DAVID Marnane first saw the yearling that was to be Settle For Bay in a sale at Baden-Baden in 2015. His trip to Germany was instantly worthwhile.

“I loved him from day one,” the Tipperary trainer recalls. “Peter Doyle helps me a lot at the sales and he picked him out and put him on a shortlist. He was out of a Spectrum mare, just like Dandy Boy.

“Dandy was a huge monster of a horse and this yearling was going to be a huge monster of a horse. They had very similar traits and I was mad about him.”

Dandy Boy was a very important horse for Marnane. He won the Victoria Cup at Ascot in 2011, a first signature handicap success for the trainer. He won at Meydan in the same season, providing Marnane with a first win in Dubai with his first runner. And, perhaps most significantly, he blasted down the far side rail to win the 2012 Wokingham Stakes, giving Marnane a first ever Royal Ascot success.

“That was a huge day,” Marnane reflects. “Maybe the first day he won at Ascot (in the Victoria Cup) it passed us by a little but we enjoyed the Wokingham win immensely. He was some horse for us. When he won in Dubai, he broke the track record and the second day at Ascot, he did a faster time than Black Caviar did in the Diamond Jubilee, despite carrying a bigger weight. He went on to finish fourth in Lethal Force’s Sprint Cup at Haydock that season when he was a little unlucky in the run.”

So you could understand that when Marnane identified the similarities between Dandy Boy and this yearling, he was excited. The hammer dropped at €35,000 and the yearling was bound for Tipperary.

While Settle For Bay held a lot of good similarities to Dandy Boy, he did take on a lot of the same challenges as well.

“Dandy Boy was a notoriously difficult horse to keep sound. He was 565kg fully fit and he just very bad legs underneath him,” Marnane explains.

“As a two-year-old Settle For Bay was a big gangly horse. He ran fine in his first three maidens and the following April we put him in a Leopardstown handicap and he dotted up. He was 5/4 for his next start at Dundalk but he fell out of the stalls and managed to break his pelvis.

“Luckily it wasn’t the worst break he could have had. He was very sensible and easy on himself. It was the longest ever drive home from Dundalk because we had to drive so slow.”

It was in the following weeks that Marnane found out a lot about Settle For Bay. The then three-year-old spent four weeks standing up.

“We had to put a wire up on the roof of his stable and tie him to a runner, which allowed him to walk to his feed, hay and water but encouraged him not to lie down. We had him on that for four weeks and all things considered he recovered remarkably quickly,” Marnane explains.

PLAN

Settle For Bay returned to action at Fairyhouse late in the season, finishing down the field when needing the run and two runs later, on November 1st, he returned to Dundalk where he got up on the line to win a three-year-old handicap by a nose. It was then that Royal Hunt Cup plan was formulated. He returned to the all-weather venue to win three more times, twice before Christmas and once after, before being put away until the sun came out again.

“I loved his final run at Dundalk for two reasons,” Marnane asserts. “He finished off his race really well, hitting the line straight and hard and the handicapper put him to a mark of 99 which historically would get you a run in the Hunt Cup. If he was 98 or 97, you might have needed another win.

“We gave him a warm up run at Leopardstown in April and it was the ideal prep run. He was just short of race fitness, but stayed on into fourth in a race that subsequently worked out really well, which was important.”

Marnane travelled to Ascot confident. How confident you can be watching your horse in a line of 29 other horses charging up the Ascot straight is questionable but if anyone can be confident travelling over to Ascot with one horse, Marnane is a good candidate.

The confidence was well placed. You’d get it hard to miss Settle For Bay when watching a race, with the luminous green silks he carries easy to spot. However Billy Lee could have been wearing camouflage colours and the eye would still have been casted to this big bay gelding travelling all over his near-side group at the two-furlong marker. In fact, so well was he travelling, he probably took Lee to the front a little too early, but such was his dominance, he stayed on for as an emphatic a win you could have in a Royal Hunt Cup, traditionally one of the most competitive races at the entire meeting.

Marnane’s emotion after the race didn’t go unnoticed. Many presumed it was caused by the sheer intensity of the battle facing a trainer with 20 horses every day in Ireland. But there was more to it than that.

“It was relief really. Like we were sitting on this horse for seven months, ever since he won his second race in Dundalk last December, we knew what type of animal he was,” Marnane explains

“It’s the three of us, my wife Mel and my brother Ed. We looked at this horse and tried to work back from Ascot. It’s a lot of pressure that you put on yourself and every morning you’re just hoping he is okay, especially after what happened to him. So to see him win like that, it caused a lot of emotion.

“It is brilliant for the owners as well. I know Denis McGettigan a long time from being out in Dubai and Mossie Casey is a local man from Cahir. I believe every bookies shop in Cahir and Clonmel was cleaned out!”

“The only sad thing was the fact that Donagh O’Connor missed the ride through a suspension. Donagh rode him to win all of his Dundalk races and it’s a big blow for him but hopefully he’ll have another day on this horse.”

Perhaps one of racing’s naivities is the assumption that a big winner at a big meeting directly translates into new business going forward. However the game is not that simple and for that reason Marnane is only hopeful his latest big-race success will bring in new business.

