IT doesn’t matter where you’re based. If someone likes the way you ride, the way you produce young horses, they’re going to send you the horse,” said Olive Clarke, who, like Cathal Daniels, is another Tynagh Pony Club graduate to have carved out their own niche in the horse world.

“I suppose for Cathal he’s doing a lot of international travel. His horses are older, he has Rua and Sammy, he needs to be closer to the ports,” she remarked on the brilliant young event rider’s decision to relocate to Kildare. “If I had an event horse, I’d be sending it to Cathal. He’s gifted and just the nicest young guy.

“We set up a different game plan. We were going to produce quality young horses and Ireland is the top place to do that. We’ve horses from all over the country, from all over the world, so for us it doesn’t really matter where you’re located.”

‘We’ is Olive, partner Dave Scally and her indispensable back-up team of parents Gerry and Jane. She’s had her share of international travel and proudly displaying the tricolour on her jacket and saddlecloth, however for the articulate Clarke, producing young horses at their Four Seasons Stables is very much her business plan now.

As a youngster, competing on three Nations Cup teams could only be the stuff of daydreams for a young Clarke whose first pony was Blackie. “He came out of Ballinasloe Fair and was just a demon, great rodeo bull potential. How I stayed riding ponies after him... I got more falls and buried off him so many times, the black eyes and split lips. I don’t know what possessed me to keep getting back up. He got swiftly replaced!

“Dad always had a few hunters around the place and a few of my sisters just did a bit of hunting, Pony Club and hunter trials. There was always a horse knocking around the place. I started in Pony Club and was just playing around with the ponies, then you just got the bug.

“I got to recycle old Grade As that were stoppers, never really had a top, top-class pony at that stage. We kind of made the ponies and then sold them on.”

There was one experienced schoolmaster in Milchem Dynamite. “And she was! She was a little firecracker that came from Ralph and when I was out of 12.2s, she ended up with Darragh Kenny, so it’s a small world!” recalled Clarke, yet another of the western-based riders coached by Ralph Conroy.

“He’s had a hand in everybody’s career at some stage. When I started off in Tynagh Pony Club, Elaine Murphy was great with the kids starting off, she would really encourage you and then I got into Ralph’s group when I got older. Then later, when I was getting serious about show jumping, we knew we needed somebody to help us and Ralph is the man for that.

“Maybe it was his American background but he is such a stylist and everything has to be perfect. You never went to his yard with shavings still in your pony’s tail and then his standards of turnout just became yours.”

HORSES OR BOOKS

The pony that made Olive’s name at European level was Island Greengrass. “We had sold my 13.2 pony to Richie Kerins so that money went towards buying a 14.2. We bought him from Michael Purtill in Clare and that pony actually went to the European championships. He jumped double clear for the team, won a team silver medal out there and then he was sold straightaway to Italy.

“I met Michael again at a show last year and funny enough, he knew me right away and we were talking about the pony. He was a four-year-old when we bought him and we went to the Europeans when he as a seven-year-old. That was 1999, 20 years ago. Time flies! The championships were held in Sweden that year and that was my first time going abroad to a show.”

After Leaving Cert came the career crossroads. “Show jumping was a lovely hobby to have and my parents encouraged me every which way they could, bringing me up and down the country. After I finished school, I went to college. I didn’t really know what to do at the time so I was trying to cover all bases.”

However, horses won out over an Arts degree. “And then I was so, so lucky to get two horses, Hands Free and Spitfield.

“Johnny Melia gave me my first horse. The story was that he bought Spitfield out of Smithfield Horse Fair for £1,000. He was an unbelievable horse, stone cracked mad, his whole life he was nuts but we did Dublin, the Hickstead Derby twice and three Nations Cups at Poznan, Ypaja and Drammen. It was just a privilege and the fairytale story to have him.

“Johnny could have sold him a million times over but he got huge enjoyment from the horse.”

Olive Clarke and Spitfield. Photo Laurence Dunne

Not only did the horse’s intended name of Smithfield get mangled in the naming process but his pedigree is a mystery. “Not a clue, nobody knew! He came with a blue book and was supposed to be by Cavalier. Marion Hughes saw him at a show and didn’t think he was a Cavalier, so who knows.”

