ON the Tuesday of the Galway Races this year, 12 months on from one of his finest moments as a trainer, Ado McGuinness and Saltonstall were in the winners’ enclosure again after the Colm Quinn BMW Mile. But this time he and his jockey Gavin Ryan had company, because Njord, Tom Madden and Kate Harrington were there as well.

Happy scenes for Saltonstall's first win in the Colm Quinn BMW Mile at Galway last season \ Healy Racing

Ten minutes earlier the two horses and jockeys flashed by the post together. Saltonstall was the fast-finishing closer. He’d gotten an unbelieavable ride from Ryan and the pair had all the momentum in the finish but it was too close to call.

Ado’s assistant trainer and cousin Stephen Thorne watched it down by the rails and he thought they won it watching it live, but then he saw the photo and didn’t know. The part owners, the Dooley brothers, watched the race in a betting shop in Manchester and they didn’t know either. Ado didn’t know and in truth the longer it went on, the more they all would have taken a dead-heat.

The horses circled around for minutes that felt like hours, dialing up the tension further.

Then the result.

First, number eight.

Ecstasy.

“I was just thinking after, if there had been crowds that day, it would have been unbelievable. The tension was unreal. You’d have never forgotten that experience,” McGuinness says this week, reflecting back on his season.

“The race sponsor Colm Quinn told us that he’d never seen such scenes in the winners’ enclosure when we won the race last season. This time it was just a surreal atmosphere.

“The late and great Bart O’Sullivan led the horse in last season and I’d like to think he nudged Saltonstall that inch forward looking down. Bart died only last Christmas. He was an unbelievable help to our yard. He pushed us forward and linked us to new owners like the Dooley brothers which has allowed us to thrive. We owe him a great deal.”

Undoubtedly Bart would be proud of what McGuinness has achieved this year. Current Option, Bowerman, Saltonstall have been chief contributors to McGuinness closing in on the €600,000 mark for prize money for the second year running, and that total easily has him in the top 10 trainers in one of the most difficult racing jurisdictions in the world. At a time of great uncertainty, the man from north county Dublin is thriving.

Current Option and Ado's son Tadhg after a Group 3 win \ Healy Racing

It’s not bad for a guy who was brought up farming vegetables and who never worked in another yard all his life. McGuinness trains in the middle of a triangle of the towns Rush, Lusk and Skerries. You could be in Croke Park in less than 25 minutes and as the horses work out in the mornings, the Dublin to Belfast train shoots by.

“My father was a farmer but when I grew up I used to eat, drink and sleep horses,” the trainer recalls. “My uncle, Larry ‘Gusty’ McGuinness was big into horses and he got me into it. Larry bred Greasepaint [twice a Grand National runner-up] and he was master of the Fingal Harriers hunt and that’s how I started.

“We always had horses here in the yard then. We had an equestrian centre for 15 or 16 years and it was quite successful. My sister did a lot of showjumping and we had horses and ponies jumping in the RDS, and going around Europe.

“A guy came in one day – his kids were riding ponies here but they had gotten too old for it – and he said I’m going to buy a racecourse, would you train it for me? And that’s how it started really.”

Funny how it worked out. McGuinness could be still happy operating an equestrian centre to this day had it not been for that request. He always loved racing and would watch Cheltenham every year but his love for any type of horse in general was just as strong. But as fate would have it, he won with the horse he was given in his first year training and there grew an addiction.

Jacks Estate was his first notable horse. He was bought to go hurdling but after a schooling session that was quickly put to bed. He went back sprinting and won five times, progressing to a mark of 103. After Jacks Estate, there was Victram, his half-brother who was bought for just €8,000.

Stretching their legs out - Ado's string cool down in the sea \ Healy Racing

Amazing

Victram was an amazing horse. He won an Imperial Cup at Sandown, an Irish Lincoln, a Lartigue Hurdle and an October Handicap. At around that point, the mid-noughties, McGuinness’s yard was up to about 35, but the recession soon followed and things stopped fairly quickly.

“I remember guys coming into me some days and saying, what in the name of Jesus are you doing?” McGuinness recalls. “It could be a Sunday or Saturday evening, it really makes no difference what day it is because nearly every day is the same in this game, you do the same work all the time, every day of the week and every single week of the year.

“It has been tough and it is very tough. I know some lads are struggling and I know what that’s like. I’ve struggled, I’ve been on my knees and you appreciate it a whole lot more when you come from there. I’ve never had anything handed to me. Anything I’ve got, I’ve worked hard for.

“Even thinking back to Victram, we won the main Saturday race in Britain with him and I never saw a horse out of it. In Ireland you have to go looking for horses, rarely do people just send them to you. You have to go selling yourself with consistent results.

“The level of competition is phenomenal. Look at a 0-65 handicap at Dundalk on a Friday night, there’s 14 runners and nine or 10 of the owners/trainers in the ring that night fancy their horse.

The McGuinness team on Rush beach \ INPHO/Morgan Treacy

“This is a cut-throat game. Right, we had a winner last night but I’m already thinking, where is the next winner? That’s the way it has to be. It’s not about what you’ve done last week but what you’re going to do next week.

“I’m very lucky that I’ve had good horses the last few years and it’s been a huge help. We’ve won plenty of big races down through the years but I’ve only come across maybe one good horse every couple of years. Now I firmly believe that I have nine or 10 very good horses in the yard. We’re very lucky at this time that we’re able to source all these horses and owners.”

