embarrassed, but no. It’s full on. Whole life. I don’t see much of the outside world. That’s what makes me such a dull person.”

He’d watch big games on TV if the time fits in around the horses. He can’t remember the last film he went to see in a cinema.

“Seabiscuit?” you venture. “No. I think we have the DVD though. I tell ya, I’m very boring. Horses and ponies are my life. Every hour, every day. I’m just lucky. This is my life’s work, my hobby and passion all rolled into one. It’s full-on my hobby. All the people we work for understand horses. They understand the downs and that the downs aren’t what they seem, they are little diversions or sidesteps on the way to the ups. And that’s how we all pull together here and share the same passion.”

Very boring. Right.

LISTEN. YOU are a horse. Humour us here. Pretend you are a horse. This is where you want to be. This is your goal in life. To get here to Ballydoyle and to stay here. This is the Ritz. The Colisseum.

You have your own rooms. Fresh hay and straw every day. Your own little paddock out back. Your back garden, as Aidan calls it.

You get treated like a champion all the way, the best of everything, the best horse doctors, the best psychologists, the best dentists. An ECG every day. Your teeth checked every day. Your happiness monitored and fretted over. Cameras on you 24-seven, watching your habits keeping you safe. Little charts noting your weight, what you eat and what you drink.

The best people feeding you and keeping you in shape. Use of the swimming pool, the two-horse spas, the sun treatment areas. Galloping on every type of surface conceivable. Galloping out on replicas of the great flat tracks.

A quarantine area where you can live if you need to go to Australia, say. American starter stalls if you need to race over there – just so there are no suprises, no upsets.

Look, see that man over there in the tractor? That man’s job for the spring and summer is to drive that thing all day, every day. Just cutting the grass constantly, like a character escaped from a Paul Auster novel. His life is devoted to keeping the grass three inches high. For you.

Everything they think can be done, they do. For you. If you are happy, you will thrive more and that makes everybody else happy. You will work more if you are happy and soon everybody is happy. People who are dealing with you are happy, your owners are happy, the jockey is happy.

Aidan is happy.

And when they tire of being happy in that way, they move you next door to Coolmore and make you a stud horse. A whole new way of being happy.

You are a horse. Aim high. This is where you need to be. Ballydoyle.

THIS IS MONDAY and yesterday was a day of downs. O’Brien took five horses to the Curragh and each of them lost. Pat Keating was up at 4am to take two more horses to Longchamp. They trailed home too. Today having won 23 Group One flat races last season means nothing. Nothing at all.

Yesterday was a race day, but yesterdays scarcely exist at Ballydoyle. Nobody lies on in bed or stable the day after racing. Whenever possible, be it to Europe or England, Ballydoyle horses travel and come home on the same day. You might wonder why after all those glorious days at Epsom and Ascot O’Brien has never once in his life tasted alcohol. Truth is he has no interest and he has no time. Win or lose he rises with the sun.

So, he was up at 5.30am despite the long day yesterday. As usual he saw all 140 horses, every one of the guests who are stabled in the four yards here at Ballydoyle from the Giant’s Causeway yard to the old Millionaire’s Row – which Vincent O’Brien built, essentially in his back garden, to house Nijinsky and Desert King and the other legends who made this a hallowed place.

One of the horses who raced in the Curragh yesterday was a little jarred after his race. He will merit a second and a third look today. The hurt of losing all day won’t go away anytime soon he says, but the lessons are absorbed more rationally. No panic.

“This time of year you’re making little moves. The big races are the target. The winning post is in the eye. When you have a hundred yards to go, perhaps to go in a straight line might not be the right thing to do. No point in almost getting there a week early. A straight line mightn’t be the right thing for the big picture. Life is zigs and zags.

“I thought the last two in the Curragh were disappointing [Aristocrat had been a favourite]. Are they fit enough? Do we have to change something? In January, February, March and April you are just trying little things. They can make it up.

“There is no blueprint for a horse. Every day is different. It’s like the last five minutes. We’ll never get that back. It’s gone. So with horses you start out from where you are everyday.”

