After my bad injury I never would have thought it possible to reach 500 winners

and without my family I wouldn’t be able to do it

I’ve had the opportunity to work with a lot of nice young horses along the way, and Forpadydeplasterer and Denman are two that stick out.

Forpadydeplasterer was in Mick Winters’ and Tom Cooper rang me one day looking for a good horse. They had wanted to call the horse a certain name, so it had to be unraced.

How lucky it was the way things worked out that I’d known the horse in Mick’s yard and I told Tom he could be a bit special I was lucky enough to get to ride him on his debut in a bumper at Galway so there wasn’t much we could do Thankfully, we arrived in one piece and Forpadydeplasterer won.

I’d been riding in a point-to-point earlier that day and my wife and I got a helicopter out of the field. The wind had been bad and Mag turned to me and said ‘Jeez, this doesn’t feel safe’.

I did a lot of the early work with Denman. I rode him a lot as a breaker and did a lot of the schooling with him I remember one day in Thurles

Adrian Maguire said to me, ‘Just tip away on him

He’s tricky but give him a squeeze along the top and see how you are going’ . I remember after I gave him a squeeze I must have been 20 lengths clear coming down to the last –he was just awesome

Colman Sweeney ended up riding him in his point-to-point as he was a neighbour of the man who owned him, but it’s great to have played a part in him

You get a huge kick out of riding good horses like that. It’s like the difference between driving a very good car and a bad one

I’ve met a great bunch of people point-to-pointing and you would have friends for life out of it They are the type of people who are only a phone call away to give you a helping hand, which is huge The racing community is unlike any other MIKEY O’CONNOR WAS

EOGHAIN WARD

TALKING TO