RAY Dawson went into Ismail Mohammed’s Newmarket yard one sunny morning last May full of anticipation.

He was set to ride a piece of work on a Dandy Man filly and the early signs were that she was a very nice filly. Dawson liked her a lot and Mohammed did too. The piece of work was with her stablemate, a No Nay Never filly, and the pair of them stretched out together, side by side, toe to toe.

Dawson’s mount moved well, felt good and travelled nicely alongside her work partner. But when he asked her to go on and lengthen her stride, she couldn’t match her morning rival. Indeed, she was left behind by her and when the pairings had their allotted distance covered, Dawson could only see the other duo in the distance, at least 10 lengths away he reckoned.

That was his first recollection of the ability of Zain Claudette.

“I kind of had my eyes on her then,” Dawson recalls this week. “Unfortunately, the Dandy Man filly got hurt and won’t make it to the track but we did like her a lot so for Zain Claudette to beat her by that much, she had to be very good.

“I saw that she was entered at Goodwood in the second week of June. I had a suspension to serve which clashed with the date she was due to run but I decided to move one of the days to make myself available. I just thought if she turned out to be nice, I didn’t want to miss out on the ride and luckily enough, I was booked to ride her.”

That was an inspired decision. Zain Claudette was beaten at Goodwood but she showed plenty of promise for Dawson, and the pair haven’t looked back since. Ismail Mohammed’s filly won her maiden at Newmarket and then provided Dawson with his first Group 3 success in the Princess Margaret Keeneland Stakes at Ascot.

Goals

A pattern race win was front and centre on the list of goals the Kildare native typed into his phone at the beginning of the season but the great thing about a juvenile winning a Group 3, is that the anticipation for what may come is nearly as good if not better than the achievement on the day. A Group 3 is great, a Group 2 is even better.

So when Zain Claudette was to be aimed for the Lowther Stakes at York last week, Dawson hummed with excitement.

“Coming up to the race, I knew Sandrine was the one to beat but I knew if we could get first run on her, that we wouldn’t be beaten,” Dawson reflects. “I just felt that if she got her head in front, she’d be very hard to pass.

“We had a plan going out but things changed on the way down to post when she was keen. She can be keen at home but not at the races, she’s usually very relaxed. Behind the stalls, I was just hoping the pace would be good, I didn’t want to upset her if she was keen.

“Luckily enough Frankie and Jason Watson went a lovey gallop and I sat in the middle of them. I could sense we were going very quick and Jason kicked quite early, and that left me a little bit worried, in that she had been keen and had been up with a fast pace, so I was kind of thinking, will she get home but obviously she has a serious engine and a great attitude, and obviously she’s won comfortable enough in the end.

“It was probably more straightforward than I thought and I was delighted that she proved she was a Group 1 filly.”

That she is. The few firms that have priced up the Cheveley Park Stakes next month make her favourite and of course that’s exciting but for now, Dawson is a Group 2 winning jockey, and that’s big.

“It will probably be the biggest celebration I ever do,” he says of his ecstatic punch of the air when passing the line. “It is just a massive moment in my career.

“It just meant a huge amount and it was down to a mixture of the work I’ve put in and then realising I’d found a very good filly. I think it was there for all to see how much it meant to me.”

That release of emotion in the immediate stage of victory represented an awful lot for Dawson. It has been a tumultuous journey for him so far. To label it a roller coaster ride would be to paint too pretty a picture because there have been more downs than ups, more setbacks than breakthroughs, more anguish than happiness.

“It’s two and a half years ago now that one night I was drinking and I blacked out and woke up the next morning in Ipswich prison

But things have been looking up for a significant amount of time now and with a unique perspective unlikely to be held by any of his colleagues, the 27-year-old is hell bent on making the most of the opportunity he has carved.

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“It goes right back to the start of my career. It was always there unfortunately so it was probably the main reason things didn’t work out and took so long to get going. The drink was always a problem.”

Ray Dawson wasn’t brought up through a direct horse racing background. Indeed his upbringing was standard enough, growing up in a housing estate in Celbridge, Co Kildare. His mother had an interest in the sport but it was uncle, well known owner and former bookmaker Luke McMahon, that provided a gateway into racing.

Attending the big festivals, he always looked up to the likes of Mick Kinane, Johnny Murtagh and Kieren Fallon.

He had his own pony, on which he learned to ride, but his experience with thoroughbreds was down at David and Con Marnane’s yards in Bansha, Tipperary. Getting the train down every weekend, he used the ride yearlings for the latter, which was a fair experience at the age of 14. At 16 he signed on as an apprentice to Charles O’Brien, who lived just 10 minutes away in Straffan.

“It was a great place to work,” Dawson recalls now. “Charles is a gentleman and he actually put me up on some very nice horses and I rode some nice winners for him. I never really got going though. I never took off from the amount of rides I was getting. Charles was very good to me but it was never going to be a place that you’d stay forever.”

The scramble for rides is ferociously competitive for any apprentice in Ireland but Dawson admits now that he just wasn’t dedicated enough, treating a full-time job as if it was part time, giving 60 or 70% when he needed 100%.

In 2012, at 18, he received a two-year ban (with a 15-month suspended sentence) when testing positive for the drug MDMA at Naas racecourse. That was a major blow for his reputation at a crucial time in his career.