Days here have the comfort of routine. They ride out the first lot and O’Brien and his dog, Buddy, are about the place keeping an eye on everything, O’Brien talking to everyone, Buddy almost doing the same. Then they have breakfast and then three more lots pass his eyes up to lunchtime. They stop and eat and then it’s quiet time.

O’Brien and the staff do things in the office, take care of administration and charts and all that kind of stuff. Really they’re just killing time waiting to be with the horses again. The lads will be back at three and then everyone gets the horses out for a walk.

In the evening O’Brien goes from yard to yard and sees everyone in those yards. His progress is a series of cheery hellos. He knows everybody. Cheery hellos and brief consultations. He has a question for everybody, an inquiry about each horse.

He saw every horse in the morning but all day long the sight of them flashes through his head. His life here isn’t about grand sweeping decisions or big edicts. It is about an infinite number of tiny fragments. Piecing them together.

It’s a thousand minute little decisions he makes every day, and thousands more made by the people around him. O’Brien’s life is about dealing with the fact that any of those little decisions could make a massive impact two months down the road.

Everybody finishes at five or quarter to five. Home for tea. O’Brien’s brain won’t switch off though. In the evening they set up the board for next morning. What has to be done. He will go to bed at nine or half-nine and the day will be over. A prayer offered up, a prayer of fulfilled living a hymn to doing the right thing.

He tries to describe the process which makes him the man he is. What made the men who own Ballydoyle install him here as a fresh-faced young lad in his 20s, placing the same trust in him as his dad did with six horses many years ago in Wexford.

“So many things concerning the horses flash through my mind all the time. So many things about horses. It’s probably a bad thing. My head is swirling all the time. A horse could come into my head now that I saw this morning. I could have seen him this morning, but the picture of the horse mightn’t have come into my head until now.”

When he sees the horses, all of them in the morning ride outs, he knows without being conscious of it that he can sense them as much as see them. He might be concentrating on the horse in front of him, but he knows almost from their shadows who is coming next, and who is after that.

Their gait, the way each horse holds himself, even without a clear view of them those things advertise themselves to him. It’s etched into his hard drive this knowledge of the animals he loves. In the mornings, with the horses rolling past the whole time and people talking and information coming from left and right, he just looks and asks the odd question. He stores the profile of every horse and they will stroll through his head again later.

This one was cantering but not using himself properly. This afternoon he will ask the rider did the horse seem okay. And if the rider says that the horse was fine, he’ll believe him . . . almost. Still he’ll check. He needs to know. He can’t be happy until he gets back to the horse, just to check.

This morning is an example. He was worried about Age Of Aquarius. The horse got a little fall a week ago and tore some of his ligaments. The horse’s action was very good this morning, but O’Brien was surprised that the animal’s body weight was a shade lighter than it looked to him. If carnivals ran competitions to guess the weight of horse O’Brien could have a lucrative sideline going, but today he was a fraction out.

“It goes to show,” he says. “That’s life. Anne Marie would always give out to me for being so certain about horses. Just because you think you see something and it is in front of you doesn’t mean that is how it really is. Sometime my eyes can lie to me.”

He videos all the horses who work in Ballydoyle and often on a vacant evening he goes back and looks at the footage of a great horse at work. And surprises himself.

“I’d have an image in my head of how he worked and moved. I’d look back and it would be different.” He finds this fallibility odd and interesting.

The next question hasn’t occurred to him. So, Aidan, in the evenings having been up with the horses since 5.30am you might sit and watch videos of old horses, lost loves? He grins again. “Anne Marie and the kids find great enjoyment out of it too,” he says.

He likes the old footage because it surprises him and because every horse here has a personality. Some horses you would miss. For instance, this evening when he is strolling the yard he stops when he comes to Yeats. The three-time Gold Cup winner and the current king of the yard looks at him askance. He is a big aggressive horse who throws shapes all day long.

Yeats knows how good he is. They love him to bits in Ballydoyle. He’s the biggest character they have had here since George Washington. One of the special ones.

