6 minute read
More than Perfect
Daniel Ross chats with US-based, Irish-born trainer Brendan Walsh, who burst onto the international scene this spring with the UAE Derby win of Plus Que Parfait
CARNIVAL. FESTIVAL. PILGRIMAGE. Whichever word you pick would be a fitting way to sum up the atmosphere at Churchill Downs the week before the Kentucky Derby. The arteries of the barn area clogged with camera-ready fans hoping for a wash-rack snap. Eagle-eyed throngs lining the trackside during workouts, iPhones and stop-watches held aloft like ceremonial candles. Then there’s the race itself.
Plus Que Parfait working ahead of the Kentucky Derby
“You know the Americans, what they’re like with their big sporting events,” says Irish-born, US-based trainer Brendan Walsh, the Monday before the first Saturday in May. “They make a big hallabaloo about it all.”
Don’t read anything nefarious into the remark – it wasn’t meant to ridicule or rubbish. Rather, it was made with a sense of good-humored wonder. Understandable really, considering Walsh on that Monday afternoon, and as trainer of a Derbycontender by the name of Plus Que Parfait, was very much in the thick of it.
Brendan Walsh (right of horse, with glasses) after winning in Dubai
In the end, Plus Que Parfait ran respectably, placing eighth. But on the Monday in question, fate hadn’t yet played her hand.
“It’s just a thrill to have a horse in the race,” Walsh smiles, before planting both feet squarely on the terra firma.
“This profession turns you into the biggest pessimist in the world – you get disappointed so often you eventually teach yourself not to get too carried away,” he adds, with a circumspection that provides a glimpse into the way he sees the art of training thoroughbreds.
“The main thing, you learn not to panic. No matter what kind of horse it is, they’ve all got a level, and you’ve just got to try to have them at their very best. You’ve got to listen to them and let them tell you where they’re at.”
Yes, Walsh didn’t win the Derby this year, but his participation in the race was another rung up the career ladder for a trainer who has proven swiftly upwardly mobile since taking out a licence only eight years ago.
In 2012, he picked up four winners, and tallied a little less than $150,000 in earnings for the year.
Cut to 2018, his win score was 53 and his wallet bulged with $3.2 million in prizemoney.
“The last few years, we’ve been lucky enough to have a handful good enough to compete at the highest level,” he says. “It’s unbelievable the way things have gone.”
And yes, Walsh didn’t win the Derby this year, but 2019 had already thrust the 46-yearold squarely onto the world stage, thanks to Plus Que Parfait’s stunning win in the Group 2 UAE Derby at Meydan in March.
“The whole thing with Dubai was fantastic, and it probably hasn’t sunk in yet,” says Walsh when recalling the chestnut ridgling’s victory in the $2.5 million contest – what he described as “definitely the biggest thrill” of his career so far. “It would be hard to match it,” he says.
A large part of the thrill, reports Walsh, belonged to his own personal connection to Dubai. He spent nine winters there, five of them working for Godolphin, first as an exercise rider then as a barn manager. Indeed, he’s played a part in the careers of a number of famous boys-in-blue blue-bloods, including Daylami, Street Cry, Fantastic Light, Diktat, Diffident, Kayf Tara and Cape Verdi.
In a humbling twist, however, Walsh’s success in Dubai coincided with news of his father’s terminal illness, and what would prove to be a precipitous decline. After Plus Que Parfait’s victory, Walsh returned to the US only to turn tail and immediately fly back to County Cork, Ireland to see his father one last time before he passed.
“The last conversation we had was about the race in Dubai,” says the trainer. “It was the first thing he talked about. He wasn’t doing great. We chatted away about the Kentucky Derby. At least we got to have a little chat – say goodbye.”
The speed of his father’s illness came like a bolt. “When I was out there on my own, I got to thinking and I was pretty distraught,” Walsh admits of finding out the news when in Dubai.
“And then you go out there that same evening and you win probably the biggest race of your life...” he adds, alluding to one of those cosmic paradoxes – that the blue skies of ecstasy are so often tinged with thunderclouds of heartbreak.
Indeed, Walsh can’t help but wonder how the loss of his father has coincided with an unusually rich vein of form for his stable.
“It’s unbelievable – I don’t know if it’s from God or what it is,” he ponders. “I got back from Ireland the following week, and the first day I was back to work we had a double at Keenelend. It’s like there’s someone helping you or something. And I would never be someone for that kind of stuff, you know, but it really felt like there was something.”
WHATEVER THAT inexplicable may be, Walsh credits his upbringing in the little coastal village of Shanagarry, south-east Ireland, where his father kept a small-holding with a few dairy cows, sheep and a market garden, as being instrumental in shaping his career as a horseman.
He was introduced to horses though a bull-headed little pony on which he learned to first stay on, and then ride. Out of school, he completed stints at the Irish National Stud, as well as Sheikh Mohammed’s Kildangan Stud – the tie that connected him with Godolphin.
Despite the rarified air that Walsh breathed working for Godolphin, the two employers who had “probably the biggest influence personally” on his career were trainers Mark Wallace in Newmarket, and the US-based Eddie Kenneally.
“Even to this day, they’re both two of my closest friends, and we still hang out all the time,” he says. “I still think back and think what they would do when I’m trying to figure something out myself – I’ll even call them sometimes,” he adds.
Wallace is a “fantastic horsemen,” said Walsh. “That’s why he got to where he did as quick as he did.” During only six seasons with a licence, Wallace enjoyed a bright run of big race success, and sent out Benbaun in 2007 to win the Group 1 Prix de l’Abbaye at Longchamp.
After the following year, however, Wallace handed-in his license. “It’s very, very hard at home to have a consistency if you don’t have the support from these huge outfits, such as Godolphin or Coolmore, and I think Mark really did well with what he had.”
Kenneally, said Walsh, is a magician at coaxing the very most out of often limited stock.
“Certain horses have certain needs, and he trains them to those needs,” explains Walsh. “And his horses always look fantastic. Anybody who goes to the races can see they’re some of the best cared-for horses on the backside of any track, and I think he gets the best out of them.”
With a nod to his past masters, Walsh doesn’t see himself marshalling large regiments.
That’s why, still of a morning, you’ll find Walsh exercising his horses.
“It turns into a thing where it’s almost factory-like,” he adds, about the numbers game. And among those big-number operations, sometimes “certain horses that might have turned into nice horses don’t because something’s been missed.
Sometimes it only takes one or two of the smallest details to be changed and it can turn them from being an average horse to a good horse.”
That close attention to detail, says Walsh, is a product of his father’s teachings.
“He had a great way of doing things. He always gave everything to anything he did. He put 110 per cent into it. If it worked, it worked. If it didn’t, he didn’t beat himself up about it. He learned from it and moved onto the next thing. I think that’s a great way of approaching things.”
With his father gone, Walsh lost one of his most ardent cheerleaders – someone who followed the stable fortunes day by day, week by week. Unconditional support can be a hard thing to replace.
And yet... “My brother made a speech at the funeral and it was fantastic, I’ve never heard anything like it. At the end of it he said our father wouldn’t want any of us to be sad, and he would just want us to be happy – just keep rolling along, keep doing our thing,” says Walsh, before pointing to the one great cosmic wonder connecting time’s voluminous threads together. “We’ve got good memories of him.”
