Cork Man Thriving On U.S. Circuit

There's about 7,000 crow-flown kilometers–and a whole universe of cultural clashes–between the wind-bitten little coastal village of Shanagarry, in County Cork in Southeast Ireland, and New Orleans, down in the steamiest, swampiest depths of Southern Louisiana. But it's the circuitous route trainer Brendan Walsh has taken from childhood home to present residence that would make Phileas Fogg purr loudest with admiration. Nor should we expect a final tally on those airmiles just yet.

“I'm in Fair Grounds at the moment,” says Walsh, before launching into a travelogue that takes in Turfway Park in Kentucky the following day, then to Florida for a couple days before returning to New Orleans for their season apogee, the Louisiana Derby weekend. In fact, Walsh, 44, has spent a good portion of the winter surfing the thermals, flitting between his two strings at Fair Grounds and Palm Meadows, in Florida–three or four days here, three or four days there, then back again. The fact that Walsh is speaking through video-chat only adds to this air of itinerancy. Still, “the traveling, it does start to wear on you.” And he's already keenly eyeing the end of the Fair Grounds meet, when his two strings will descend upon Kentucky, split between Churchill Downs and Keeneland.

Not that this will trigger any sort of slowing down.

“Anybody who's any good never rests on their laurels,” Walsh says, giving a nod to an underlying philosophy that has propelled him swiftly up the training ranks since first taking out his trainer's license in 2011. “When you do better, then you want to do better again.”

In 2012, his first full year training, Walsh posted one win short of a measly handful, and bagged less than $150,000. Cut to last year, when he boasted 68 victories and an end-of year wallet stuffed with $3.7-million, and it's fairly evident that laurel-resting is something that Walsh thumbs his nose at. “I'm very lucky,” he says, with a note of self-deprecation that rings sincere. He's “lucky” because his horses are generally much quicker now than they were seven years ago. He's got lots more of them. “And I've got a good bunch of owners.”

But the blinding speed with which he's rocketed up the charts–last year, he sat 35th on the nation's trainers' standings–has had the effect of accentuating some of the problems that smaller operators are perhaps less burdened by. “It's getting to be a concern, especially for someone trying to grow and trying to do the job right,” he says.

Walsh is referring to help, or lack thereof–particularly, quality riders and grooms with the requisite skill and commitment for the job. Something trainers on both sides of the Atlantic can sympathize with, it seems. “Good people are worth their weight in gold around horses.”

A broken work visa program in the U.S. and heightened immigration enforcement are certainly factors. “I see the struggles that some of the guys have here, with visas, and it's reflecting on the racetrack,” he says. The other is more a cultural phenomenon, brought about by emerging generations being raised less and less out in the country, and more and more within the urban center. “People aren't going into racing like we did when we were younger,” he says.

Before returning to this in a bit, it's useful to rewind the clock, re-trace the route Walsh took to training, to better understand his thoughts on these issues. For though he wasn't raised in Ireland around horses, his father kept a small-holding with a few dairy cows, sheep and a market garden.

“It gives you a good feel for animals–gives you a feel for the land, and a work ethic,” he says about being raised on a farm, even though he didn't care much for it at the time. Horseracing was his passion. “I remember my dad saying, 'what's it going to be like with the horses if you're not really interested in farming?' I said, 'well, it's a different kettle of fish completely.'”

A stint when Walsh was 15 at the Jockey School at The Curragh was short-lived. “I think I maybe got homesick more than anything–when you go off to that thing at 15 years of age, it's not for everyone.”

Dented pride? Sure. But not defeated. After he finished school, Walsh hop-scotched from the Irish National Stud course onto Sheikh Mohammed's Kildangan Stud. Down season at Kildangan meant busman's holiday time. And one winter, he found himself in Dubai–the first of nine winters he spent in Dubai, including five years with the boys in blue.

“The first two, three years I was with Godolphin, I started as a rider,” he says, “then I started to help run the barns, moved up the ladder and got offered a full-time position.”

“That was a great time, when they had an exclusive 50 horses,” he adds. “I remember walking into the barn, it was like a who's-who of racing.”

Daylami, Street Cry, Fantastic Light, Diktat, Diffident. Kayf Tara. Cape Verdi. “You learned to be around good horses,” he says.