Some horses, other horses, will cruise through the days if he lets them. So O’Brien mixes them with horses slightly better than they are. Always he is inside their heads. This one, for instance, gets lonely. So his stall has a mirror in it running along the wall about five or six feet up. When the looks to his left he sees a pair of ears and he is reassured that he has company.

Every horse is different and he knows the character of each one as well as he knows himself. Yeats, though, takes so much attention that he and O’Brien are like room-mates. “Yeats! He has a huge personality. Watch this,” O’Brien says.

And he puts his hand out to the horse and immediately Yeats sticks out his tongue.

“He wants me to hold his tongue.” And so he holds the horse’s tongue, never taking his eyes off Yeats. They stare at each other in a little stand off.

“You know why he wants me to hold his tongue?” he asks.

You shake your head.

“So he can try to bite my hand off!” And just then the spell is broken. He takes his hand quickly from Yeats’ lolling tongue and his fingers just about escape the gnashing of Yeats’ greedy teeth. “Oh he doesn’t want to give you a friendly nip. He wants to get you between his teeth and pull hard.”

He says this as though it were the most charming thing in the world. Yeats is the boss. On race days just about every other horse is afraid of him and his every whim gets catered for. When he is done racing, for instance, he likes a bucket of cold water to be made available. The bucket is held for him and Yeats sticks his head into it, blowing out all the air from his immense lungs. He takes his head out and gives the look. And another bucket is fetched. And then another until Yeats is satisfied.

How it was discovered that one horse in the stable might like this routine after a race doesn’t seem to perturb anybody. That is what Ballydoyle is about. Finding out exactly what makes each horse tick. And then providing it.

Sometimes things happen with horses which make no sense. Like letting the horse stick his head right into a bucket of ice cold water. O’Brien enjoys the journey more if he and the horse in question get from A to B in a very zig zaggy way, some way that nobody can make sense of.

“It’s like life. It’s just an amount of circumstances. You remember it and that’s an experience that goes into your head.

“Some things don’t add up with horses,” he says. “Human beings don’t control everything. There is a far greater power than what we can figure out. We are only programmed to understand so much.

“Yes, God. That’s a power we can’t understand. Sometimes there aren’t logical reasons for things to happen with horses. We do things with horses that make no sense but they work for that horse.”

Is that a god or is it your intuition? Surely that is you?

“But sure who am I? Nothing special. Who puts thoughts into my head, into anybody’s head. All the circumstances of my life. Being homesick. Meeting Anne Marie. Ending up here. That makes no sense.”

And what would it say to you about God if you suddenly were producing nothing but also-rans? He throws his head back and laughs.

”Sure that’s all we had yesterday in the Curragh and in France! Maybe I need to be careful and watch my back!”

You ask him about regrets. He has a few, but they come in the shape of lessons.

He would remember particular horses with sadness. George Washington was destroyed at the Breeders’ Cup. Heartbreaking. Or, say, a horse called Thats My Man, a very good horse whom he had schooled to be a favourite for a big prize at Cheltenham. He was working him on a gallop here in Ballydoyle and Thats My Man broke his leg and had to be destroyed. The horse belonged to JP McManus. The regret on O’Brien’s face when he talks of any horse being destroyed is a heart-breaking thing in itself, but this one hurt badly.

McManus came down to Ballydoyle and they walked the gallop together. McManus had been a close friend of Vincent O’Brien’s and had learned lots here. So in their grief the two men walked and talked quietly and how Vincent O’Brien had used this gallop. No blame was attached. “And from that,” he says, “we had Istabraq. I learned from JP about that gallop. I learned from him that evening, what he learned from Dr O’Brien. JP could explain it to me and show me. That taught me a lot for when the good flat horses came here.”

LEARNING. LEARNING. Learning. Only a fella of such humility can learn every day.

“Who knows more about horses here than you do,” you ask him at one point. “Everybody does,” he says flatly, “if I think I know more than you do, I rule out the possibility of learning from you.” They had a good filly here a few years back called Peeping Fawn. She ran four times before they got her to win and then she won four Group Ones.

