FLAGS flying around the GAA stronghold of Gort and its hinterland are not unusual. For the next seven weeks, sightings of Lone Star State and US flags are. The reason? Jessica Burke has qualified for the Longines FEI World Cup final in Fort Worth, Texas and her hometown is behind their local show jumping star.
“They’re delighted, they even gave me a shout-out at the Galway Blazers hunt ball last week! It was hilarious. Colm Farrell, a good friend, gave a speech while wearing a cowboy hat. They’re absolutely flying at home,” said Jessica, who won the Bordeaux World Cup qualifier recently with Good Star du Bary (Rock ’N Roll Semilly x Oberon du Moulin).
“I had so many messages and calls after Bordeaux. It was actually incredible, really, when you think of the amount of people that reached out to me. This week, it is definitely starting to sink in. Like I said in the interviews, I probably wasn’t expecting to win it, but it’s so good to get that win under your belt.”
Good Star du Bary, bred in Normandy by Marina Storgato and Christian Gonsolin [see Breeders’ 10] is the horse that delivered that breakthrough World Cup qualifier win and points that secured her place in this year’s final.
Would he rate as her current horse of a lifetime? “I’ve had some very good ones. Obviously, Good Star du Bary at the moment would certainly have to go in under that category, wouldn’t he?
“First five-star Grand Prix win, first World Cup final and the nice thing about him is he’s so easy to do everything with. He’s very, very consistent, very trustworthy, and you know what you’re going to get with him all the time, which is a great quality for a rider to have.
“Some horses are so much more complicated, you know, but he’s just fantastic. I feel like it’s actually only the start for him.
“I suppose it’s different stages in your life as well. I can’t just pick the one that won a five-star Grand Prix over the other one that hit all the other milestones.”
Such as the Liam Nicholas home-bred Express Trend (Future Trend x Condios).
“I’ve had ‘Trendy’ since he was three and he won a three and four-star Grand Prix for me and he won the Queens Cup in Hickstead as well. I suppose he’s probably the reason I left teaching.”
Leaving any permanent pensionable career can be a gamble, although with the first World Cup final now in sight and show jumping goals since achieved, was it the right choice for the former maths teacher to take that career break?
“Oh, my God, definitely! It’s unbelievable.”
Change of address
It’s all happening this year for Jessica, who is currently in France, preparing to leave for the Sunshine Tour next week. Followed by that move back home to Ireland.
“I’ll bring ‘Rocky’ [Good Star du Bary] to the Sunshine Tour. He probably won’t jump a whole lot down there, maybe some smaller classes, and there’s five other younger ones to go as well.
“I’ve asked to go to the Paris Hermes Show, so I’m kind of hoping to do that before the World Cup finals (April 7th-12th). Then I’m going to be based at Ballyward Equestrian, Brian McConville’s yard, in the North.
“I’m moving back to ride for them, and, obviously, I’m bringing my better horses with me. I have some of the Ballyward horses with me now at the moment, because we all go to the Sunshine Tour together.
“It’s all depending on the logistics around Texas. I’ll either move back to Ballyward after the Sunshine Tour, but it might be just after Texas, because that follows quite quickly after the Tour. Either way, we’ll be back in Ireland.”
Just before that historic Bordeaux win, Jessica left Arion Stud, her UK base since she took that teaching career-break plunge.
“Definitely the fact that I stayed away for six and a half years, even I’m surprised!” said the self-confessed homebird. “But that’s just testament to how much I enjoyed it there. Louisa [Church, Arion Stud’s owner] and everybody at Arion were very good to me and it was very hard to leave, actually.
“But I suppose it was nearly coming to a stage that it was now or never to live in England or Ireland, and I decided I wanted to live in Ireland. It was a lot more about location, and I’m very, very much looking forward to the opportunities that Ballyward will bring.”
Pony circuit apprenticeship
In the background of many Irish riders is an early start with ponies and Jessica Burke has her own multiple picks for a pony of a lifetime title. “I’ve had some very good ponies. I had a very good 12.2 and 13.2 around the same time. Ballynoe Chester was meant to be a racing pony, but he fell into my hands, and he would have been my first 12.2 in show jumping.
“And for my last year in 12.2s, I was given Turbo Boy, who had done Dublin and had done everything,” she added about the famous dun schoolmaster.
“Then, I got this 13.2 pony, Drumloughra Pelly, who was actually a Kerry Bog Pony, and she again kind of fell into my hands because no one really wanted her. She was a machine to jump!
“I jumped her in the 13.2 team competitions at Cavan with Darragh Kenny and the late Benny Kuehnle, so she was amazing. I think I was 10 and the lads were 14 at the time I was on the team.
“I had a very, very good pony career, to be fair and won a lot of classes all over.”
She also notched up four years at the European pony championships, with ponies such as Claremount Sam, then Bean Alaining the first and the very last year and Sillogue Darkie (Ard Talisman) in the middle, winning a team bronze medal in 2007 with Eamon Briscoe’s famous Connemara.
“So, yeah, I was blessed with the ponies that we managed to stumble across ourselves and then people actually gave me the ride on some very good ponies.”
For an island with a population of seven million, Ireland has produced an extraordinary number of international show jumping riders per head of population. Does that background on the competitive pony circuit, an advantage some other countries lack, shape a lot of these riders’ careers?
“A lot of us would have come up having to work hard, having to fight and to probably ride a lot of different ponies. Darragh Kenny would have grown up close enough to us, and he would have been in Ralph Conroy’s yard in Tynagh, where a lot of us grew up.
