THE racing community turned out in large numbers for the funeral Mass of Edward O’Grady on Friday. Champion trainer four times and forever associated with success at the Cheltenham Festival, O’Grady passed away last weekend following a short illness. He was in his 76th year and had been going racing and training winners up to very recently.

During Friday’s service Jonathan O’Grady told the congregation that his father had been diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer as far back as 2017, prior to the death of his wife, Maria.

However, the trainer managed his condition very effectively for years until the cancer spread to his colon recently.

In his eulogy, Jonathan O’Grady spoke about his father’s resourcefulness, his dedication to his family, staff, friends, and of course his horses.

“The O’Grady family motto is Vulneratus non victus, wounded, not conquered. And, goodness, Edward was wounded many times, but he never let it conquer him. Sometimes, I wonder how he kept going always but the truth is he never looked backwards.

“For Edward, it was always about the next horse, the next race, the next winner. And isn’t that what horse racing is all about, hope over experience.

“One friend said to me recently, when Edward was training in the 70s and 80s, there wasn’t a whole lot of hope in Ireland. Work was scarce. Emigration was high. People had very little to look forward to. He brought Ireland back into the winner’s enclosure in Cheltenham, and in doing so, he lit a fire in a whole new generation of potential owners, and I’d like to think the rest is history.

“Edward, for all his greatness, was far from perfect, but he had enormous capacity for life. He loved his family, he was fiercely loyal to his friends, and he was a master horseman more than anything. He pulled us all out of the mundane drudgery of day-to-day, and showed us how to live a fuller life. “Tally ho, my friend. Kick on, regardless.”

Earlier O’Grady’s wife Kay quoted Rudyard Kipling to describe her husband’s resilience and virtues.

His passing was announced on Monday morning in a statement issued by his family through Horse Racing Ireland. “Over the course of an extraordinary career that spanned more than five decades, Edward trained just shy of 1,700 winners under rules. His name became synonymous with Irish National Hunt racing, and he was a formidable force at Cheltenham and across the racing world.

“Beyond the winners and the headlines, Edward was a man of deep intelligence, sharp wit, and remarkable warmth. He had friends on every continent, a story for every occasion, and a lifelong passion for the sport, the hunting field and everything equestrian.”

Jockeys riding at Galway on Monday wore black armbands as a mark of respect and a minute’s silence was observed before racing.

Started young

One of Ireland’s greatest National Hunt trainers, O’Grady is best known in racing for his success at the Cheltenham Festival in the 1980s and ‘90s, where he had 18 winners, many of them owned by J.P. McManus.

Based in Ballynonty, near Thurles in Co Tipperary, he began training at 23 years of age in 1972, taking over from his late father, Willie, who had been a champion jockey in the 1930s.

“I was married on the 3rd of January and then my father passed away on the 13th of January. I sort of went from being a student with a £300 student overdraft to being married, with a widowed mother and a host of employees, all in a blink of an eye. It was a bit of a shock to the system,” O’Grady told The Irish Field in a recent interview.

Despite a sickness in the yard which wiped out virtually all of his horses, O’Grady quickly established himself as one of the country’s top trainers, enjoying notable big race success.

In March 1974 he had his first Cheltenham Festival winner when Mouse Morris rode Mr Midland to victory in the National Hunt Chase.

The following August, Gay Future, a horse prepared by O’Grady, was involved in an attempted coup by an Irish betting syndicate. O’Grady was one of four people arrested during the police investigation but the charges against him were dropped. The affair was depicted in the 1980 film Murphy’s Stroke,with Pierce Brosnan playing O’Grady. The trainer rarely, if ever, spoke about the controversy even though it sealed his iconic status among racing fans.

Golden Cygnet

He soon became established as the leading National Hunt trainer in Ireland. He regarded Golden Cygnet to be the best horse he ever trained. Golden Cygnet won the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle in 1978 by a wide margin but died following a fall at Ayr a month later.

“In those days, 99% of the Cheltenham crowd were racing aficionados and they were just in awe of what they’d seen,” O’Grady said. “It was breathtaking. I’m biased but he was probably one of the greatest hurdlers of all time. To lose him in the Scottish Champion Hurdle that same season was just tragic really. He had two of the best hurdlers of all time in Sea Pigeon and Night Nurse, cooked stone cold before he fell at the last. It was a tragedy for the owners and everyone in the yard that he could never reach his potential.”

The same year O’Grady won the Galway Plate with Shining Flame and in 1979 he completed the Plate-Hurdle double with Hind Hope and Hard Tarquin respectively. Rugged Lucy won a third Plate for the trainer in 1981.