“I just didn’t know how to deal with that at the time,” Dawson recalls now. “At the time I thought it was okay but looking back now, it obviously wasn’t. I didn’t deal with it properly, I was just too young.

“I didn’t deal with anything really so it meant I didn’t improve my riding. If anything bad happened, if I gave a horse a bad ride or someone gave out to me, I turned to drink. If I felt bad, that was the painkiller and I’d wake up the next morning and wonder who that person was the previous evening.

“I went to Eddie Lynam’s, and I was riding out at Johnny Murtagh’s and Ger Lyons’ as well. They were all good people to work for and good yards to ride in as well but again I wasn’t dedicated to it. I was saying all the right things but I wasn’t doing all the right things.

“I didn’t take it seriously so those jobs didn’t last very long. Then I just stopped riding for a while.”

Ray Dawson in winning action at Leopardstown in 2013

Right there and then, Dawson’s career was done. His bridges with trainers in Ireland were all but burned. He didn’t have a ride for three years but one day he was watching Royal Ascot and it sparked a new bout of enthusiasm in him.

He texted his uncle to see if he could organise him a job in Britain and within an hour he had organised him to go over to David O’Meara’s. He left with no riding licence but he enjoyed riding out in a new environment and having moved on to Tim Easterby’s yard and then Mick Appleby’s, decided to take out his licence and go again.

Unfortunately, the initial problem of drinking hadn’t left, and indeed, this is where it came to a head for Dawson.

“It just got to a point where I’d kind of battled with it for so long,” he explains. “I was up and down, race riding and not race riding, going from thinking my life is getting better but then getting worse, a constant battle of trying to find a balance, trying to drink like a normal person.

“It’s two and a half years ago now that one night I was drinking and I blacked out and woke up the next morning in Ipswich prison and I hadn’t a clue what happened. I was told I crashed the car.

“I didn’t hurt anyone or hurt myself but just sitting in that prison cell, whatever it was, I just thought you know what, I can’t be doing this anymore. Something inside just clicked, and I thought this is it now, from now on I’m going to try and get help and I’m going to get sober and live a good life and I’m going to do my very best to do it this time.

“As mad as it sounds, I’m very grateful for that night, I’m grateful for crashing my car, I’m grateful for getting arrested and I’m grateful for spending a night in a cell because if that didn’t happen, I might never have got sober and I might not ever have had that click moment that I decided to turn things around. I count myself very lucky but that was the turning point really, May 4th 2019.”

Reached out

Dawson reached out to Paul Struthers of the Professional Jockeys Association and straight away things began to progress in the right direction. With the help of the Sporting Chance organisation, he began his journey up a road that had seemed daunting, sometimes unimaginable before. Centre to his motivation was both his mother and his now fiancée Abbie, “two incredibly strong women who never gave up” on him.

“The road back wasn’t tough. It wasn’t easy but it wasn’t tough,” he reflects. “As soon as I started talking to people it just felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders and I thought, this isn’t too bad.

“The people that I was surrounding myself with were very good about the situation. I actually enjoyed it (the process). I started to enjoy life again. I started to enjoy being sober and the recovery, and then obviously a lot of good things have happened since then.

“My mum never gave up on me, even when I felt like giving up. It was the same with Abbie. If it wasn’t for those two very strong women in my life I know for a fact I probably wouldn’t have tried to get sober.”

That Dawson is now happy in his own skin again and healthy living is a remarkable story in itself but his spike-like progress on the track has been astounding.

A move to Newmarket has taken his career to a completely different level. He rode 33 winners last season. That easily covers the tally of his entire career prior to that and this year he has 43 winners and counting. He rides for Roger Varian, Robert Cowell and T J Kent, for whom he struck up a key partnership with three-time winner Ataser last season, a horse he says was instrumental in his progress.

His big Group 2 win last week was coming not long after he rode out his claim, so at a crucial time in his career, he’s accelerating.

The arrival of his baby daughter Lila is another highly positive development off the track and now he has what seems a very healthy perspective to life and his career.

“That is the main motivation now, to make sure your family are happy and safe. My career would come second to them obviously so me staying sober is ensuring that my family are happy as well.

“Everything else follows after that but it would be a massive motivation to stay well and improve for them. It’s a big difference from when I was growing up, it was only me and obviously I lived with my mum and she was there but now there’s more people involved and it’s become more important.

“Things might not go my way but you come home and you see Lila and it just makes you look at life differently. She’s actually taught me a lot about life and what really matters. Abbie is a fantastic mum. Without her it would be impossible for me to go racing, she does all the grafting at home. I’m very lucky like that.

“I suppose when I’m riding winners and I come back home, I know that I’m more proud of myself because of my family, that I’ve succeeded for them.”

Dawson has come back from the brink to a space where he can now look forward with excitement and enthusiasm, in the shorter term with Zain Claudette, but more significantly he has a base set for the longer term as well.

He has been given plenty of chances in his life but now he has given himself a second chance, and grasped it with both hands, delivering on potential that was always there.

“I’m not ashamed to talk about the relationship I had with drink but it’s in the past now,” he says. “I don’t want it to be the main focus going forward. I’ve proven to people now that I’m not the kind of person any more.”