THEY go past the stands with a circuit to go. Soldier In Milan is tanking, and Paul Byrne is going, holy God, what is happening here?

Rewind about four minutes. The start of the Irish Grand National is always fairly frenetic, everybody wanting to get a position, every inch a fought-for and hard-earned inch.

Donagh Meyler has Soldier In Milan well positioned when the starter says go, he gives his horse a squeeze and they get to the first fence just behind the front rank, seventh or eighth but no more than a length behind the leaders.

Soldier In Milan is okay at the first fence, a bit staccato-ish, the fence comes at you quickly enough after the start, but he lands upright and running and that’s the most important thing.

He squeezes up between horses on the run to the second, where his rider sees the stride from a long way out. He asks his horse to pick up and Soldier In Milan responds, pings the obstacle and lands in second place, just up on the outside of Monbeg Genius. Over the third and up by Ballyhack and turn, as the race settles down a bit, insofar as an Irish Grand National can ever settle down a bit.

Exhale.

Soldier In Milan is metronomic. Stride, stride, jump. Stride, stride, jump. Loving it. Up past the stands and he’s along the inside, still just behind Monbeg Genius, The Jukebox Kid up on his outside, shaping as if he wants to go on, telling everybody who is watching him that he is able to go faster than he is going.

“I’m looking at him there passing us,” says Paul Byrne now, from the sanctity of his Fitzwilliam Sports office, situated, as it is, appropriately enough, in Fitzwilliam Street, more of which anon. “And it looks like he’s keen, but I’m not even sure if he was being keen. I think that he was just so well in himself.”

Motionless

The metronome continues. Fence: jump. Fence: jump. Fence: jump. He doesn’t miss one of them. The five-furlong marker goes past and still Soldier In Milan tanks. Over the fifth last and around to the fourth last, Soldier In Milan eases his way towards the outside and moves to the front. Donagh Meyler doesn’t even have to ask him to do that. He just needs to loosen his grip a little. They coast into the home straight, his rivals in varying states of squeeze or push or kitchen sink in behind, and still Donagh Meyler is motionless.

“Everything had gone so well,” says the horse’s owner. “You’re just waiting for the hiccup to happen.”

As it happened, the hiccup happened to his closest pursuer. Kiss Will got the third last fence wrong and came down. After that, Soldier In Milan’s only two dangers were the big black birch ones that lay in front of him. Stride, stride, jump. Stride, stride, jump. Three punches of the air and cue celebrations, which started long before his closest pursuer got to the winning line.

“That was as good as you get in this game,” says Paul Byrne, and that’s with the insight and the retrospection that comes with the passage of time and the settling of dust. “It was something else. It’s an unbelievable race to win. The prestige of it, the history of it, the reach it has. The number of people who got in touch with me afterwards, even people who you wouldn’t have thought would have had any interest in racing. The people who got in touch with my family. It was incredible.”

Paul Byrne grew up going to Fairyhouse, and the family element of all of this is massive for him.

“It’s huge for me, the chance for the family to get together on these big days. If there was no family involvement, I wouldn’t get the kick out of it that I get. No way. If you have a good horse like that, it’s like a family wedding every time he runs. My two brothers, my two sisters. My mother is loving it. We have cousins and aunties and friends, and everyone is riding the wave.”

Early days

Rewind 11 months when the Soldier In Milan wave began, no more than a ripple then, but intent on gathering momentum. A point-to-point winner who had just beaten the future Baring Bingham Novices’ Hurdle winner King Rasko Grey in a bumper at the Punchestown Festival.

“Yeah, Emmet fancied him for the bumper,” says Byrne. “I had a few quid on as Emmet was very strong on him that day. He said to me before the National, I’m 95% happy with him, just not 100%. I was 100% on him before his bumper!”

They had been there before. When Noble Yeats won his beginners’ chase at Galway in October 2021, Emmet ventured that he could be an Irish National horse, that he could be that good. Paul said, great, great that he’s that good, but could he be an Aintree National horse?

“I only got half-way there.”

When Noble Yeats finished second in the Grade 2 Towton Novice Chase at Wetherby in February 2022, he raced in the light blue Paul Byrne colours. When he finished ninth in the Ultima Handicap Chase at the 2022 Cheltenham Festival, however, he raced in the Robert Waley-Cohen colours.

Same when he won the Grand National.

Even though Noble Yeats didn’t race in Paul Byrne’s colours at Aintree, he still got a great kick out of it. That’s this game, you have to sell when the time it right, keep the thing moving on. He’d never sell through gritted teeth, he tells you. He’d always want the horse to do well for the new owner.

“I have to be realistic,” he says. “Over 10 years, the operation is going to lose money. It would be shocking if it didn’t. You can’t keep finding these horses. So I’m aware that it’ll be a cost centre. But I do love it. And just trying to trade our way around where we’re able to enjoy it and not cost us an arm and a leg. And that will mean I will sell Grand National winners. I’ll sell a horse for 20 grand, and it will go on and do well. This will happen because I’m not getting rid of them before we’ve got to the bottom of them. But I just want to keep the thing moving, I want to be able to keep buying, and, to be able to do that, I have to sell. I can’t afford to keep 40 horses in training.”