Instrumental

Bart O’Sullivan put a backbone to McGuinness’s business in recent years and Stephen Thorne has been instrumental in taking an initiative to drive the yard forward. The 30-year-old is a cousin of McGuinness and lived just a mile and a half away from him growing up. He went to college to study Equine Business in NUI Maynooth, before travelling to Australia, earning a place on the Darley Flying Start before working for Mike de Kock and then as assistant trainer to Ralph Beckett.

He came home and set up Shamrock Thoroughbreds, an equity share model syndicate, and to operate as an assistant to McGuinness. Both instances have been hugely successful, stimulated by a shrewd and gutsy approach to buying at the horses-in-training sales.

“We go down through the catalogues in depth and a huge amount of work goes into it,” McGuinness explains. “Stephen is a great man for picking out horses. We try and buy what we can afford but we’re lucky now that we’re in a position where what we can afford has gone up and that has been a huge asset to the yard.

“There’s certain trainers we don’t buy off because it’ll just be very hard to try and improve or just maintain the level of form of the horses coming from those trainers. We have to cull it down, you have your list and then you look at your animal, make sure he’s sound, get him vetted. But a lot of these horses have problems, you have to weigh them up – the pros and the cons.

“We were the underbidders on Bowerman last year at the sales and the people who bought him found out he bled and they threw him back. Tatts rang us and asked us would we take him and we decided we would. That’s how lucky we were with that horse but we knew if he didn’t bleed, we would never be able to afford him because he was a very high class horse.

“That’s the gamble you take and of course it doesn’t always work out. But it’s risk and reward. When you’re buying a horse whose price is a little bit more expensive you’ve a better chance of buying a nicer horse.”

Buying horses with known flaws could be seen as high stakes gambling but it’s not a coincidence that plenty of these gambles have paid off, given the environment they’re moving into at McGuinness’s yard, which is just 10 minutes away from South Beach in Lusk.

“I’m blessed that I have the beach there for these types of horses,” the trainer says. “Especially the day before or after a race, if you want to give them a nice relaxing day, the sea water is brilliant for the horses and I’m very lucky that I have that.

“Like this morning we just did 10 minutes walking the horses in the water, we don’t gallop them on the beach or anything like that, it’s just basically an easy day away from the hard training.

“Saltonstall is a good example. He was probably the first expensive type horse we bought. He cost €44,000 but we wouldn’t have been able to get him so cheaply if he didn’t have the problems he did have, he bled when he was with Michael Halford and he still does.

“But I think we have a great system for him here. We put him in a converted cow barn, nice and open with plenty of clean air from the sea and he’s really enjoying his life. I think that has been key to him.”

Saltonstall winning the Listed Glencairn Stakes in the colours of the late Bart O'Sullivan \ carolinenorris.ie

Like many trainers, McGuinness has migrated most of his stock to the flat, which he sees as a far more commercially viable project.

“I’d be a divil for going on to the internet and counting up what the good horses cost for other trainers,” he says. “I counted up Gordon Elliott’s there the other week at Down Royal and one day alone, if you totalled the cost of the horses that he won with, it wasn’t 100s of thousands, it was millions.

“With the budget we have, we’re far better off going to the horses-in-training sales on the flat and trying to get some young stock. I’d love to get more two-year-olds. We’ve had plenty of success with the ones we’ve had. I trained Beau Recall. She won a maiden for me and we sold her to America and she’s won $1.5 million dollars.

Next season

Off the back of his finest season, McGuinness and Thorne were busy at the sales and Skylark House is set to be full with 60 horses for next season.

In fact, one of the horses bought for next season, Harry’s Bar, has won a listed race already in Dundalk, just eight days after joining McGuinness following a private deal struck by Thorne after the horse was led around unsold at Newmarket. The future is very bright but with that comes further investment in facilities and staff. McGuinness is in a peculiar geographical location for a racehorse trainer and says one of his biggest problems is finding accommodation for staff.

“It’s a big problem for me,” McGuinness admits. “We’ve a lot to invest into in the coming months and I’m looking to go for planning permission to get in accommodation where the gallop field is but it’s not a simple process at all.

“Come January and February, we’re going to need to take on two or three more staff. A three-bed house in the town here, you’d be looking at €1,800-2,000 a month which is way too expensive at the moment. You could be down in Tipperary and get the same house for €800 a month.

“We were lucky during the lockdown that my kids, Aisling and Tadhg (twins), were a great help in the yard. Zoe Boardman is a local girl here in Lusk and she does a great job. We’ve great staff in general and I’m very grateful for them.

“My wife Hazel does all the accounts and bills every month. She was working up until a couple of years ago – she was in the medical profession for a long time and she worked hard while things weren’t going great here.

“I was probably lucky that she was working because we started off good and then all of a sudden the recession hit in 2007/8 and it was a very tough year and we were back down to eight or nine horses. I probably would never want to see it again but that can happen in this game. You can fall very quickly. It’s all a matter of keeping your foot on the pedal all the time.

“We’re always looking to upgrade ourselves. There is never going to be a day where you close the gate and say you have it all done and that’s it. We’ve recently put a weighing scale in, we’re going to need a second walker soon and we’re looking at building a second barn. You’ll always be spending money in this game, that’s for sure.”

This trainer-by-chance admits that it may have taken him 20 years to be an overnight success but he’s not about to let go of his position anytime soon. Two Group 3 wins, three listed and three premier handicaps have set the bar and McGuinness is four winners away from bettering his career best total of 34 winners last season. He has a good team for Dundalk to do it.

Despite his wishes, 2020 will come to an end, but the prospects for 2021 are very bright indeed.