“Darragh too would have ridden different ponies, as would Richard Howley, one of my best friends. So a lot of us have experience with different types of ponies, which is an advantage. If you’re going to work hard and have a little bit of talent, I think you’ll be able to finetune the rest then and hopefully get the lucky breaks.”
World Cup campaign
Those lucky breaks then result in having horse of a lifetime candidates like Express Trend and Good Star Du Bary, the French-bred, which guaranteed the Gort rider’s qualification for Fort Worth.
“I’ve had other ones in between and I’m sure I’ll have more. I also had a very good mare Nikey HH (Herald Van’t Ruytershof x Upsilon van de Heffinck).
“She jumped the Grand Prix in Dublin. Again, another first. I got my first five-star Nations Cup as well, she was clear in Abu Dhabi. So, look, I’ve definitely had three and hopefully others in the future, but I just think Express Trend will always be very special to me.
“He took me from knowing nothing to having to learn an awful lot. Then, Good Star du Bary, or Rocky as we call him, finished that with a five-star Grand Prix win, probably sooner than maybe I expected he would. And now we’re going to Texas.”
The 2026 World Cup final, which will be held in Fort Worth, was the quiet goal for their winter campaign.
At the Longines CHI Classics Basel in early January, where the Irish pair had an unlucky fence down, Jessica was hopeful about qualifying, having already picked up points at earlier qualifiers such as Oslo last October, followed by Stuttgart, Mechelen and Verona, then those valuable six points from Basel.
It all came together at Bordeaux, where Jessica was the first lady rider to win the World Cup qualifier at the French show.
Watching ringside was Clareman Liam Nicholas, who had also bought Nikey HH for Jessica to compete when she moved to Arion Stud.
“It was an incredible weekend at Bordeaux. It was Liam’s 60th birthday and all his siblings were there. They had a table for the World Cup. It’s not something we do very often, but it was a kind of a once in a lifetime occasion that they were all actually there together. You couldn’t write that side of it, how Rocky then won the World Cup qualifier with everyone there to see.
“Look, Liam has been a massive supporter of me before I went to Arion Stud all the way through and now his horses come with me to Ballyward as well. He has bred young horses and, every time he sells one, he always reinvests again.
“It’s been a lucky partnership and long may it continue.”
“I have a horse”
Also watching on from the sidelines were two other key players in the Jessica Burke World Cup campaign: her mother Catherine and supergroom Aaliyah Phillips, who came as a 16-year-old to work for Jessica at home in Gort.
While Jessica’s dad Francis prefers to stay on their former dairy farm, where the family breed sport horses, thoroughbreds and Connemaras, Catherine occasionally travels to watch her daughter compete.
Where did she find her World Cup final horse?
“Ivan Dalton of Butler Court Stables. I’d already bought a horse from him the year before at the Sunshine Tour and that horse worked out very well. I’d often text him when we’re looking for another one, which we were at the time. He never even sent a video, he just said, ‘I have a horse that you’re going to love.’”
Jessica duly made the trip to Zandhoven in Belgium. “It was late when we travelled up, so it was getting dark. I rode this horse, jumped a few small jumps and we were going to go back to the airport.
“And then we said, ‘No, we’ll book in somewhere and stay the night’. I really thought he was probably the best horse I sat on that day. So I stayed over and we tried him again the next morning. That was an easy day for Ivan anyway, because I was having the horse and that was it!”
It was a similar situation to when a puzzled Dianna Babington picked up Carling King, another horse in this series, at the quarantine stables and rang husband Kevin to enquire if the ‘Draught with the furry feet’ really was the star young jumper imported from Ireland.
Despite Aaliyah’s surprise at the diminutive new arrival’s height, it wasn’t a concern for Rocky’s rider.
“Although when I got back [home], I was like, ‘God, he is actually really small!’ But when you ride him, you don’t think that. And to be fair, he’s quite broad and strong, and he’s really strengthened up a lot since that day. He does everything in the way he believes and, to him, he’s not small in any way.
Leap of faith
“He was bought at the end of his six-year-old year and then, as a seven-year-old, he didn’t do a whole lot actually. We produced him slowly; he was quite green for the first half of the year, but the mentality was so good.
“Once we got him up and going, he went to Arezzo and he did shows in England that summer: Hickstead and Bolesworth.
“He jumped around the seven-year-old final in Lanaken in the autumn and he had one down. He just missed out on a medal there if he had jumped clear. And to be honest, since then he hasn’t really looked back.
“He was already jumping two-star Grand Prix, then 1.50m and, once he got that bit of mileage, he knew exactly what his job was.
“Hopefully we’ll go to Paris and then Texas with a lot of confidence, because even though he was having one down, he was really consistent and jumped those big classes very easily all through the winter circuit. I know I’m really looking forward to Texas.”
Cool as a Texan night breeze is Jessica Burke, who made the leap of faith from the classroom to qualifying for her first World Cup final with Good Star du Bary, shaping up to be another horse of a lifetime.
Did you know?
By the numbers
20 - World Cup points earned for Good Star du Bary’s Bordeaux win.
14th - Good Star du Bary’s place in the Lanaken seven-year-old final in 2023, won by Harry Allen and Kumina Della Caccia.
Seventh - Jessica’s current place in the Western European league, which guarantees her Fort Worth appearance.
Three - Express Trend and Good Star du Bary, plus the since-sold Nikey HH, were sent to Jessica by owner Liam Nicholas.
Two - Burke family members followed a horsey career: Jessica’s sister Olga is a vet.
One - first World Cup final place secured by the Gort former schoolteacher.