Bernard Jackman: ‘If I can help us win our second ever equestrian Olympic medal - or medals - it’ll be fantastic’

Bernard Jackman was in Vietnam a while back, giving a talk to an AI startup. That’s AI, as in artificial intelligence. As opposed to AI, as in artificial insemination. This is not idle techsplaining, as will become clear.

Friday week ago, he was down visiting his dad on the Carlow/Wicklow border. Nicholas Jackman is a farmer and a cattle dealer. His son is a former rugby player turned public speaker turned performance expert turned any amount of things that aren’t either a farmer or a cattle dealer.

“There’s a special sale on in our local mart on a Friday night,” Bernard says. “I’m inheriting the farm. But I’ve shown very little interest. I was in the canteen anyway at the mart and I was talking about this gig in Vietnam that I had been doing, just chatting to Dad and two of his friends about it. And I was saying it was for an AI company and I could see them looking at me and getting more and more interested. That’s when one of them went, ‘And what sort of bulls are they using over there?’”

This is his life. Jackman found himself in the news this week when Horse Sport Ireland announced that they are bringing him in as their acting head of high performance sport, a role he will fill right up until the Olympics in Paris next August. And if you’re wondering what level of expertise he has in either showjumping or three-day-eventing to sustain him, his answer is short and to the point.

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“I know nothing about showjumping or eventing,” he says. “But my job isn’t to know about showjumping and eventing. My job is to help the experts – those are the athletes, the riders and the coaches. To make sure our plan is world class for the next nine months leading to Paris. And making sure that they have the support to deliver that.

[ Bernard Jackman helping world’s top coaches pick each other’s brains ]

“Where I have learned most about high performance since I stopped playing is basically when a company has said, ‘This is the challenge we have – can you help us?’ I don’t go in and tell them what to do. I just facilitate their expertise and pick up from that. Like, I’m not going to go into an AI company and tell them how to create AI.

“I will obviously learn loads about the sports now because that’s my passion and I know I need to be as up-to-speed with everything as possible. But I’m not going to be telling Cian O’Connor or Shane Sweetnam to take nine strides instead of 10. That’s something I should be really clear on. That’s not my role.”

How did he get here? Day by day, same as everyone else. Jackman was forced to retire from rugby in 2010 after his knees cried enough. Though he wasn’t ready to go and would happily have stuck it out for another couple of years if the doctors had let him, it never occurred to him to mourn or grieve for his playing career. He went to DCU, he got stuck into anything and everything. Onwards. Always onwards.

“I never for a second looked back,” he says. “I just moved on. Even though I would have loved to stay on and I was in a really good environment, I never thought about it for a second once it was over. I think if you’re really busy and if you’re chasing something else, that’s what you become.

“For my thesis in DCU, I looked at the correlation between high performing behaviours in elite sport and business teams. Like, I wasn’t very academic. So I basically went traveling. I went to Toyota in Japan. I went to the All Blacks. I went to the Sydney Swans. I went to Carlton. I went to Amazon in Seattle, Google in San Fran, the IMG tennis academy in Florida, Just Eat in London, Dyson, Man United when [Alex] Ferguson was there.

“I went to visit all these sports environments and basically wrote a thesis looking at what common behaviours there were between sports and businesses. And that’s the kind of stuff that I’ve been really into ever since.”

He coached for a while as well, of course. With Grenoble in France, with the Dragons in Wales. He liked it well enough but reckons it was never going to be his forever job. “People will say it’s easy to say that since you were sacked,” he laughs. “But genuinely, we said we’d go to France for a year, it would be good for the kids, etc. Then we signed for another year and then another year. I was always going to come home though.”

There’s a story about his father in that whole escapade too. Nicholas Jackman wouldn’t be a big man for sport. Bernard reckons he might have seen him play five times in total in his career. As far as he knew, the end of his boy’s rugby career would mean an extra pair of hands around the farm. A long overdue extra pair of hands at that. But Grenoble had other ideas.

They would speak every week on the phone, all the same. Just checking in, father-son smalltalk, bits of news and not news and all the rest. Occasionally, his dad would offer up some waft of scepticism about what Bernard was doing out there at all and one time mentioned that a neighbour of theirs was saying that there was surely no rugby to be coaching out in those parts anyway. And Bernard would sigh and placate and move on.

“I went home in the summer and went down home to see him and we went to the local mart. This was 2012. A cattle mart is like a scrum – everyone is bending over each other, pretending they want to bid. But mainly it’s social. Anyway, I stood into the ring and I found that fellas were avoiding me on either side. Nobody standing to the left of me, nobody standing to my right.

“And I was going, ‘What the f*ck is this all about?’ I was trying to shake lads’ hands and they wouldn’t shake my hand. I went into the auctioneer and got talking to Arthur Quinn, who has known me since I was seven. And I said, ‘Arthur, what’s going on here?’ And he goes, ‘Ah sure what do you expect – you’re over there in Chernobyl coaching a rugby team!’”

“So what had been happening – for a year! – was that my oul’ fella would go into a mart or onto a farm and get chatting away and somebody would ask what’s Bernard at these days and he’d go, ‘He’s away coaching rugby in Chernobyl. I didn’t think they had rugby there at all. Sure I thought they had nothing…’”

Grenoble pulled the plug in 2017. Warren Gatland got him to take up with Dragons but the whole scene there was in perpetual crisis and he got himself out of it in short order. He moved the family back to Ireland and set about getting a real job. He had a spell working for Reuters – the financial wing of it rather than the journalism one – and another working for Gartner, a multinational consulting firm.

All the while, he was making a name for himself as a pundit and columnist. This led to people and companies asking him to come and give talks here and there. He was smart enough to realise very quickly that old rugby yarns weren’t what anyone was really after.

It was far more about performance, insight into how teams coalesce, how systems can be refined and sharpened, how to get the best out of people. There’s a whole industry around this stuff that is both relatively new and plenty ripe for pooh-poohing. But some of the biggest companies on the planet place a lot of store in it and Jackman has found himself in demand as a result.

He has always been into horse racing but never really gave the equestrian side of it a lot of thought until Horse Sport Ireland asked him would he be interested. Now he’s all in. He spent six hours on Tuesday going through the participation agreement for the Longines circuit, who are changing their format this year. Line by line, parsing it for meaning, scanning for hidden bombs. The road to the Olympics is where he will live between now and August.

“There’s a chance here now to win something. It won’t be down to me. But I can play a part in that. We are so blessed with the riders we have. We are so lucky with the depth of talent we have and the commitment they have to representing their country. I have been blown away by the quality of the people involved - Denis Duggan and Triona Connors and these people. This is a world class operation.

“So if I can help us win our second ever Olympic medal – or medals – in equestrian, it’ll be fantastic. A lot of the work has been done already in the two years since Tokyo. The hard part is now, in these crucial last few months. This is the nicest part but it’s probably the part that can make most difference as well.”