IT is easy to see why Jim Bolger is still training at 75, when he has neither monetary nor reputational cause for doing so.

It is right in the eyes, which are not so much doing a two-step as break dancing. It is in the body language, the face-splitting grin, the folded arms, the rapid-fire nodding of the head and the forward-and-back rocking motion.

This is almost childlike excitement. Pure, unadulterated glee.

Verbal Dexterity has been introduced to the conversation. A three and a half-length winner of the National Stakes, the colt is as definitive an advertisement of the Bolger business model as there has ever been.

Sire (Vocalised) and grandam (Luminous One) were trained by Bolger and owned by his wife Jackie, while ridden to victory by their son-in-law Kevin Manning. The same applied to the dam Lonrach, but she is a homebred, as is Verbal Dexterity, of course.

This is why he is still doing it. To breed and train what he thinks could be the European champion two-year-old and do it in the most competitive era ever against heavy hitters with the type of financial clout he could never dream of. To belittle the odds against someone doing that and do it again.

He has just returned from presenting a cheque as a result of the Hurling For Cancer phenomenon that has raised more than €700,000 since he launched it with Davy Russell six years ago. If he did nothing else in his life, that would be plenty to be proud of.

His philanthropy extends far beyond the incredible Hurling For Cancer success. He is a passionate supporter of the GAA, his county Wexford and his local clubs around Carlow and Kilkenny.

He is fiercely proud of being Irish. He is loyal. Des McDonogh and Brendan Duke have training operations thanks to his patronage; he has gone to bat for struggling trainers against the crippling hike in commercial rates and continues to support his first love of show jumping by keeping a few Irish Sport Horse broodmares.

His sense of humour has always been underestimated, or downplayed, while a picture was painted over the years of a serious man who brooked no tomfoolery. The thing is that some of the best lines are delivered in a way that you can be unsure whether he is being serious or having some fun at your expense.

“I mustn’t have been doing very much that it took two years to come back to me,” he delivers with a sideways glance in my direction as we walk from our meeting point.

And we’re off.

****

THE season started slowly but once the ground dried normal service resumed.

“It was going very well up to (Irish Champions Weekend) at Leopardstown. Theobald didn’t run well but he’s bounced back now again.”

As a juvenile, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if he didn’t anyway, you venture.

“No, sure I have the other fella,” comes the instant response. “The other fella” won his maiden in scintillating fashion by nine and a half lengths on soft ground at HQ over seven furlongs before going down by a length to Beckford in the six-furlong Railway Stakes. The trip, rather than the good ground was the issue according to the trainer.

“He learned a lot from (the defeat). It wasn’t lost on him. Obviously I would have liked to have had him unbeaten but it wasn’t to be. He’s the highest-rated two-year-old in the world at the moment.”

He pauses for dramatic effect.

“Out of 75,000.”

The smile is now at maximum lumens, ear to ear.

“He’s top-drawer. He was always showing a bit, you know? And he’s a marvellous temperament. Very laidback. I don’t know if you saw it on telly after the Curragh. He’d 50 people around him and he just stood there. Not many of them do that.

“He’ll go on any ground. He goes through the soft very well but he’ll be quicker on quicker ground. He’s such a good looker as well. You couldn’t pick a fault in him.”

It is all systems go for the Dewhurst Stakes, a race Bolger has won five times in the last 11 renewals.

Unsurprisingly, the son of Vocalised has attracted “big interest” but there is one vital condition to any deal. “He’ll have to stay with me anyway.”

For the business to remain viable, producing one like Verbal Dexterity every few years is a necessity. But the joy of it all is the prevailing emotion.

“You need one like him in your lifetime. I didn’t train a better colt than he is anyway. He’d be very much now where Dawn Approach was at this time. He’s right up there with Teofilo and New Approach as well.”

His sire had produced countless winners, including the Group 3 victor Steip Amach, while the Duke-trained Warm The Voice is another exciting son. Does the Redmonstown Stud boss expect increased commercial interest now that Verbal Dexterity has put Vocalised front and centre?

“Not giving you a short answer now or anything, but I don’t really care because we have plenty of mares to send to him anyway. We’re gonna get payback now. I don’t want to go into the stud business myself.”

Because it is about producing racehorses to train, yours truly begins to say.

“Well,” he interrupts, with perfect timing, “I wouldn’t want John Magnier having sleepless nights.”

