Des Scahill: The Voice of Irish Racing

Des Scahill tried to do the maths. “I'd be 45 years at it now,” he said. “And up until last year, it was 210 meetings per annum. So maybe you're talking around 1,500 races a year, and even over 20 years that comes out at 30,000 races. Beyond that, I wouldn't know…”

Scahill is approaching the home straight now, but there has been little sign of flagging. It was only when the voice of Irish racing turned 65, in fact, that a three-year contract extension permitted him to ease off from calling those 210 meetings a year to “just” the 150. With another 15 months to go, then, Irish horsemen are increasingly hearing Scahill's commentaries with an anticipatory sense of nostalgia. For the fact is, that his austerely restrained cadences have been the seamless soundtrack to their lives for two generations.

If the carousel has featured numberless horses–good, bad and ugly; and as many as 10 in a single race all carrying the silks of J.P. McManus–then all that quantity has been more than matched by quality, in man and horse alike. And, between the two, Scahill has become an integral part of the daily circuit in Ireland. He gets Christmas cards from the parents and partners of jockeys, for instance, thanking him for always being at such pains to specify that a fallen rider is back on his feet. Typically, this only causes Scahill to fret about causing distress whenever he fails to do so.

If the professional community considers him one of their own, then that is just how he started–with a three-year apprenticeship under Charlie Weld, whose son Dermot celebrated his 16th birthday two days after Scahill. So is he two days wiser, as well as two days older?

“I wouldn't say that,” laughs Scahill. “Ask who has the money! Dermot was a student at Newbridge College at the time, and a crack amateur rider. I did have a couple of rides as an apprentice, but I was always on the heavy side for that.”

That being so, he proceeded via Paddy Prendergast to spend three years travelling horses for Mick O'Toole.

“The stable was flying at that time,” he remembered. “And of course Mick was a great character, and a great boss. I'd say that's what's missed in the game, at the moment: the characters have gone. I know 45 years is a long time but there has been a real transformation. A lot of trainers now don't even bother going to the races. Obviously they feel they can get a lot more done in the yard than in spending two hours stuck in a car going to the races, and two hours going back. But it can be hard on sponsors presenting their trophy and so on. In those days, of course, the only way to see your horse run was to go to the races–and the only way to back it, as well. Anyway there would always be great banter at the races. And that's been the great thing, all the way through, the fraternity of the track. We're like a circus, really, with a different venue every day.”

The hours they share can be “savage,” coming home from Ballinrobe at midnight when they all have to convene down at Wexford next afternoon. But Scahill consoles himself that it is harder still for the valets, say, who are cleaning boots and breeches an hour after he has gone–yet must still be on site before him the following day. And then there are all the friends he has made on the circuit, over the years, to the extent that Scahill has had a supporting role in some of the outstanding careers of the modern Turf.

Thirty-odd years ago, for instance, one of Kevin Prendergast's apprentices was living a couple of doors down the road.

“This lad had a motorbike and every morning he'd wake the whole street up as he was setting off,” Scahill recalled. “The noise was unbelievable. And I said to him, 'Would you ever push it to the end of the road and let it roll down the hill before you start it up?' Anyway he came into me one day, he'd ridden 15 or 20 winners but was getting disillusioned, and he said: 'I'm giving up the game. I'm going back to work with my father, he has a bit of work going plastering houses.' And I said: 'You're throwing in the towel a bit quick, aren't you? Would you not think of maybe trying your luck in England?' 'England?' he said. 'Where would I go in England?' So I told him to wait there and I picked up the phone and rang Jimmy FitzGerald.”

The following Friday, Scahill learned that Kieren Fallon–subsequently six times champion jockey of Britain–had ridden his first winner for FitzGerald at Thirsk.

Scahill was twice foiled in trying to get future stars of jump racing to follow Fallon to FitzGerald, both Adrian Maguire and Tony McCoy being signed up by Toby Balding instead. One day, the great Richard Dunwoody came up to him at the Galway Festival, after a young dervish had nearly turned him over on an odds-on shot. “Who's yer man that rode the second?” Dunwoody asked in bewilderment. “He's an apprentice at Jim Bolger's,” Scahill replied. “Name of McCoy.” “By Jesus can he ride!” exclaimed Dunwoody.

Then, at another of the great festivals, Punchestown, Frank Berry–at that time training, now manager of the immense McManus string–asked Scahill who could ride his horse after a senior jockey had taken a fall in the first race? Scahill recommended McCoy, who duly won on Mayasta.

“It was his first ride in the McManus silks,” Scahill said. “And 16 years later, as J.P.'s retained jockey, he won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in the same colours on Mayasta's son, Synchronised.”

Scahill's intimacy with the cast, however, never intrudes on the dramas they enact. Probably his two most famous calls fell within a relatively brief radio stint: Secreto's Derby in 1984 and Dawn Run's Cheltenham Gold Cup two years later. In both cases, Scahill was able to find just the right key because he knew exactly how the race would be resonating–both back home in Ireland, and out on the track. After all, his own arrival at The Curragh 20 years previously had coincided with that of Christy Roche. And here was Roche winning one of the greatest of all Epsom finishes. In the same way, Scahill had once shared digs with an apprentice named Mark Dwyer. Known to many TDN readers nowadays through Oaks Farm Stables, Dwyer had gone on to become one of the jockeys involved in the epic battle won by “the people's champion,” as Scahill calls Dawn Run.

Some younger commentators doubtless consider Scahill's style rather too dry for their tastes. But it is precisely this dispassionate quality that enables him to serve a community he knows so well without forfeiting his professional detachment. Many traditionalists, in fact, are infuriated by a contrasting determination among self-consciously “modern” callers to vaunt their own sophistication in describing a race.

Scahill is fairly scathing about this trend. “I remember talking to Peter O'Sullevan one time,” he said. “And he said: 'I don't know if it's just the fact that we can't accept a new generation–but I detest all their jargon. I called my book Calling the Horses. And I think that's our job, isn't it?' And I had to agree with him. Early on I would sometimes try to pre-empt the outcome of a race, when a horse came there travelling best, but I quickly learned that when push comes to shove you can get caught out. And then all you've done is mislead people.”

Even when you aim to keep things simple, things will not always go like clockwork. One day at The Curragh, Scahill was going through the card for the sponsors in their hospitality tent. In the next race, there was a 1-6 favourite facing just two rivals. Scahill, keeping a careful eye on the television monitors, was relaxed to see the three horses still walking round the parade ring.

“But then the next thing I saw was one in the stalls and the other two being led forward,” he said. “I suddenly realised that the monitor had been showing the RTE broadcast, and that the parade ring shots had been recorded. I had two flights of stairs to run up and they had already gone two furlongs when I got to my position. One journalist put it nicely, though. He wrote that the race was such a foregone conclusion that even the commentator didn't show up!”

But show up, in the most meaningful sense, is exactly what everyone has always been able to rely on Scahill to do. Reciprocally, moreover, he knows that any danger of monotony will be dependably relieved by the daily shifts of fortune, on and off the track. Each or any day might yield a new Fallon, a new McCoy, a new Mayasta.

“Yes, that's the thing,” Scahill agreed. “You never know. Even the most innocuous meeting can always turn out to be a red-letter day.”