Omey, oh my, we watched them fly

They may not have the glitz and glamour of the big-name race meeting in nearby Ballybrit, but the Omey Races at Claddaghduff in Co Galway drew a crowd of 5,000 people for a remarkable day of sea, sand, sun and some horseracing

THE OTHER Galway Races took place yesterday, on the strand at Omey Island, at Claddaghduff in Co Galway. There were hats evident, but not ones featuring bright feathers, netting and extraordinary shapes: these hats were tweed caps, modelled by elderly Connemara men who would probably think Philip Treacy was the name of a horse. As for eye-catching footwear and high heels, well, many people didn’t wear any shoes at all, but walked barefoot on the sand. It was Connemara’s turn for the races yesterday, and an estimated 5,000 people turned up, the largest crowd in years.

Re-established as a tradition in 2001, the annual summer races at Omey, which take place between the high tides, have been steadily attracting greater numbers every year. Yesterday, the sun shone with rare generosity and Omey and Claddaghduff were looking impossibly postcard-beautiful: turquoise waters, butter-yellow strands, vast blue skies. Everywhere you looked on the walk across the strand, there were ad-hoc picnics; some of them featuring bottles of wine, and some of them featuring flasks of tea.

Among the thousands of people present was the newly crowned Festival Queen of the Sea, Gráinne O’Toole from Cleggan. She won her title last week, and was out at the races wearing her hand-made sash and a gold and pearl tiara. “It’s the first time Cleggan had the Queen of the Sea competition since 1987,” she said, while small girls nearby stopped digging sand castles and looked on in awe at her glittering princess-like tiara.

Where did the tiara come from? “It was donated by Rebecca Walsh from Cleggan – she’d worn it for her wedding,” O’Toole explained brightly. Even festival queens of the sea, it seems, are doing their bit of recession recycling.

While the adults dug into their pockets to place bets, the children just dug. I almost fell into an enormous moat constructed by six small, hard-working children. Forget binoculars. The must-have accessory of the day was a bucket and spade.

There were nine races on the card, except there was no card. Names of runners and riders were written up on whiteboards just before each race; the boards were propped up on the open-sided truck which also functioned as a commentary box, and as a stage for Irish dancing in between the races.

Jockeys weighed in at the back of a horsebox. They signed in at the front of the horsebox. A man with a handbell that looked like a school bell signalled the completion of each lap. The winners enclosure was a little area on the beach, decorated with hand-written signs and a wooden tub of pink hydrangeas.

The only way to describe the first race of the day is that it was a one horse race. Three horses started – Jekyll and Hyde, Ghost and Poker Face – but two of them missed the first bend on the strand and went galloping out together towards the ocean, like Synge’s Riders to the Sea.

Meanwhile, Jekyll and Hyde went on to be the days first winner.

“The bend on this far side might need to be looked at,” announced commentator Dingle Tom, otherwise known as Thomas O’Callaghan, from Dingle, Co Kerry. Racing was temporarily halted while stewards put up additional fencing, to stop other horses doing a Synge on it. “I love commentating at Omey,” O’Callaghan said simply, looking down with delight at the crowd. “It’s a nursery for young jockeys.”

The bookies were lined up in two rows at the back of the truck. Some of them were very fancy, with portable digital boards of the kind you see at airports giving information about flights, while others used flip charts or whiteboards to write up the names of the runners. Attracted by the name, I put a random, uneducated fiver on a horse in the second race with Colm McGinley’s bookies from Letterkenny, Co Donegal. The horse’s name was the same as a colloquial expression in Co Clare, Take it Handy, which was pretty much the mantra for the whole day yesterday.

There was also a horse in the same race that seemed to have two names; some bookies had him down as Smoking Gun, and others as Smokey Gun. I put another fiver on the horse known as Smoking Gun, but if Smokey Gun won, well, he was going to be my horse too.

Down at the edge of the temporary fencing, a steward scolded the crowd for leaning on the fence and dislodging the poles that had been driven into the sand. “You’re worse than the horses,” he said, shooing us back behind the fencing.

My horses looked beautiful as they walked up and down. I eyed them with expectant pride. They were going to earn me a modest, but important, fortune.

There were two false starts, but neither was made by my horses. After a second false start by the same horse, a small, energetic boy in a red T-shirt standing in front of me yelled encouragingly at the horse. “Come on, ya plank!”

And then they were off. Only a stone could not have thrilled to the silken gallop, the slender legs fluently drumming a kind of music on the sand, the gorgeous contrasting surroundings of ocean, rock and field.

Each time the horses passed by, they re-ignited the excitement of the crowd in that particular place. I lost track of Take It Handy and the horse with two names. It all became a glorious blur of manes, tails and necks, with the ocean flashing constantly between their legs.

My horses did not win, or were even placed. They may have come last.

The winner was New Beginning. Never mind. I may have lost the race, but like everyone else on Omey Island yesterday, I won big on the experience of a very special west-of-Ireland day.