He trained Mister Donovan to win the Sun Alliance Hurdle at Cheltenham in 1982 for J.P. McManus, a result which McManus still describes as being critical to his surivival in the game.

Drumlargan won the 1983 Whitbread Gold Cup, which O’Grady described as “the most memorable win of my career”. In the same year, Bit Of A Skite proved victorious in the Irish Grand National.

Around this time O’Grady switched his attentions to flat racing and it ruled him out of winning big jumps races for approximately 10 years.

Back on top

He returned to the limelight in the mid-1990s when Mucklemeg (Champion Bumper) and Time For A Run (Coral Cup) completed a daring Cheltenham Festival double in 1994. Sound Man won two successive Tingle Creek Chases (1995 and 1996) and Blitzkrieg had earlier captured the Victor Chandler Chase in 1991.

Sacundai, with Ruby Walsh aboard, captured the Martell Cognac Aintree Hurdle in 2003. In the same year, Back In Front won the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle at Cheltenham and the Evening Herald Novice Hurdle at Punchestown.

Pizarro amd Sky’s The Limit were both Cheltenham Festival winners and multiple Grade 1 winners for him around the same period.

More recent success came in 2009, when Tranquil Sea ridden by Andrew McNamara became the first Irish-trained horse since Bright Highway in 1980 to win the Paddy Power Gld Cup at Cheltenham. He continued having a steady stream of winners every season right up to this month, his final winner, Our Soldier, coming at Bellewstown on July 5th.

O’Grady’s first wife Judy [Sweeney] died in 2010. His second wife, Maria Anderton, whom he married in 1999, was fatally injured in a fall while out hunting with the Tipperary Foxhounds in November 2017.

He is surivived by his third wife, Kay Russell, children Jonathan, Amber, Lucy, Mimi and Rosie Mae, and six grandchildren.

His family has requested that, in lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Cancer Trials Ireland (cancertrials.ie) and asks that sympathisers consider becoming blood donors.

Tributes

“No doubt, he was an amazing trainer. I went to him in 1978. I had one horse before him, Cill Dara, and the second horse I owned was Jack Of Trumps - he did a great job with him. I remember he won at Punchestown as a five-year-old carrying 12 stone in the Jameson Gold Cup, it was a handicap then. We went on to win the Galway Plate the same year [with Shining Flame], which seems a long time ago now.

“Edward was something special. The one thing that I’ll have to say about him is that he was always very good to his staff and very kind to everybody.

“When Edward fancied a horse and he gave you the office, you didn’t need to have money, all you needed to have was credit because they nearly always delivered. His record was second to none at the time.

“After Fairyhouse in April, following the National when they used to bring some of their future bumper horses and four-year-olds there, he’d say ‘we’ve found one for Christmas’. And true to his word, Christmas is when he’d next appear.

“He’ll be missed, he was a great judge of a horse and looked after everyone who worked for him so well.” – J.P. McManus.

“Edward was always the trainer to follow going to Cheltenham when the Irish were having very few winners. He always had some fantastic horses and he had the connection with Galway too through Golden Cygnet, owned by the Rooneys. He was a trainer who we all followed. Edward was always good for a bit of fun too, like a lot of trainers. He was a very nice man, a big loss.” – Willie Mullins.

“He was a remarkable man who trained some amazing horses. When you think of the likes of Golden Cygnet, you realise Edward was way ahead of his time. I have worked with a lot of trainers over the years and you watch what they do. Nowadays horses seem to be fitter but way back then everyone’s horses needed a run. His didn’t – they were ready.

“On big days there was no panic. He just landed them in there and they were either fancied or they weren’t. Nothing was ever left to chance.

“We had some great times together. Boots Madden, Charlie Swan and Richard Dunwoody came before me, and Barry Geraghty came after me.

“I remember Back In Front had a hold-up 10 days before the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle [in 2003]. He missed a work morning at Tipperary but Edward never said a word. I asked where the horse was and he just said ‘I’ll be in touch’. He called me later to say ‘See you in Tipperary in the morning’ and we did a hard piece of work. Most people wouldn’t risk it that close to the Festival. When we got to Cheltenham he just said to me ‘Best of luck, you know what you’re doing.’ It was a steering job.

“That’s what he was like. He knew what he had all the time. There was no point in you telling him it was a good horse or it wasn’t - he already knew it.

“We never had a cross word about race-riding. We became very good friends and we did a lot of hunting together. I offer my sympathies to his family.” – Norman Williamson.

A selection of his best racehorses: