THERE were times last year when Bryan Cooper must have felt like a protagonist in one of those godawful, criminally-addictive reality TV shows. Except in this one, he was the judge and it was prancing horses he was adjudicating than performing seals. The horses were completely unaware of what was going on however. It was all on him.

Forget The Voice. This was The Choice.

It transcended racing, dominating trade media and finding prominent positions in the mainstream. This was the Cheltenham Gold Cup. The questions were ceaseless, his constant, consistent declarations that he would be waiting until as late as possible to make a call falling on deaf ears. It was like the constant drill on the roadworks that are never completed.

Thud, thud, thud… choose, choose, CHOOSE!

The Blue Riband race. Two Dons, one rider.

Cossack or Poli?

A sensational piece of work by Don Cossack at Leopardstown that had Gordon Elliott watching terrified as his pride and joy under Davy Russell jumped fences at breakneck speed alongside Cooper and No More Heroes, made the Gigginstown House jockey’s mind up.

Revealing it did not signal a conclusion to the interminable speculation, analysis and commentary. It just moved on from who he would pick to whether he had selected astutely.

It was no picnic for Cooper but as he sat on the broad back of the gelding Elliott had always considered the best he had ever trained, and the pair soared over the last before galloping up the finishing incline, the relief coursed through his veins.

The initial reactions were quite restrained. Finger in the air and then pointing at the horse. The joy, fist-pumping and flag-waving came on the way to the winners’ enclosure and the celebrations lasted a few days. Getting over the last and passing the post though, it was relief that was the prevailing emotion.

He had never felt like buckling under the weight of The Choice but it was a weight nonetheless. One now lifted.

This is what it was all about.

****

“I have to find myself a hobby. I nearly went mad last summer because Melanie was eventing, Robbie was gone, there was no-one around and I didn’t know what to do.”

– Bryan Cooper, December 15, 2015

HE PLANTS himself on the seat at the Keadeen Hotel, just about 10 feet from where he sat around 14 months previously for a similar but also very different conversation.

A lot has happened in interim. He has won the Gold Cup and pushed Ruby Walsh all the way in the race to be champion jockey, smashing his previous best of 61 winners in Ireland in the process. With the six registered across the water that made it an even ton for the campaign. There were nine Grade 1 successes as well.

The current campaign has been more trying. He has been sidelined for 163 days due to a variety of injuries that have tested his patience but conversely, aided his personal development. He is back booting home winners now though at the business end of the season and crucially, confidence is high.

The young Tralee pilot has arrived from Cullentra House, where Elliott was entertaining the local and cross-channel racing media. He has a bit of an aversion to the British press, feeling that a few have been unduly hard on him, but has cut down largely on interviews anyway.

Thankfully, he has agreed to sit down with The Irish Field to talk about a testing term that, depending on how things go at Cheltenham, Aintree, Fairyhouse and Punchestown with the likes of Petit Mouchoir, Death Duty, Apple’s Jade, Outlander, Don Poli, Empire Of Dirt, Alpha Des Obeaux and co, could still rank as one of his best ever.

But let’s get the misery out of the way first. It started pretty mundanely with a scheduled operation to have a pin taken out from his leg, inserted after the brutal double-break suffered at Cheltenham in 2014, described by Irish Turf Club senior medical officer Dr Adrian McGoldrick as “the worst fracture I have ever seen in a lower limb”.

His knee had been troubling him for a while and the removal of pin did the trick. Missing June was no cross to bear and it coincided with the 10-day break that is scheduled bizarrely in the second month of the new season.

He wasn’t back a fortnight when taking a heavy fall at Kilbeggan in the middle of July that left him very stiff and sore. After nine days off, he returned at Galway. While the fall from Tiger Roll was a bad one, it wouldn’t have needed to be.

“I think I had a few cracked ribs going there and then I broke more ribs and punctured my lung and lacerated my liver as well,” says Cooper matter-of-factly. “That was tough and quite sore when it happened. I couldn’t breathe for about 40 minutes on my own.

“I got a fright now for a few minutes because you’re not sure what the damage is internally. Adrian was there that day and he was very good. They got me off the track very quickly into hospital and I was fine then and I was home for the weekend.”

You feared the worst watching it live, as the incident took place at those two fences that follow close together in the dip. Cooper was losing his battle to hang on after a mistake at the first of them, with the second approaching rapidly.

“I thought I was going to land on top of the fence which would have been fine ‘cos I would have hit the birch but I just came off three strides before it.

“It was a new EasyFix apron that was there and I’d say only for them I would have done more damage ‘cos they’re plastic. The normal fences aren’t. I’d say the way I hit it I was probably lucky that there wasn’t more damage done.”

RECOVERY

There wasn’t much to be done in the month or so of recovery other than let nature take its course. Once the scans revealed that the ribs had set, the liver had closed up and the lung was also back in proper working order, he was good to go.

He returned in September but was in the wars once more the following month, when fracturing his right arm after Ball D’Arc sent him crashing to earth. Initially, his lung went on hiatus and it was only when he sat down and his breathing was regulated once more that he noticed the throb in his arm.

“It was just at the point where the horses were starting to come out and run again. I missed a lot of winners - not big winners as such but a lot of maiden hurdles and beginners’ chases. It’s the time of year when I usually ride most of my winners. Then I missed the JN Wine Chase and the two novices in Down Royal that day. It was pretty frustrating.”

He got almost seven weeks on the track after recovering from this setback before being struck down once more. Awkrisht unseated him at Punchestown on New Year’s Eve and the result was a broken pelvis.

