Jim Bolger has announced he’s downsizing his training and breeding operation. Irish racing’s enfant terrible isn’t going anywhere, though. He might even have a classic horse for next year in Mumhan. But it’s still a landmark in the career of one of the seminal and most distinctive figures in Irish racing history.
Since Bolger will be 84 on Christmas Day, any use of “enfant” might seem incongruous, but it is apt in the sense of someone so famously unconventional, outspoken, and even innovative. When it comes to willingness to disrupt long-standing orthodoxies, Bolger’s maverick instincts remain timeless.
It means it’s probably just as well he has always cared little for popularity. It is the lone wolf’s fate to be far from all things to all men. There are those in racing who dislike Bolger for his disruptive instincts. And when observing how disruption for its own sake can have an impact on even the highest political offices, it’s easy to understand how it might generate unease.
The difference with the famously combative trainer is how tough it is to characterise his habit of cocking-a-snoot at the sport’s conventions as some end in itself.
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By any objective analysis, his decades of warning about the deficiencies of Irish racing’s regulation have been vindicated to dispiriting effect. As with most things, there were likely various motivations behind what some at the time were prepared to dismiss as simple zealotry. The bottom line, though, is that no one can say Bolger was shouting into the wind.
That it gave him licence to make incendiary comments in 2020 about doping being a chronic issue in Irish racing is another matter.
No one could question Bolger’s readiness to stick his head above the parapet about such a crucial issue. Any smug presumptions about Ireland being an ethical oasis in the thoroughbred world had long since been blown out of the water. Plenty were, and some still are, willing to believe his claims of a non-level playing field.
The consequence was as vigorous a shaking of the racing tree as there has ever been. What has fallen out can be viewed as either reassurance that things aren’t nearly as bad as might have been feared or some implicit, giant cover-up. What there’s no dispute about, though, is the legacy of bitterness many within the sport and industry feel towards the man who kicked it all off.
There’s an honourable tradition of whistleblowers skirting normal legalities for a broader good. Not naming names might have been understandable in the circumstances, but the way things unfolded was anything but satisfactory. Ultimately, no smoking syringe emerged to back up Bolger’s claims.
There appears to be little evidence of that having diminished his ironclad self-belief. Even in a business where shrinking violets are quickly mowed down, he is a notable stranger to the concept of doubt. The industry joke about the man born on December 25th is that God thinks he’s Jim Bolger.
It’s the sort of self-assurance that can antagonise people. There are countless individuals who’ve felt the waspish side of his tongue. Bolger’s capacity to wrong-foot is renowned. If it makes for a wary atmosphere sometimes, that probably suits just fine a man who comes off as egotistical but whose greatest distaste of all may be for complacency.
It’s one of the paradoxes that make for a compelling, if sometimes contrary, figure. He is the racing grandee who’s also the ultimate racing interloper. With no racing background and no financial benefactor, he carved out a singular position during his training career, which next year will reach the half-century mark.
Perhaps it’s little wonder the outsider peered around a sometimes dauntingly insider world and baulked at comfortable inherited certainties. When he started, the legendary Vincent O’Brien was in his pomp and disposable income was at a premium. When he first emerged, his contemporary John Oxx recalled queries of “Jim who?” It wasn’t long before that was put right.
Given Bolger’s abrasive personal reputation, the sheer scale of his towering professional accomplishments mean they could be overlooked.
But it’s worth considering how perhaps the only valid comparable figure in terms of the breadth of his ambition and accomplishment is the legendary Italian horseman Federico Tesio, the man who bred Nearco and Ribot. He, too, owned, bred and trained his own string, but in a very different competitive era.
Tomorrow’s Dewhurst Stakes at Newmarket, usually Europe’s top-rated two-year-old contest, is an indicator of the Irish man’s consistent levels of modern success. Between 2006 and 2012, Bolger won it five times. They included the subsequent 2008 Derby winner New Approach.
That in his finest moment at Epsom, Bolger found himself exchanging fire with journalists over how he’d appeared to rule the colt out of the race, only to then change his mind, somehow seemed apt. The great disrupters rarely make for comfortable company. However uncomfortable it may be, shaking up complacency can be no bad thing in the long run.
Something for the Weekend
A paltry field of 21 lines up for tomorrow’s Newmarket Cesarewitch and 10 of them are Irish, including last year’s controversial winner Alphonse Le Grande. Charles Byrnes’s Reverend Hubert will garner a lot of focus, while Willie Mullins has three shots. Seddon (3.40) is the oldest horse in the race but could go close at big odds. John McConnell’s veteran, a 2023 Cheltenham festival winner, is two from four on the flat and will relish quick ground conditions. Patrick McGettigan’s claim means he has a featherweight on his back.
In contrast, Damysus (1.15) is likely to start favourite for the Newmarket opener but looks the one to beat. Injured at the start in the Derby, he impressed on his return to action at Deauville in August and shapes as ultimately being better than this Group Three level.
