Micheal Blake’s connection to the RDS Dublin Horse Show goes way back. His mother, Eileen, was watching a class while pregnant with him when a horse jumped out of the ring and landed beside her. It startled her so much it became family lore that he was lucky to be here at all.
But luck only had part of a hand in how his life turned out. Most of it was down to hard work and an abiding love of horses.
He grew up in the village of Tuamgraney, in east Co Clare, the same part of the world his aunt, the late writer Edna O’Brien, so famously fled. The novelist was his mother’s sister, and he and she were very close.
As a child the RDS Dublin Horse Show was the high point of his summer. By the age of eight he and his older sister were allowed to travel up on the train on their own to visit it, staying with their Dublin relatives.
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His father, John, was a showjumper who won the Grand Prix in Dublin in 1963. At that stage almost everyone on the team was in the Army because it was a hard sport to make a living in. Despite his successes John kept his day job, as a country vet, for more than 60 years.
Growing up, the yard was full of horses but when Michael asked his father for a pony of his own, he was told to earn it. So he did, milking cows for his grandfather for a year, aged nine. It earned him enough for his first steed, Miss Frisco.
Unbeknown to himself, or his father, “who as a vet should have checked”, Miss Frisco was in foal when he bought her, so he got himself a “twofer”.
In time he sold the foal for his first pair of jodhpurs. Made by a local tailor, they were a disaster. “They were the old-fashioned style, with the big baggy sides like a German soldier. I wouldn’t wear them,” he recalls.
It didn’t put a stop to his gallop, however. He started out by flying around the fields at home bareback – he had more work to do to fund his first saddle – before entering and winning a succession of showjumping competitions, first as a junior and right up the senior ranks to Grand Prix.
Those early years gadding about without a saddle stood him in good stead. In 1995 he broke the world record for bareback jumping. At 2.17m – or 7ft 2in – his record still stands.
Although his showjumping career went from strength to strength, it was still a precarious way to make a living and for many years he too had a day job, working for a chipboard manufacturer.
But the lure of working with horses full time was too strong and, after 13 years, he left to build an equestrian centre in east Clare, from where he ran international shows in the early 2000s.
His own three boys all learned to ride there. “Someone once said that when your children started beating you, you should stop, so I did, and started helping them out instead,” he says.
One, David, is now a professional showjumper too.
For his part, Michael was gaining enormous respect as a trainer. He came up with the idea of setting up an International Young Rider Bursary to allow young riders to train with international riders, and helped develop a Young Rider Academy.
His commitment led to a role supporting Comdt John Ledingham, who was developing young showjumpers for Horse Sport Ireland, and subsequently Rodrigo Pessoa, whom he describes as “the Ronaldo, the Federer” of world showjumping.
He likens his time working with Pessoa as akin to university, so intense was the education. It was also a period in which Ireland won successive Nations Cup competitions.
In 2019, when the Brazilian returned to competitive life, Blake succeeded him as Ireland’s high-performance jumping director, incorporating the chef d’equipe role. The chef d’equipe looks after all the logistics relating to Ireland’s senior showjumping teams, and the three-, four- and five-star events they attend.
In all he is responsible for a pool of more than 30 riders and their various mounts.
“It’s a bit like the GAA in that you’re starting underage and move them up to senior football,” he says. “You start with three-star competitions and develop the talent you have to fruition. Then it’s about matching the teams to all the Nations Cup competitions as successfully as we can throughout the year.”
In 2022 alone, under his auspices, Ireland won the Nations Cup on four different continents, “which is hard to do but then we have such talent,” he says. “My father used to say that horses are 90 per cent desperation and 10 per cent elation. I’ve tried to change those odds the best I can.”
The buzz he gets as chef d’equipe is even greater than he got when competing himself. “When the national anthem is played, I get goosebumps,” he says.
But the biggest thrill of all is still the horses.
“I love all animals but what I love about horses is their intelligence. I especially love trying to understand the difficult ones, the ones other people might have given up on. Someone once told me it’s not what the horse can do, it’s what he will do. If he works with you, you’d be surprised what can be achieved.”