“I couldn’t believe it. I got up and walked to the ambulance. It was sore but I was fully sure it was just a bang.

“I was inside in the ambulance room and Mikey Fogarty came in and Puppy (Robbie Power) and my girlfriend Melanie came in and they were saying ‘You’re fine’. A half-hour or so later, I was still in the ambulance room and (Turf Club doctor) Richie Downey said ‘There’s something not right here’ and he sent me for an X-ray.

“But I went over for an X-ray and I’d fractured my pelvis. Mr Kenny, my surgeon, was away but he saw the X-ray and he made me go straight to Blanchardstown to keep me in to make sure there was nothing too serious.

“Ruby (Walsh) rang me that afternoon to see was I alright and he had seen me walking off. He reckoned that was me telling myself there was nothing broken. He said I wasn’t letting myself believe that there was anything wrong after the ones I’d had before.

“That was real tough.”

Yet, he maintains, it was character-building. Watching others win on your horses stings but this is a way of life in which lengthy absences are not just likely, but certain.

Close friend Robbie McNamara was a housemate when he suffered the injury that left him paralysed from the waist down. More than once Cooper refers to being able to walk away from a fall and how people have suffered much worse than him. Context is important.

But the mind can do funny things if left on its own for too long. When unoccupied, it can eat at a man as it focuses on falls, injuries, losses and picking the wrong horse.

Cooper was aware of this danger and talked at the end of 2015 of needing to find an outlet away from the game. He joked about getting a cat to kick, to avoid sitting in the corner of a dark room. Melanie gave him the final push. Cat-lovers rest easy.

“I’ve learned to deal with things a lot better, try to go off and do a few things, keep the mind busy. I started doing a course in Griffith College as well. Melanie said ‘You need to do something. You can’t be sitting in the house every day.’ It’s grand. It’s a business course.

“I left school when I was 15 so it was like starting from scratch but it’s amazing how quickly you pick it up. It’s difficult but I’m finding it okay. You’ve assignments to do and even if you come from racing after a bad day, you put it out of your mind because you have that to do, just to take your mind off racing.

“There is a life outside racing as well. You go home on a Thursday night and get beaten in a maiden hurdle, there’s no point sitting at home drowning your sorrows over it. There’s worse things going on in life. It’s a very high profile, big job and I try to do the best I can. That’s all you can do at the end of the day.”

If that was a significant arc in his development as an individual, the rehab for his pelvis in particular cemented his commitment to strength and conditioning. He is in no doubt as to the benefits of maintaining a training regime.

“I think it’s a massive help. Some people are only starting to realise how fit you have to be, and strong. You look at the rugby lads, the stronger they are the more physical hits they can take. For us, it’s without putting on weight. I’m bigger and stronger than I was three years ago and I’m the same weight. I mightn’t be the prime example ‘cos I’m getting burst up every day of the week but I do think I take a bang better than I did three years ago, two years ago.

“I came back in Gowran, I had four rides, you’d swear I hadn’t missed a day. I said it afterwards. I felt perfect.”

****

THE build-up to Cheltenham 2017 has been nothing like its predecessor and not just because it has been so fragmented. Cooper isn’t the headline act this time and he has no problem with that, particularly as he still has a mouth-watering book of rides.

Yes, there will be choices to make - but there is nothing like the stressful preamble that accompanied January, February and March 2016.

“There’s no real major high-pressure decisions,” Cooper confirms. “Obviously there’s a choice in the Gold Cup again but it was a lot more difficult last year - it was about getting off the favourite to ride the second favourite. This year they’re both 4, 5, 6/1. You’ve Petit Mouchoir in the Champion Hurdle is straightforward. Death Duty. Apple’s Jade.”

How bad was it last year though?

“Anyone that asked me, I just told them I’m not making decisions. I remember the media day in Gordon’s last year, there were so many stupid English fellas coming up asking me. They must have thought I was stupid that I was going to tell them.

“‘But you must know deep down?’ they were saying to me.

“‘No, I don’t.’ How stupid did they think I was? ‘Then some lad came out and said I shouldn’t ride Don Cossack, that I don’t get on with him. I turned around and said to him ‘Yeah, I’ll use your expertise to base my decision on.’

“I knew myself with a week to go what my choice was but I wasn’t going to say it until I had, just in case something happened… I got it right anyway but it was a big call.”

UNBELIEVABLE

And the feeling of being victorious in the race he had dreamed all his life of winning?

“Unreal. The relief was unbelievable. I knew going to the last, ‘This is done bar I don’t deck him now!’ Everyone was there, my Dad, Melanie, all my friends. I’ll never forget coming back into the parade ring, Puppy and Mikey Fogarty were standing there. I was on a high for two or three weeks afterwards.

“We went out that night in Cheltenham and had a right craic. We’d a party when we came home too on Sunday. You have to enjoy these things. I’m not the type of person to put it to one side straight away. You’ve got to make the most of it I think. At the end of the day it’s a short career and it won’t be long before it’s long forgotten about. But I can always look back on it. On the bad days, it’s a nice thing to look back on.”

Don Cossack is now in retirement after it was decided not to risk him having had a setback recovering from a tendon injury.

“The month of March last year was definitely the best of my life by far and it’s great to see him going out where he’ll be very well looked after. He’s still in Gordon’s at the minute. It’s frustrating walking by him. You’re tacking up Don Poli and Don Cossack is beside him wondering why he’s not being ridden out. He looks as good as ever but it was the right call. He’s gone out on a high, he’s a Gold Cup winner and no-one can ever take that away from him.”

Or from his jockey.