Shattered trends

Noble Yeats broke the established thinking, shattered the trends charts. A novice couldn’t win the Grand National, they said. A seven-year-old couldn’t win the Grand National.

It was a victory for originality of thought, a trait that he shares with his friend and trainer Emmet Mullins. Same with Feronily, who won the Grade 1 Champion Novice Chase at the Punchestown Festival in 2023 on just his second run over fences, still a maiden, less than a month after he won his maiden hurdle.

Start with a blank canvas, don’t accept the accepted norms. Look beyond the obvious. Consider the unorthodox.

Ballysax Hank won the Summer Plate at Market Rasen, then won a maiden on the flat at Gowran Park before going to America, to Far Hills, and going down by a head to Zanahiyr in the American Grand National Hurdle. It was on that day too at Far Hills that Coutach won the Foxbrook Champion Hurdle Stakes.

Fujimoto Flyer won a juveniles’ hurdle at Killarney two weeks before going to Auteuil and winning a listed hurdle confined to three-year-old fillies. The next time she raced, in the Grade 2 Adonis Hurdle at Kempton, she was racing in the green of Simon Munir and Isaac Souede.

The Shunter won the Plate at Cheltenham 12 days after he had won the Morebattle Hurdle at Kelso, and bagged the €100,000 bonus. Soldier In Milan, straight over fences, not a hurdle in sight, and bags the Irish Grand National.

“The way we looked at it,” says Paul thoughtfully, “Soldier In Milan was going chasing. We didn’t want to be wasting time with him over hurdles. I’m a firm believer in, if a horse is in form, that’s when you strike. I’ve had so much bad news through the years with horses, you might not have the horse next year, so you just crack on when you can.”

Bookmaker background

Rewind to Paul Byrne’s childhood. He used to go racing on weekends as a kid. Every weekend, Saturday and Sunday, he and his dad Davy would head off. His dad was a bookmaker, he had shops in Dublin but, at the races, he was a punter, part of a community.

“Dad knew bookmakers at the track, of course,” says Paul. “He would have taken positions on certain races. It was a community of punters and bookmakers, and it was fascinating to me.”

He was very young when his dad was diagnosed with dementia. He wasn’t really involved in his dad’s bookmaking business, he was too young at the time, and yet, here we are, surrounded by the screens and the infrastructure of Fitzwilliam Sports, a bookmaking business.

“I would have been up in the back office as a young fellow, but I never set out to actually become a bookmaker. It was never a path that I set out to follow, it just sort of happened by a series of events. I was taking my betting seriously, and it just panned out like that.”

His dad knew Alan Byrne, who was CEO of the Racing Post by the time young Paul started studying commerce in UCG.

“The Racing Post had just set up their new Dublin office, and I remember begging Mum to ring Alan to ask him about a job for me. I would have done anything! Anyway, she did call Alan and, while there wasn’t really a job there, Alan set up a meeting for me with Mark Flood in the Dublin office. I remember, I spoke to Mark at about 11 o’clock in the morning, and he said, can you be in here by 2 o’clock? So I dropped everything and got there.”

Salesman

He started selling classified ads in the Racing Post. A summer job, three months during the summer before going back to college. It started with a trickle, he was a bit shy at first, but the more the summer developed, the more he enjoyed it and the better at it he got.

“I was given my targets, and I just got on with it. You’d be giving deals to fellows, trying to get ads sold. You’d be talking to all sorts of fellows with anything to sell, horses, broodmares, nominations, clothing! It was a great grounding. It was great learning. Being able to sell is a great asset, and there’s no better way to learn to sell than that, because you’re literally selling. So when I was going back to college in September, they were happy to let me work sort of like part-time, make a few calls on the weekends or during the day. So it worked well. I loved it there. There was a great team there, it was great fun.”

In time, his role with the Racing Post would morph from selling classified ads to being a key cog in the strategic development of the business.

These days, he runs Fitzwilliam Sports. Has done for about five years.

“We started with two people, so I suppose you could say that it has been fairly successful so far. It takes a lot of work though. There are a lot of things that you don’t think about. You learn so much from this side of the counter. Like, when we went out to get our platform provider, every one of them was shocked that I wanted to do horse racing. They all said, just do casino and sports. I said I’m interested in horse racing. They were shocked. All of them. They said, you won’t make any money on horse racing.”

Horse racing is a key element of the Fitzwilliam Sports business, and their pitch on the rails at Cheltenham, and then again at Aintree, was high-profile.

“I knew the auction was happening for the pitch. That’s all I knew. And then Andy, our head of compliance, just happened to put in an email that morning saying that our on-course licence had come in. Literally that morning, he just sent in the copied licence.

“The auction was at 7pm or something. He sent that email at 11am. I thought, wouldn’t it be great? And then putting Johnny (Dineen) on the pitch, he’s a bookmaker and I thought that it would work well. The idea just evolved and it went from there.”

Fast forward to today. Press Play.