Ruby Walsh is just fine, thanks for asking.
You could be forgiven for imagining that this might not necessarily be the case since we are here in the short-light days of winter and he is nowhere to be seen in the jockeys’ championship.
Don’t imagine that this is a small matter, either – Walsh has a record 12 titles to his name, three more than the next on the list and nine more than anyone still riding. But on the whole, he’s okay with not being able to add to it, at least for this year.
“The numbers aren’t going to work out for me. But you still want to be champion jockey, definitely. You start off in the summer and you’re not riding for races with huge money attached to them, day-in, day-out. At that stage, you’re riding for numbers. You have a far better chance of riding 15 winners a month in the summer.
“I always thought in my own mind that if I averaged 12-a-month over the course of the season, I’d be there or thereabouts. But to do that, you’d want to be riding 15-a-month in the summer to make up for when the numbers tightened in the spring. Once or twice, I’ve got past 100 just after Christmas but never got beyond 131 over the rest of the season. Your win-rate slows down in February and March no matter what you do.”
He had been tipping along happy enough this summer until a fall in Killarney at the end of August. Officially it went down as a rib injury but the kicker was bruising around his vertebrae. The rib recovered reasonably quickly but the swelling around his spinal canal took a while to go down and the medical people didn’t want him back riding until it did.
In his younger days, he’d likely have made his own call on it. One of the luxuries of getting older is allowing himself be told what to do.
It turned out to be one of those forgotten-but-not-gone injuries. One week borrowed another, and then another, until suddenly he was the guts of two months on the sidelines. To compete for the jockeys’ title, you need to be riding an average of three winners a week in those late-summer, early-autumn months. That didn’t happen and now it can’t happen.
“Six or seven weeks out is around 20 winners, give or take,” he says. “A bit more if things are going well. And missing out on 20 winners in that period basically means the jockeys’ championship is out of reach by the time you come back. There’s a big difference getting to the middle of December on 40 winners as opposed to 19.
"It basically means I'm 40 behind Rachael Blackmore and Paul [Townend] and Davy Russell instead of being 20 behind. One is surmountable, the other's not. You still keep riding but you realise that you won't be champion jockey this year. Rachael and Paul are both in the mid-60s, I'm 40 behind them. There are five months of the season left, meaning I'd have to outscore both of them – and Davy – by eight winners a month. Not likely, is it?"
Harder fall
The brass tacks of any situation have never been all that far from his grasp. Walsh will be 40 next May. It is of no particular interest to him whether or not you think that means he must be coming near the end soon but, since you’re wondering, the answer is a very definite ‘no’.
"What was McCoy when he retired – 41?" he asks, knowing well. "Noel Fehily is 43. We'll be grand for a while yet."
Thing is, it’s easy to see how amateur sleuths would start piecing together their own conclusions. Take his age, throw in his relative lack of winners, and sprinkle with the thick end of another year lost to injuries.
From November 9th, 2017, until his return on October 13th, 2018, Walsh was only injury-free and available to ride for 39 of 338 days. He broke his wrist, his right leg twice and then got that rib/vertebrae injury in August. At a certain point, normal people tend to wonder if it’s worth the bother.
On top of which, when he went back riding he appeared to be picking and choosing his races in the judicious way an elder statesman of the weigh room would as he’s winding the whole operation down.
In particular, it looked from the outside that he might be steering clear of riding over fences and instead confining himself to hurdles races, much in the same way Charlie Swan did towards the end of his riding career.
Two plus two equals an imminent ride off into the sunset, surely.
Or not.
“No, it’s not that way at all,” he says. “I ride plenty over fences. I suppose Willie would be keen enough not to be risking me too much coming back from injury but it was nothing like that.
“I prefer riding over fences anyway. Most of the bad injuries I got were over hurdles. I got injured three times last year and two of them were hurdle races. You get a faster, harder fall in a hurdle race.
“Contrary to opinion, smaller jumps can often lead to worse injuries. Just because a jump is smaller doesn’t mean the fall is any easier. Think about it – you will probably be going faster in a hurdle race. It’s never the fall that does the damage, it’s the suddenness of the stop.”
That said, there is no doubt he has been ceding more rides to Townend that he would have in other seasons. But not because of any waning of appetite or desire to mind himself. The reasoning is far more prosaic and goes back to the jockeys’ championship being out of reach.
More important
For that particular race, the weight of the Willie Mullins stable is behind Townend for the rest of the season. Walsh will still ride the marquee horses over hurdles and fences on the biggest days, as he did with Un De Sceaux, Min, Limini and Quick Grabim over the past two weekends.
But when it comes to the grind-it-out business of picking up workaday winners, Townend will get the nod.
“People reading into what I am riding or what I’m not riding at the minute aren’t reading into the bigger picture. I’ve always been for the big day. The big days are what I remember – I can recount them all, more so than the lesser days.
“You have to pick your battles too. Numerically, the way this season is now with the jockeys’ title gone, the big days are more important than ever. That’s where the emphasis is going to be. Next year will be different with a bit of luck. If I’ve ever been anything in my life, I’ve been realistic.
“You become more focused on the bigger horses in the bigger races. You probably don’t take as many chances on a daily basis. Paul is there now, he’s in the mix to be champion jockey. So on a day when, let’s say, we have only one runner in Thurles, Paul will ride it. He has the chance to be champion jockey, I don’t.”
He doesn’t love it any less than he did, doesn’t look for a workload any lighter than it ever was. He rides out in the Willie Mullins yard four and sometimes five mornings a week, as he has for the past 22 years whenever he was available.
He plots and plans with Mullins senior and junior and David Casey and Townend, finding races for this horse and that one, laying out the best roads to the spring festivals.
When he started in Closutton back in 1996, they had 64 horses. Now it’s not far short of 200. Everything has trebled in size accordingly – apart from expectations, which have increased a thousand-fold. For the past few months, they’ve been like all the other top yards in the country, drumming their fingers on the table waiting for the rain to come and the ground to soften. That’s a lot of potential, waiting around to be unleashed.
“I’d say about 80 per cent of our horses haven’t run yet,” Walsh says.
“Most of what we’ve been running has been running through the summer. We’re running out of horses to run because they’ve been on the go all year. And it hasn’t been soft enough to run the winter ones.
“You would chance them on this sort of ground when they’d be much lighter and fitter in April. With a season behind them, they would have trimmed down and got fitter through the winter so you wouldn’t be taking as big a chance on them on the ground. But right now, when they’re a fraction heavier and not fully fit yet, they could do more damage to themselves. You want it to be good and soft for them the first time they go out.”
Same page
Must be frustrating to have all that firepower and not be able to pull the trigger?
“It’s not frustration, it’s anticipation. Because you know it is going to happen. Frustration is when they start getting beaten or they start getting injured or sick. Because then you have the reality to deal with.
“When they get beaten, they’re not as good as you thought they were. When they’re sick, you’re wondering when are they going to get better. When they’re injured, when are they going to be back? Right now, they’re all ready to go so it’s anticipation. Frustration is when it’s gone arseways. It hasn’t gone arseways yet.”
It will, though. Nothing surer in racing than that.
Walsh has seen too much of the sport from the flat of his back to ever imagine otherwise. In November, Mullins was publicly unhappy with his ride in the Morgiana Hurdle on Faugheen, a rare misjudgment of pace at the front of the field. It says plenty for their level of trust in each other that the trainer left the jockey to his own devices afterwards. No bust-up, no bollocking. No need.
“No, he never said ‘boo’ to me,” Walsh says. “People love to believe what they like or to create their own story. He never said a word to me after it. We’re probably on the same page on most things, as would Paul be, as would Patrick and Danny be as well. You come in and tell Willie what you thought happened and that’s it.
“But there’s never too much of a post-mortem one way or the other. There might be a discussion of tactics beforehand and if he has a strong opinion, he’ll tell you. But otherwise, it’s up to you.
“Likewise when you come back in, he’ll call it as it is. If he sees something you could have done differently, he’ll tell you. He can see all those things and he wouldn’t not say them to you. Willie’s sound – I’ve always found him dead straightforward.”
Christmas is coming and in the Walsh kitchen, the elf on the shelf is perched above the oven today. He and his wife Gillian have four girls now, ranging in age from nine-year-old Isabelle down to Erica who is just turning one.
They got used to having him around all the time last winter but a life in racing means he’s away at weekends now and it’s the one thing he’d change if he could. That side of it picks at him far more than any worries over them seeing him fall.
“No, I don’t worry about that at all. Gillian does I’d say but I don’t. Isabelle is getting to see it happen a bit more and I guess Elsa (7) is coming up to that stage too. But they’re not the first jockey’s kids in the world.
“They saw me here last winter going from one set of crutches to another and I don’t worry about them seeing that. If that’s the worst thing they see in life they’ll be doing pretty well. Obviously you’d prefer if they never saw it but that’s not really realistic.”
It wouldn’t be the kind of thing to make a man think of the end, so?
“I don’t think so. No, I wouldn’t have thought they’d be a factor. This is what I do, this is what I’m able to do and what I like doing. I’ll do it as long as I can get away with it.”