Hands Free, the three-star ex-eventer was the other horse to bring her to the big time. “My uncle Dermot Clarke bought him, I kind of blackmailed him into buying him!” she said, laughing. “That was his first venture into horses.

“He was by Carrolls Flight, 15.3hh, tiny. A stocky, butty little cob with a white face but you’d think he was 17 hands, he had such presence. He was a superstar. I was so lucky to get him at the start of my career, we went to the European young riders championships, he won me my first ever Premier Grand Prix and then he became hot property and the Army bought him.

“He was very opinionated but Shane Carey got on like a house on fire with him and Hands Free became one of the best speed horses. It broke my heart to sell him but at the same time it made sense. My uncle was a business man and I wasn’t in a position to travel with two horses, not with a yard of young horses so it made sense to sell him.”

Olive Clarke with the brilliant Hands Free

TECH SAVVY

Another horse associated with Olive is Mark Q. “Richard and Deirdre Bourns owned him and sent him over to produce. He won the six/seven-year-old final in Cavan and then he went to Kevin Babington. He was just a really nervous horse, there was no badness in him and he had masses of talent, unbelievable talent. He was just super-sensitive and it was a matter of getting inside his head. He was the little horse that could.

“Putting a rug over him at a show was a disaster and I fell off the back of him once at Hickstead. I was pulling up the zipper on my jacket and as soon as he heard a zip, he was gone, back to the stables!”

Scrolling through Clarke’s SJI results shows a list of dozens more young horses produced by her since. “We’re good at producing young horses. It’s always easy to sell a good horse, there’s always a market for a good horse. We’re lucky that we’ve sold a lot of good horses over the last couple of years, that’s what our business is now; we’ve started to concentrate on producing quality youngsters to seven, eight years old.

“People will come to us and say ‘I’m looking for XYZ, what have you got?’ Owners put their horses into our yard to be produced and sold. It’s such an expensive game and owners often need unlimited funds. I kind of tend to encourage them to sell, sometimes horses are accidents waiting to happen. I’d be sorry to see horses go, you’d love to hold on to them but you completely understand when people make the decision to sell.”

Disco Z, by Darco, was another export produced by her. “He went to Samantha McIntosh and landed on his feet. I love to see horses going on and doing what we believed they could do. Madam Butterfly went to Enda Carroll in Ashford Farm, she was a real winner and recently we sold a seven-year-old to Jennifer Gates.”

How did that sale happen? “Lykke was sent into me to be sold. We just took a video of her, a really simple video but she was going beautifully and we popped it up on the Facebook page and our phone never stopped ringing, the owner’s phone never stopped ringing. It just shows the reach of social media, it’s a small world now, everything is connected, it’s not like America is that far away anymore.

“Social media, it’s a huge factor now but it can be a double edged sword,” continued Olive. “You don’t have to be a whizz kid, you just need to be a little bit savvy. You can take a video of a horse and WhatsApp it to the owner within 10 minutes of coming out of the ring.

“It just makes things so transparent. What we do is take videos of horses, how they’re going, how do they go on a grass ring, we couldn’t sell horses without videos and social media.”

On the subject of surfaces, Clarke is vocal on the need for a new indoor venue for the west, saying: “We’re badly stuck for a new indoor show in the west of Ireland, we’re sorely lacking that facility.

There’s so much talent in the west of Ireland, Damien [Griffin], Cathal [Daniels], Jessica [Burke], Shane [Goggins], all the Mayo crowd, we’re badly stuck for a new indoor centre. They have the Emerald in the east, that’s a fantastic facility.”

SAME PAGE

Would it justify anyone investing in such a facility? “There’s nothing in the west. Myself and Damien would regularly go to the Emerald at the weekends to school horses and shows, you warm up indoors, you jump indoors.

“If you want to educate your horses, take videos of them, you can’t do it outdoors in the rain. If there was a similar venue in the west, it could be open from September to March with people hiring it and the same in other parts of the country. This craic of shows shutting down from October to March should be gone.

“The Premier League, I think there was six shows in the space of five weeks. One, the riders don’t have enough horses to do all those dates and two, were the venues good enough? If I had a Premier League horse, I’d be looking at the venues and saying ‘I’m not going there, I’m not going to jump him there either.’ I’d be ringing my owners up, the horse is worth X amount of money, I’m not going to run the risk of bringing him there and jumping a big, big track there.

“Dublin is a class show, it’s an achievement to get any horse there but they need to look at their dates and spread them out. Everything seems to be crammed in to get it done before Dublin, Dublin happens the first week of August and the final Horse Board class might be on the last week of August. Is anyone looking at these schedules?” Clarke asked.

“We don’t really set our hearts on going to Dublin, it’s lovely to go but it can be a stressful week on them. Twenty-four four-year-olds qualified last year, we had two of them in it, we qualified five for Dublin last year, that’s a quarter of our yard which is a nice thing to put in your resume.

“It’s very, very competitive up there, it’s the best of the best and you want to go up there with a horse that will hold its own and you’re not going home thinking ‘We’ve done more damage than good by bringing that horse there.’”

Another competitive area now is show jumping breeding and Clarke has utilised some of the best performance bloodlines.

“There’s so much selection now. You can pick up the phone to any stud in Europe and say send over straws and it’s done. It’s not like in the older days when it was a bit traditional to hop into your car and go and see the stallions, those days are gone.

“We have only three broodmares at the minute. Paradise G, my good Grand Prix mare is finished but we’ve an Orlando mare. She was going to be another Grand Prix mare but got injured so she bred the Plot Blue and a four-year-old by Cardento.”

That Plot Blue colt was shown in the Horse Sport Ireland foal championships. “It’s a good series. It’s a good incentive for breeders if they have nice foals. We’ve done it a couple of times. We did it the first year when a Cornet [Obolensky] filly out of Paradise G won the show jumping filly foal qualifier and was runner-up in the final. The following year, the Plot Blue colt won the overall section, he’s now a three-year-old.”

Olive winning the 2007 Cavan Indoor Derby with her top mare Paradise G. Photo Jim Prime

Any plans to enter him in three-year-old loose jumping qualifiers? “It’s not that we’re anti those classes but we just don’t do it. The Plot Blue is sold, he’s actually in America with really good friends of ours. Jill and Trevor Gaffney of Freestyling Farm, so he’s out there.

“They’re very good friends of ours, we’re in business together basically. They bought a lot of horses through us and from us. It started off when Trevor had a mare bought and he was moving out to the States, so he asked us to take her and do a bit. I knocked around with her for a year and then Carlton Cafe went to them. They jumped a million dollar Grand Prix and World Cup qualifiers on her, so that’s where that friendship began.

“We’ve been lucky for each other. Swift Action was a mare I rode for Norman Allen. She’ll be six this year and I rode the mare as a four-year-old, qualified her for Dublin and jumped double clears in some of the Horse Board classes. She’s just a super little mare.

“Jill and Trevor were over in November and they ended up buying her from us and three other horses. It’s really good to see her going on and we love to see horses that we sold being successful.

“It’s a long process with young horses and you have to be truthful with owners and tell them ‘Look, this one isn’t as good as we all think it’s going to be and maybe find a different road for them. Sometimes we think our duck is a swan, there’s no point telling lies about it either, everybody has to be on the same page and have the same goal.”

Olive Clarke and Swift Action. Photo Laurence Dunne/ jumpinaction.net

TEAM WORK

It’s a full house now at Four Seasons Stables in Duniry, near Loughrea. “The yard is full, we’ve 20 in at the moment. There’s myself and Scally and then my dad Gerry, we’d be lost without him. He’s there every day and my mother is a huge support too. My Dad is from Gurtymadden and Mum is from Portumna, it’s a really horsey area around here.”

What about ‘that’ moment she first met ‘Scally’?

“I knocked him down! I still say I swept him off his feet but I literally flattened him. I was out at the Europeans with my junior horse and he was working with Cian O’Connor. I was jumping an oxer in the warm-up and Cian shouted something, I turned my head and didn’t see Dave walking across in front of us and knocked him down. We’re together 18 years, he’s my right and left hand man and I’ve been longer with him than without him.

“We kind of considered buying somewhere else but we built our yard from scratch. When we bought the land, there was nothing on it but a field of furze basically. We kind of picked our location, to buy land in Kildare or anywhere like that would have been crazy.

“So we got pretty much bang for our buck at the time and the price factor was one reason we stayed here,” ended Clarke, another of the West’s success stories.