“The standard in Ireland is so high. I was at Gowran Park the other day and everywhere you look you can see guys who can train. Look I think it’s a good thing. I’d go along with the view that the lads at the top, the likes of Aidan O’Brien and Willie Mullins over jumps, they are setting the standard and it is up to us to get to it. It brings the whole level forward and the overall quality of trainers in this country is top-class.

One place Marnane is more hopeful Settle For Bay’s win could have a positive effect is Dubai. There is the Denis McGettigan connection and there is the fact that Dubai has always been an important place for him.

He and Melanie travelled there in 1997, not with the pretensions to gain the experience to embark on a training career but just because they were young and wanted to see another part of the world.

“We both got jobs at Kiaran McLaughlin’s. Melanie was managing a barn and I worked as work rider,” Marnane recalls. “We absolutely loved it. Kiaran is a proper gentleman and we had a very nice life out there.

“It was our intention to go out there for a year but we didn’t return home for another nine years, with three kids with us. I suppose the kids were getting close to school and we thought it would be better to have them start at home.”

Those nine years were a significant in assisting Marnane to where he is today as a trainer, both in practical terms and through the connections he made.

He explains: “I was never dead set on becoming a trainer but I suppose when I went to Dubai I was interested to see that there is a different way to train horses. It opened my eyes to it.

“And thankfully, the connections we made out there have stood to us. We’ve had a good few owners from Dubai, both local and ex-pat Irish and British, which has been great.”

Marnane returned to Dubai as a trainer in 2011 and Dandy Boy gave him a first winner with his first runner at Meydan. It was also a significant winner for his owner, local Dubai businessman Malih Al Basti, as it also gave him a first winner at Meydan. Since that win in 2011, Marnane has been back every year since recording notable successes with Nocturnal Affair, Seanie, Jamesie and Elleval, who finished second in the 2013 UAE Derby, worth over €1 million in prize money.

Settle For Bay and Billy Lee thunder down the centre of the Ascot straight to win the Royal Hunt Cup Photo: carolinenorris.ie

AMATEUR RIDER

Before training and before Dubai, Marnane was a very successful amateur rider. Based with the great Mick O’Toole, he rode all the winners every amateur jockey wants to win, including the Punchestown Champion Bumper on the Liam Browne-trained Dramatic Touch and the big amateur flat handicap at Galway on Pat Flynn’s Onomatopoeia.

Those were great days for the Tipperary man but that he has been able to continue the trend of big-race success as a trainer, with all the extra challenges that comes along with the position, is a thoroughly more impressive feat.

It is a battle for 20-horse trainers in Ireland in the current climate but Marnane is keen to focus on the positives and is buoyed by successes in the past which gives his whole team confidence going forward.

“We pride ourselves on what we’ve been able to extract out of the horses we’ve had. The likes of Elleval, we picked him up for €50,000, and he’s now earned well over €600,000. Dandy Boy earned €300,000 and cost just €20,000. Jamesie cost just €11,000 and he earned well over €350,000.

“When we have the raw material, we can do it. Winning races in Ascot and Meydan on big days gives you that sort of confidence.”

Marnane has been a huge advocate of Dundalk with the aforementioned horses all winning on the all-weather surface before going on to bigger things. One suggestion the trainer would make for the Irish racing scene is for another all-weather track.

“We need another all-weather track, whether it’s around here in Tipperary, in Kildare, or wherever. We’re in one of the wettest countries in the world and we only have one all-weather track.

“I’ve told anybody who will listen to me, if you have a horse that can show up at Dundalk, he’ll show up anywhere in the world. I think we’ve proved it and Aidan O’Brien has proved it – they’ve had two Breeders Cup horses come out of Dundalk,” Marnane says.

“Settle For Bay would not have made the Hunt Cup without Dundalk. He was injured up until October, he won’t walk on soft ground so what could we have done? We’d have had to wait until April or May to come back.

“Dundalk gives trainers an opportunity to run their lower grade horses and keep staff in a job year long. It gives some trainers the opportunity to run nice, back-end two-year-olds, that instead of putting them away or running them on bad ground, you have an opportunity to hunt around there, win your race or two and then plan for next season. It also gives people like us an ideal opportunity to get runs into a horse before bringing him off to Dubai or somewhere else abroad.”

And that final reasoning is key to the David Marnane objective. Big race wins are what floats this Tipperary trainer’s boat and even with just 20 horses in Bansha, he has shown he can produce his horses to win on the biggest stages, particularly Royal Ascot and Meydan, a number of times in a career still in its early stages.

In the immediate future, there is lots to look forward to. Settle For Bay goes for the Listed Platinum Stakes at Cork and Dubai is in the pipeline. Freescape is a horse who could join him in Dubai – he finished third at Meydan in March and has similarly progressive profile. Today, Alfredo Arcano has a big chance in the Rockingham, following his win at the Curragh last month.

“I’ve great staff here, guys who have been with me for a long time. And Mel and Ed are great for advice, it’s really the three of us that’s in it,” Marnane says.

“I don’t really have a set target, I don’t operate like that. What I’d love is to just get more horses around the place, and continue to big it up, so we can challenge more and more on these big days.”