But good horses are nice n' all. The problem was, the training bug had bitten him-hard. And Walsh knew that, to better understand what obstacles he'd face as a trainer, he'd have to first hang with racing's working-class heroes. “At Godolphin, money's no object. There's no trying to get lesser horses to work out,” he says. “I had to get back in at the ground level.”

And so began a 3 1/2-year stint as assistant to Newmarket trainer Mark Wallace–a graduate of the Mick Channon academy of hard graft, human and horse. “Mark was a great man with 2-year-olds,” says Walsh. When Wallace got them fit and feeling well, he'd run them often, just like his old mentor. “He made a great hand of it, for a guy with no top, top support. He didn't have 20 Maktoum horses, or 20 horses with Coolmore.”

But Walsh, who'd spent two summers at Arlington Park in Chicago when with Godolphin, had a very specific location in mind for when he took out his license. “The place to go was the States.” He'd already met U.S-based trainer Eddie Kenneally. “And Eddie, he'd said to me, 'if you want to come over full-time, give me a shout.'”

Walsh shouted. Keneally replied in the affirmative. “I got a really got a good grounding there, on the American way of things,” says Walsh, about his time as assistant to Kenneally. “We had some great years. He had some fantastic horses–he taught me how to organize a barn,” Walsh adds. “His organization and his barn always looked impeccable. He does a really good job, and always had great people working for him.”

Which brings us neatly back to Walsh's earlier remarks, about not only his concerns that tightened immigration means a smaller pool of available workers–“You don't have the same number of Irish and English lads because it's impossible for them to get visas. It's hard even for the people from Central, South America”–but about the quality of help in general. For when you're raised around livestock, like Walsh was, the rhyme and reason of the seasons gets into your bones. Birth and death, reaping and sowing–the drum-beat rhythms of life and land instills in those nurtured on it a respect for the strange interconnectedness of animal and vegetable, of human and creature.

You get a real flavour of this when Walsh talks about his horses–not in that sanitized boardroom manner, where a horse's achievements are ticked off like points on a chalk-board. But rather in a way that makes it clear he's spent time dissecting their personalities, working out who they are, what makes them tick.

Take Honorable Duty, second last year in the G1 Stephen Foster. “He loves to train–I think he went through a state of depression when we wasn't in the barn,” Walsh says, about his Grade II winner, back in from a break at the farm. “He'd go out there on one leg and train every morning.”

Or when he describes a little trick of his to re-inject the jazz back into his horses' steps (at the same time betraying what can only be described as a rather sadistic regard for his poor benighted riders!). “I think if you're sending them out there and the rider's not that strong and the horse has the upper hand, some of them love that,” he says. “It makes the horse feel good. I think you have to let them fool around, and just feel like they're in control.”

And it shows in the way he nursed Carey Street from claiming also-ran to stakes-race hero. “I claimed him for ten grand,” Walsh recalls, of early 2013, his barn a tad bare and the coffers scant. “We were giving him a bath, and I was thinking, 'man, I don't have ten-grand to spare.' I remember he wouldn't stand still, and I thought to myself, 'Jesus, what have you done now?' Little did I know what would happen down the line.”

Carey Street was a little funky behind. “I put a set of draw-reigns on him, got him stronger behind the saddle.” He soon began a winning spree that took him eventually to the Breeders' Cup undercard, in 2014, and a victory in the GII Las Vegas Marathon.

Walsh confesses to becoming “more American” as a trainer over the years. “You put more speed in horses over here, because you have to. I've got more aggressive than what I might have been four or five years ago.” Still, when I point out that his most successful horses have tended to progress with time and patience:

'I'd like to think I'm still really patient with horses–if I'm allowed to be,” he says. “We've done well with horses as they've matured, as they've got older.” He has a Kentucky Derby win on his bucket list. He'd like a Breeders' Cup victory or two, as well. And he'd “love to have a horse good enough to take to the Dubai World Cup meet.” First up, there's Saratoga.

“The last few years I'd brought a small team, but we probably didn't bring the right horses up there,” he says. Then, last year, he struck gold, with Proctor's Ledge picking up two graded stakes. “When you're getting your ass kicked, you're like, 'uurgh, not again.' But thankfully, we had a good run up there last year.”

Ultimately though, “I want to keep the quality–want to be involved in the good races,” he says. All of which returns us digging once more into the psyche of the horse. “Once they're fit and up to racing, it's a case of keeping them mentally happy. It's the mental thing more than anything.”