BARRY Geraghty has endured what he describes as “an ordinary run” on the injury front in the past 12 months, breaking his right arm at Market Rasen on July 16th of last year, fracturing seven ribs and suffering a collapsed lung in Kempton on February 25th and then on April 17th breaking his left arm and a wing of a vertebra in his back at Fairyhouse.

All the reporting ahead of his comeback on Monday has detailed the arms, the ribs and the lung but there has been no reference to the vertebra. So you ask.

“No.” Pause.

“Nooo.” Pause. And then something clicks.

“There was a wing of a vertebra. When was that? That must have been around the same time.”

I remind him that he wrote about it in his At The Races blog, in relation to the latest mishap.

“Oh no actually, you’re right… I did one of each but the one I did in Easter was lower, there was a lot of muscle and everything connected to it.

“Very painful. I got up to walk off the track after the fall and after two steps I couldn’t move. I had to be lifted off. The arm was painless, and was painless last year, though they were completely broken. But the back was very painful. I did one with the ribs but that wasn’t too bad.”

It is a genuine exchange and suggests not so much a concerted, definite intention of blanking these things out. It must be the subconscious taking control. Or maybe there are so many that you can’t keep track of them all. That might sound blasé, like when his wife Paula talked about the seriousness of a punctured lung and he reminded her he had two of them.

Rather than being bare-faced liars to themselves or anyone else, jockeys just block it all out. There is a trip switch somewhere within them that kicks in and they forget. How else would you risk life and limb every day?

Irish Examiner, July 29, 2017

IT IS said almost glibly at times, that falls and injuries are inevitable in National Hunt racing. Barry Geraghty’s “ordinary run” wasn’t over.

Although his return in Galway was glorious – his first ride was a winner and he ended the week with four in all, highlighted by garnering a first Galway Hurdle on Tigris River for his boss J.P. McManus and trainer Joseph O’Brien – he didn’t make it to September.

A fractured shoulder suffered in Killarney ruled him out for another month but since then, he has managed a clean bill of health. Remarkably, this span of little more than four months free of injury is as good as he has managed since hitting the dirt in Market Rasen in July 2016.

He is on his way to Huntingdon for one ride. The job means being away from the family a lot but he has been making the cross-channel trip for 10 years now, since his highly-successful spell as Nicky Henderson’s numero uno.

Protek Des Flos ends up a well-beaten favourite but Geraghty will stay with his good friend Luke Harvey overnight, make the familiar trip to Henderson’s Seven Barrows yard to sit on the likes of Buveur D’Air and My Tent Or Yours in the morning, before heading to Cheltenham, where Apple’s Shakira will maintain her 100% record in impressive fashion. Then it is straight to the airport and home to Paula and their three children Síofra (12), Órla (6) and Rían (2). He is aware and appreciative of the price they pay for him to do his job.

“Everything revolves around racing,” says the 38-year-old. “It dictates whether you’re going to a wedding or not. Davy Condon got married before Christmas – I was in Ascot. There’s plenty you miss out on and that’s how it is, I wouldn’t want to change it, but Paula has to work her own life and work the kids’ lives around what’s the likelihood of me being in Huntingdon on Friday. She has to put up with a lot.”

Ruby Walsh has noted how his eldest daughter had come to an age where she was taking in the leg break that had him ruled out of action. It was the first time she realised that Daddy wasn’t bullet proof. It is something Geraghty is acutely aware of.

“When you’re on the ground the first thing you do is get up, so they know if I’m not getting up it’s not good. But that’s probably all part of the denial again too that jockeys are so good at, telling ourselves we’re fine. When I done my ribs, I got up and walked into the ambulance.

“They would have had a rough time the last couple of years but it’s all they know too, it’s what they’ve grown up with. I’ve been commuting since 2008 when I was with Nicky, so Síofra was three. You’re a part-time Dad.”

Is Paula dropping any hints about retirement?

