feature | jessica harrington
feature | jessica harrington
Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood’s horse, Sandymount Duke
no, you’ve got a bit further to go! Rob said it was a dream ride, he never made a mistake, he just went on jumping. And Rob said the lovely thing about him was that he jumped at two-mile speed and he was going three miles, so every time he jumped he was able to take him back. “When they came down to the third last, I looked at the horses in front and behind and I thought ‘my God, I’m going to get placed in The Gold Cup!’ And then when he jumped to the front just after the second last I thought ‘if he stays now I’m actually going to win a Gold Cup!’ and I think I was jumping up and down. You probably could’ve heard me in Moone – I’m a very noisy trainer. I’m jumping and screaming and so are my family – we’re a good noisy lot of people! “It was just surreal... the next race is over before your feet have touched the ground, then I was lucky enough to win the last race as well. Everyone said ‘oh you must stay over to celebrate’ and I just looked at everyone and we all said ‘no, let’s get home’. “I suppose I was in a sort of daze really. I think it didn’t sink in but then we walked into the bar in Birmingham and everyone got up and applauded and then I got into the plane and everyone clapped and I was ‘please just leave me be!’ I don’t need that!” laughs Jessica, who is typically self- deprecating. Jessica has had her other triumphs at Cheltenham over the years and is happy to wave a flag for Irish trainers. “To every Irish person, Cheltenham is very special. If you ask anybody here with horses the one thing they’d love is a Cheltenham winner, that is the love, the holy grail. I can remember coming back one year when we were all pretty gloomy in Ireland and the only winner we’d had at Cheltenham was Galmod, in about ’86 and now we’re coming out of Cheltenham with 15-16 winners, winning more than half the races, so it’s amazing.” She has other treasured memories of The Festival too. “Having my first winner there, which was actually in the Grand Annual – it was the last race run at Cheltenham in the last millennium. Having your first Cheltenham Festival winner is pretty special. I’ve been very lucky, Moscow Flyer won there three times. “Another time was when Jezki won the
were just lumps of fluff. When they got to yearlings and two and three year olds, fine, then I could actually see what was in front of me, but he was a great judge of a foal which was an art. It was an instinct. “A lot of things I do with training I just do. I go by an instinct that it’s the right thing to do, but when I make a decision about running a horse or not running a horse, I always go back to my first decision because that is usually my best decision. “We all have disasters. A couple of years ago I entered a horse in the wrong race – that was a disaster, totally by mistake, I just pressed the wrong button.” You would think that maybe Jessica might have treated herself after the Gold Cup, but although she had a week’s holiday in France and Italy to recharge her batteries, she is at her happiest at home. “It’s lovely. It’s a family home that became a racing yard. I always told Johnny I married him for his house! Everything has taken ages to do, we’ve literally done it bit by bit, literally as we could afford it. We had four children and that’s the way it was. “I like my garden, it’s how I want it, it’s rambling. It’s not tailored and it’s taken me 40 years to do this. “I’m quite happy with what I’ve got. All the money goes back into the business. It’s just me so why would I spend it on myself ? Nothing is ever perfect, we all have our ups and downs and disappointments, but my thing is to just enjoy it. “When you wake up every morning and look at this place it puts a smile on your face anyway – I’m lucky to live in a place like this.” Jessica offers to make me lunch, shows me some more of her art (Ronnie Wood’s Moscow Flyer is a triumph), then we end up chatting about our vegetable plots and never having successfully stuffed courgette flowers. She loves cooking too. Jessica is a font of wisdom on all fronts, and age “is just a number as far as I can tell,” she says. It turns out she still rides three times a day in the winter. I’m in awe. As I leave, I know she’s about to start mowing the grass, something she says she finds very relaxing.There’s a Gold Cup in the kitchen, but that’s not the only reason that it feels a little like the end of a rainbow at Commonstown.
The Gold Cup sits on Jessica’s sideboard amid roses and family photos
“ I’m jumping and screaming and so are my family – we’re a good noisy lot of people Champion Hurdle, because it was when my husband was ill and he wasn’t over there. It definitely kept him alive for an extra couple of weeks.That was definitely special, in the way that it boosted him so much.” But Jessica is reserving her judgement for 2018. “Well, the last two winners haven’t even run in the race the following year, so to actually run in the race would be the first achievement.The thing with horses is we don’t realise how fragile they are.They’re not machines.
“And horses remember. I’m sure with Sizing John he remembers having been defeated six or seven times by Douvan, and I’m sure when he got his head in front down in Thurles that day he remembered and he thought ‘oh I can do this! I am better than them’. He really put that to the test at the Irish Gold Cup and Cheltenham Gold Cup but he had to dig deep and very, very deep in Punchestown that day. I’m sort of worrying now that maybe that has left a mark on him but I won’t know. “I looked at him yesterday and he looks amazing, absolutely amazing. We don’t have a crystal ball. You have targets and you have plans – you have plan A and when that doesn’t work out you have to go to plan B, C, D and E sometimes, but let’s hope we won’t have to.” Jessica is typically sanguine about the accolades that have been heaped on her since March, including being dubbed the Queen of Cheltenham. “If they’ve decided that’s what I am then I’ll take it!” she laughs. “You know, it’s lovely to have a title, but I’m a trainer and whether I’m female or male, we all do exactly the same job, we all want the same things, we all want winners and we all want winners at Cheltenham, so we all have the same goal.
“I’ve got to double winners and to me that’s a great achievement. It’s all great and then I’m also the Queen of Moone, they put up a ‘Welcome Home Queen of Moone’ banner on a cherry picker.They have a lot of laughs with me because I don’t take it seriously.” Jessica is very proud of her team – her head lad Eamonn Leigh has been with her for more than 40 years, and she is pleased with how her daughters Emma and Kate work so well together. “Even though they’re 11 years apart they still squabbled, so I said to them, look, I don’t mind, but I am not going to be the referee to your squabbles. I wasn’t going to get involved. And they’ve been great” And Johnny is still very much of a part of it all. “He is still part of it. I still always talk about we, because he’s still there. And I think that’s healthy, it’s good. “I could talk about Johnny until the cows come home. People are funny, I sometimes think they’re uncomfortable about me talking about him. But I’m happy talking about him, I don’t have a problem. Why not? He was there for long enough!” There are of course many amusing tales of
Johnny to be told. Times when he would maybe take home the wrong foal, or when he thought, halfway home, that the horses he was bringing home for Jessica after a race were being very quiet, only to realise that was because they hadn’t actually been loaded up and were still back at the stables. Then there was the day he collected the wrong horse from the vet... “We have a lot of very funny Johnny stories, he was a great character. He did a lot of very funny things. We laughed our way through life. We had our rows and our arguments, it wasn’t always idyllic, but we were lucky. We had a great life together,” says Jessica. A nd what would have been the first thing he would have said on her Gold Cup win? Jessica smiles: “Oh, you wouldn’t be there without me! He’d be saying ‘you’d be nothing without me’, and I’d say ‘yes Johnny’. But you can’t do everything on your own, you need a lot of help. If I had a bad day, I’d come and moan at him. “He loved horses and he loved what he did as a bloodstock agent. He was a great judge of a horse – he did something I could never do, I could never judge a foal, to me they
Kalendar 59
58 Kalendar
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker