“I’ve been lucky enough in that I’ve been to the World Cup Final, the Rugby World Cup Final, tennis tournaments all over the world, NFL games, NBA games, every major sporting event you could think of and in my book, nothing, absolutely nothing touches Cheltenham. Not even close.”

Barry Maloney in The Irish Field, April 23rd

A FEW days after Minella Indo won the Cheltenham Gold Cup, the horse’s owner Barry Maloney was still in a state of disbelief.

A couple of phone calls helped him to make sense of the whole thing.

“The first was from J.P. (McManus),” he reveals. “It was very kind of him and he just reminded me of the many horses he’s had in training for the length of time he’s been in the game and that he had just one Gold Cup and at that point, just one Grand National.

“I’ve only been in racing a few years in comparison and I only have a handful of horses, so for this to happen so quickly, we feel extremely fortunate. It’s only when you listen to J.P. putting it in context, you actually realise how few people this happens to, so we’re incredibly privileged.

“The second call I got was from Michael O’Leary and he said congratulations but you know now you’ve won a Gold Cup there’s only one way you can go. So there was a stark reality of that message as well!”

McManus’s point hits home when you couple it with the Cheltenham Festival stats for Maloney. He’s had just nine runs at Cheltenham of which he’s had two wins, three seconds and two fourths. Minella Indo was just his second runner in a Gold Cup after Monalee had finished a close-up fourth the year before.

But perhaps such numbers shouldn’t be a surprise for a man whose highly successful business career has been made out of picking out the stars of tomorrow. His Balderton Capital firm is now one of the largest venture capital firms in Europe after a number of highly successful investments including in the burgeoning stages of Bebo, MySQL, Betfair and Revolut.

He says his business strategy is all about backing the right people. In Henry de Bromhead, he has backed the right person again, and the Waterford trainer has brought him to outrageous heights because winning the Gold Cup was simply a dream come true.

“I met Henry a long time ago,” Maloney recalls. “We got a syndicate together in college and rented a horse that was trained by his dad and then Henry. I always said then that if I ever had enough money to invest in racehorses, I’d like to work with Henry.

“I’d tried a few different models of buying horses and having them with a few trainers but as I figured out what I wanted to do, I had more and more discussions with Henry about what he wanted to do and there was this kind of connection I guess.

“I remember the first horse Henry recommended for me, which wasn’t a cheap horse, I think we paid about €80,000 for it but for one reason or another the horse didn’t work out. Henry came back to me and he said ‘Listen, I’m sorry, I made a mistake and I’m putting €10,000 into your training account because I got it wrong.’

“The minute he did that, as far as I was concerned, it was game over with regard to who I was going to work with because for a trainer to do that, in my experience, is off the charts, and it spoke to his honesty and his integrity.”

Conversations

Reflecting on de Bromhead’s success at Cheltenham in The Big Interview in The Irish Field last April, Maloney was fascinating when he spoke of the conversations he and the trainer had in the earlier days.

“It was a huge shock to Henry when he lost all the Potts horses,” Maloney explains when asked to elaborate on those discussions. “If you think back to that time, Henry’s stable was relatively small. Alan Potts had maybe 30% or 40% of the horses including Sizing John, so when he moved his horses, it was a body blow. In fairness to Gigginstown and Michael O’Leary, they then came to support him, but initially Henry had come fairly exposed.

“I remember having a chat with him at the time and the model for him going forward is to have a better balance of owners so he’s not over-reliant on any one owner.

“The way to do that was to have a reputation and a success record of winning the top graded races because frankly to go after a Gordon Elliott or a Willie Mullins in terms of number of horses in training and to try and beat them at that game is going to be very, very difficult. Instead, he put the focus on the quality of horses inside the infrastructure and I think you saw the benefits this year.

“Henry has always said that he doesn’t necessarily want to be the biggest in terms of the highest number of horses in training. He wants to focus on fewer horses of higher quality and I think that’s the niche that he has now carved out for himself and it’s one I believe he can own.

“He has changed the landscape of the trainer’s pecking order and I think this (Cheltenham last season) is a defining moment for him. I couldn’t be more happy for him.”

The Gold Cup win completed a sensational treble of feature race wins for de Bromhead but for Maloney, that single triumph was pure bliss. He has gone through the ringer with Minella Indo at Cheltenham - winning the Albert Bartlett with Rachael Blackmore at 50/1, the heartbreaking defeat in the RSA Chase a year later and then scooping the blue riband last season.

Even now, nearly one year on, he still can’t fully make heads or tails of it. It all stems from a year-on-year solidified passion for jumps racing. That passion was borne from his father and developed by the Cheltenham Festival, which from the quote at the top of this feature, is a sporting Mecca for Maloney.

“Dad was a policeman here in the guards and when Ireland joined the United Nations in 1958 they sent 12 guards out to what was then Palestine as the first Irish contribution to the UN peace mission,” he explains.

“So he went out there and then my parents got married and we lived out there in the Middle East with them until we were 11 and then we all came home to boarding school here in Ireland.

“Dad used to come home here on his holidays and whenever he did, he was always looking out for where he could go to a National Hunt meeting - he was mad about it. When he married my mother, their honeymoon was three racecourses on the west coast of Ireland. My mother used to tell the story of how she was in the pouring rain, peering out of an umbrella as he ran from bookie to bookie in Ballinrobe and Sligo!”

“That’s how we first became aware of jumps racing. My uncle Noel Lennon, my mother’s brother, he was mad into horses and greyhounds as well. I remember coming home from boarding school for the weekends and I’d stay with my grandparents and Noel would bring me up to Harold’s Cross on the back of his Honda 50!”

Pilgrimage

When Maloney talks of his horses and his yearly pilgrimage to Cheltenham, he always uses the word ‘we’, which accounts for his brothers Michael and Alan, good friends Eddie Gleeson, Rod O’Callaghan, John Molloy and his Uncle Noel.

His father was a part of the group until he passed away in 2016 but Uncle Noel still goes and he is just “one of the lads”.

Cheltenham is everything to them. It’s the buzz, the atmosphere, the sportsmanship, the collegiality, the emotions - high and low.

With that said, it’s Sod’s Law that when Minella Indo powered up the hill to Gold Cup glory last March, it was the one year Maloney and Co couldn’t possibly be there to see it.

Still, they made the best of the situation watching from home last season, or indeed watching from the Mount Falcon Hotel.

He explains: “With restrictions still in place we had no staff in the hotel so we tested ourselves beforehand, brought down a BBQ set and locked ourselves in for the week, creating our own little bubble. So on the mornings we’d do our business, then have a bit of lunch and then settle into the racing for each day.

“After racing we had a pool table there and my brother brought down a dartboard so we got that set up. Funnily enough, that’s what we do at Cheltenham every year anyway. So we had a great time and it all built up nicely to the climax of the week with Minella winning the Gold Cup.

“Nothing would have beat being there but this was probably the next best thing.”

Plan

Things clearly haven’t gone fully to plan for Minella Indo this season but Maloney is still very hopeful the horse can defend his title valiantly back at Cheltenham and bookmakers have been slow to write him off despite three defeats this season.

“Kempton just didn’t work out for whatever reason,” Maloney reflects. “We’ve just drawn a line through that - the track and test just didn’t suit him. To be pulled up, that wasn’t the real him but he was in good form since the race and he ran much better at Leopardstown.

“He has been back working well and we’ve just kicked on, all the time working back to the Gold Cup.

“I don’t know what it will be like to be there watching him. I get very nervous and wound up watching races. But to be honest, everything with him is a bonus now.

“I haven’t even dared to dream he could win it again but if it happens, it happens.” ?