“No. But I’d say it’d be a weight off her mind when it happens and hopefully I’m in one piece. I know when I got the fall in Kempton in particular and I was being shown on the TV being loaded into the ambulance. I was told I looked like death. I’d say that was a hard one but luckily enough, lots of people contacted her to provide help and support. You need that, especially when you’ve three young kids and you’re trying to do everything at home when something like that happens. It’s a test for her.”

He is deeply appreciative of the expertise and support provided by Adrian McGoldrick, who retires as the Turf Club’s senior medical officer this year. McGoldrick has reshaped the landscape for health and safety. Apart from that, he has been totally selfless in making himself available.

“I got a bad dead leg from a fall off Riverside Theatre in a novice chase at Punchestown. I went to bed and woke up around 12 o’clock that night and I was in agony with it. It had bled into the muscle and swelled so bad, it was like a knife stuck in your leg.

“Rather than rock into Blanchardstown, you ring Adrian, he makes the call to Blanchardstown, you’re straight in, seen to and he is on the phone again at two o’clock that morning to make sure everything is okay; and was offering to call to the hospital to see if I needed anything.”

Apart from the improved facilities and safety and nutritional standards, McGoldrick understands jockeys.

“You’re in the hospital and they’re asking you out of 10 what pain you’re feeling. I’d be comparing it to other injuries I’d have and maybe lowering it down a bit. Paula’s beside me giving me a dig and saying ‘No, this fella is playing it down’, and Adrian would be on the phone to the surgeon and specialist who’s seeing you and he’s telling him as well ‘This fella is pretending he’s okay but he’s not.’

“You’re getting the morphine, you’re getting what you need – but it’s because that’s your mindset, to talk down the extent of the injury or pain. You don’t want to admit it to yourself not to mind to anyone else. You don’t want to acknowledge it. You put it out of your head.

“It’s denial. It’s all denial. That’s probably across the board in all sports, football or rugby or anything. People talk about tunnel vision but it’s a different form of it. It’s the denial to say ‘I’m fine’ when you’re not.”

DISCIPLINED

The irony though is that he has never felt stronger or fitter. He is much more disciplined about his diet than he used to be – one of the benefits of marrying a nutritionist – and took up running when he discovered it was a regular part of the routine of English-based jockeys.

Now, he has a weekly weights regimen, established for him by Enda King in Santry Sports Clinic, who helped him rehab his broken arms and shoulder. His posture is markedly improved now. So too is his core.

“Everybody would have thought weights put on weight but I do a session every week at home. It’s a programme Enda gave me and it’s working well. I’m running plenty too but it’s funny, the fitness levels are better for doing weights because you’re strengthening up where you need to strengthen.

“I was chatting to the Gooch (former Kerry footballer Colm Cooper) about it there during the summer and he had a lot of similar exercises from Enda as well. He was even telling me how he deals with some of the Premier League football clubs and they’d be doing a lot of the same. It’s just about core strength.”

It is notable how the vast majority of top-tier NH jockeys are in their late 30s or early 40s, with the odd exception. Jack Kennedy has bounced back well from a testing period with injuries and looks assured of a bright future if he can stay sound. It does seem that there is ridiculous pressure being heaped on 16-year-old James Bowen though he is clearly talented.

MENTORS

Having Gordon Elliott and Nicky Henderson as mentors – Bowen also spent time with Elliott starting off before moving to Seven Barrows – is a huge positive says Geraghty. He points to Keith Donoghue as another talented pilot benefiting from Elliott’s handling. Not every trainer has that time to give, which is why professional coaches are being called on more.

“I know myself when I was young, you can hit a bad run and you can be just making simple mistakes… You get beaten on a horse and straight away you think ‘What did I do wrong?’ but often times the runner-up could get a better ride than the winner but he just wasn’t good enough to win.

“Some lads might battle more with that than others and would need reassurance. ‘You gave him a good ride.’ Sometimes lads need that support.

“The stakes are higher than they were 20 years ago. Definitely there’s more pressure on younger fellas than there was when I was starting out. There’s more scrutiny. Every race is televised, every race is analysed, there’s a bigger focus on day-to-day, social media with a lot of criticism, and young lads can be affected by that. Naturally some lads will take it better than others. Some will ignore it and some will take it to heart.”

That is where having a sounding board helps.

“I remember going through a bad run. I came back after doing a vertebra. I was falling off everything over fences. Jesus I couldn’t… I fell off Merry Gale. He galloped through the last below in Naas and I went straight out and brought the bridle with me.

“And I remember (the jockey) Terry Mitchell, he was in Navan and you’d get a lift here and there. Simple things. He said to me at the start when I was 17, ‘Get a mobile phone, get an accountant.’ They were the first two things he said to me.

FALLING OFF

“Well I went through this stage of falling off, and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. I dropped me pedals, I was doing everything to stay on but I was stilling falling off. And Terry said to me ‘I’m watching you’ he said. ‘You’re going down to fences and you’re not taking the horse back onto his hocks at all.’

“I had been out for three months with injury and came back and was straight into it. And being that age, I didn’t just fall back into the routine I was used to doing. I wasn’t taking the horse back on his hocks a little bit, not breaking his stride but just gathering him. So he said it to me, and I promise you, within a week, I’d the pedals back up, I rode a horse, I think it was called Lord Heavens for John Murphy. He wasn’t the nicest ride in the world. Well I got some ride off him. It just clicked. Bang, I was back, I had it. And all it took was someone like that... So coaching was happening then and it does work.”

The man who retains his services has a bit of that about him too. “I remember getting beat on a horse in a good race back in the early winter and I rang JP that evening, saying ‘That was one that got away’ and apologising. He said ‘Do you know where that race was lost?’ I said ‘Where?’ He said ‘Over the first four fences.’

“I hadn’t thought about that at all. It was the finish that got me, timing it maybe wrong. He said ‘No, the first four fences cost you’ and when I thought about it he was so right. It was the horse’s first run and he was a bit rusty over the first four and those few lengths out of position were the lengths I had to make up, which cost me the little bit I needed in the finish. I was relieved because I was beating myself up for getting beaten on him but I was thrown a lifeline! Now I would say I could still have done a bit better but he was right.”

Geraghty had ridden plenty of horses for McManus prior to succeeding McCoy as the Limerick man’s retained rider, but he was still taken aback by his enduring enthusiasm for racing on a day-to-day basis.

The big days are the best though.

Espoir D’Allen is favourite to augment his growing reputation in the Tattersalls Ireland Spring Juvenile Hurdle at Leopardstown tomorrow, while last year’s Triumph victor Defi Du Seuil is on a retrieval mission in the BHP Irish Champion Hurdle today, having flopped at Ascot in November.

“He never turned up. Philip’s horses mightn’t have been flying at the time so hopefully he’ll be in better order. He still has a good bit to find to win a Champion Hurdle but the last thing you’d want to see is him getting beat. You want to see him win.”

Geraghty will be in Sandown for Buveur D’Air’s final prep run before Cheltenham. He was sitting on a couch watching the then six-year-old scoot up the hill in the Champion Hurdle under Noel Fehily in last year’s Champion Hurdle but would have been on Yanworth had he been fit so that was grand.

All eyes in Ireland will be on the former king Faugheen today but Geraghty warns that the indications from Newcastle and Kempton are that Buveur D’Air has improved.

“He’s been brilliant. He’s only just rising seven. He felt very sharp and even his hurdling has got slicker. He was coming into the Champion Hurdle on the back of two runs over fences so he’s entitled to be slicker over a hurdle now. He’s been very good.”

He is very excited about the Dublin Racing Festival, believing it to have the ideal slot in the calendar, perfectly suited for Cheltenham. Jump racing needs more of these types of festivals and the prizes are prestigious enough on a standalone basis. The one disappointment is the dearth of British-trained runners.

“That’s a reflection of the strength that’s in Ireland. England are weaker than us in most divisions. And if they’re not weaker, Ireland are definitely on par with them. I’d say as it gets established over the years there’ll be more prestige and it’s when it gets more prestige, it will be more attractive.”