“It was because she was so zig zaggy,” he says. “Well the water was very, muddy. I could see no pattern. Yet from race to race it got a bit clearer. We could see the little things that were good for her or bad for her.

“We talked about her everyday. Maybe she did too much work one day, too little the last day. She was wetting her own hay, literally taking mouthfuls of it and carrying them over to her water pot and dropping it in the water before eating it. She just wasn’t comfortable.

“Things in life aren’t always what they look to be. A horse can look at me and seem to be happy. He can’t talk. I can’t get it out of him. A human being can talk to you and lie. Horses are amazing. You can think a horse is doing their work easy or hard. They mightn’t be. All the other little factors. Is he anxious? Walking his box, etc, you can work it out. If you are with somebody for every hour of every day you can’t lie.

“I’m just saying that sometimes with horses things just happen. You can’t explain but you just go with it. There’s not always a reason. You just keep on trying to do the right thing and hope it works out.”

HE TALKS ON. The season is upon him, looming mountainous over Ballydoyle.

How they will tackle its sheer faces and harsh inclines is his call. He says he feels the responsibility for everybody here. They climb and fall together, but he makes the key footfalls. It’s on his shoulders.

Does he ever feel like an employee? “How do I feel,” he muses. “I feel like a player. All the time, I feel part of it. I don’t feel that I am in the middle of it or the bottom or the top. I just experience things swirling around. If you imagine, I’m like a bucket. In the middle of everything that is being thrown in, good and bad. Lots of praise and lots of criticism. I try to keep a cool head and accept it. If anyone is criticised here, especially me, you let the thing unfold and see if the criticism is unjustified. Nobody here is afraid to criticise me.” Nobody is afraid. Will they tell stories about him?

Pat Keating, the head man when it comes to travelling with the horses, tells a story. Waiting for somebody to fly into Ballydoyle one day Pat was given O’Brien’s brand new car, a Saab 95, in which he was dispatched to ferry the visitor from the helicopter to the main house.

In Vincent’s O’Brien’s time they used the runway to fly Ballydoyle’s own horses to and from races in a little aircraft. Two horses in the back, a pilot and one other person in the front. As Pat describes it, the horses would be leaning over the pilots shoulder and if a horse sneezed they’d have to hastily wipe the horse snot off the inside of the front window.

Anyway, the old airstrip is still there and while waiting for the helicopter Pat had an idea. He ran the car to one end of the airstrip, pointed it towards the other end and put the pedal to the metal. A once in a lifetime opportunity – 90, 100, 110, 120, 130.

And then the crackle of the two-way radio! “You waiting for somebody flying in or you flying up to meet them Pat?” The owner of the brand new car chuckling down the line. No reproach.

“Sure I get criticised everywhere here,” says O’Brien. “Nobody is afraid of me!” And the greatest horse trainer of our time looks up to the heavens and laughs. “Listen,” he concludes, “there will be a time when we all get tired.

“If we are lucky we’ll get 60 to 80 years out of the old body and then we are bunched. We’ll pick our minds up hopefully and off we will go to wherever. The reality is we are lucky. The minute today is gone there is a new day. On and on until we are bunched. So you just make the most of every day.”

And you realise that he doesn’t see the mountain at all. No season. No targets. Just a series of days and a million fragments to be put together. In other words, a life. A happy one.

Doing the right thing, every day, every zig zaggy day.

AIDAN O'BRIEN FACTFILE

DOB: October 16th, 1969

Early years: He was the third of six children and lived in Killegney, near Poulpeasty, Co Wexford. Denis O'Brien, his father, is a farmer and small-scale horse trainer.

Schools: Attended Donard National School and Good Counsel College, New Ross.

Family: Married to Anne Marie. They have four children; Joseph, Sarah, Anna and Dennis.

Career: Started working professionally with horses at PJ Finn's racing stables at the Curragh, Co Kildare, and then with Jim Bolger at Coolcullen, Co Carlow. He is now private trainer for John Magnier and his associates at Coolmore Stud and heads up the training operation at Ballydoyle Stables in Co Tipperary, where he lives.