He continues in more serious vein. “That’s been a long wait now and he didn’t come cheap. I think it was US$550,000 we gave for him and we had to wait until now… Well, he was a good three-year-old. He won the Tetrarch Stakes and a Guineas Trial at Newbury. He got a sting or a bite then down at the start of the French Guineas and nearly lost his life. He never ran a race after it.”

Were Vocalised to take off commercially though, at least he would be getting direct benefit. Having rescued Galileo and changed the course of history, he now is paying the price.

“There’s definitely too much Galileo blood – there’s too much for me anyway because we’re looking up their back ends a lot of the time! Years ago it was Northern Dancer and Vincent O’Brien. Then we had a few years before Sadler’s Wells arrived. He wasn’t long gone then when Galileo came on the scene. But sure it could be Dubawi or Teofilo in a couple of years’ time. Nothing lasts forever.”

Many of his horses have names as Gaeilge. They are easy to get but he has always had a grá for our native tongue. He says that he will go to a Gaeltacht for a month when he gives up training.

Back up! Give up? He has said in the past that being such a large employer, he is loath to retire, while joking in the past that he wouldn’t even dream of packing it in before Kevin Prendergast.

“We’re on tricky ground there now because…” Oh sorry, this is one we’ve to steer clear of obviously…

“No” he beams, for he has a yarn to tell. “The reason we’re on tricky ground is because Ger Lyons said seven or eight years ago that he’d want to be in the first four or five in the trainers’ list and Kevin Prendergast wasn’t getting any younger. I made sure that Kevin had read it. He met Ger at the Curragh and told him that he was never to talk about his retirement!

“I’ve been up front with Kevin. I’m telling Kevin ‘You wanna keep going now because if you give up now I’m the oldest flat trainer.’ John Kiely is hanging in there as well and I think John is only a matter of days younger than Kevin. There might have been a few in between them that might have been a bit short of stamina and that’s how I’m cropping up next.”

Would you have succession plans?

“You must be a bit braver than some of the other journalists that have asked that. Usually they’d be half way out the door when they bring up the subject,” he cracks before giving a non-committal answer. “Who knows? Anyway, my staff know the situation. It hasn’t changed so they’re happy to go with that.”

WORK PRACTICES

There has been a lot of negative commentary surrounding the conditions of staff in the industry of late, with the increase in minimum wage and launch of a pension scheme overshadowed by the Labour Court hearing into work practices at Ballydoyle.

“I wouldn’t be too concerned about it because there was negativity about Mother Teresa. Aidan O’Brien, myself and all the others are a long ways behind her so we can take a bit. You have to look after your staff. I haven’t seen any staff running out of Ballydoyle so it can’t be that bad!”

Not too many run out of Glebe House either. Bolger is loyal, as evidenced by his backing to former employee Duke and good friend McDonogh.

“Brendan got a bit lucky because my life was all squared and set away five or six years ago, maybe more. We had 50 yearlings coming in every year and then Sheikh Mohammed decided to send me 20 yearlings to train so that put a bit of pressure on. I gave Brendan some of my lesser horses then to train.

“I’m not much into the jumping scene from a training point of view (anymore), purely because of the 39- or 40-hour week. My staff work hard from February to October and then they get days off in the winter time. Now I couldn’t give them days off in the winter time if we were training jumpers so that’s why I don’t train jumpers. I’m not sure I could compete with Gordon Elliott and Willie Mullins anyway.”

He leaves decisions on the horses’ campaigns to the trainers, only to ensure that he doesn’t have a competing runner with Duke.

“I don’t have to have five runners in a race,” he says with a sly grin, having a playful dig at O’Brien and the English-prompted debate on pacemakers. He hasn’t been averse to using them himself as required.

“We won the (Irish 1000) Guineas with Pleascach. We had two pacemakers for her, purely because I didn’t think either of the pacemakers were up to the job so as it happened anyway, one of them, and she’s come back recently and won a few races, Mainicin, ran out of her skin. She took her to maybe three and a half down, which was good for her, because basically Pleascach was a mile and a quarter, mile and a half filly. She was chased home by none other than Found so you’ll take that any day!

“And we did use a pacemaker with Dawn Approach (in the Dewhurst) as well. The pacemaker (Leitir Mor) looked like winning in the dip. They ended up first and second. That was alright too.”

He doesn’t need to be that active at the sales but is always a keen observer.

“We’re not the most successful country in the world for nothing. We do have the horses. That has been proven since the time of Vincent O’Brien, PJ Prendergast, Mick Rogers and Stuart Murless that we can train them as well.”

It is difficult to transmit that message to a broader church, with national coverage proving very difficult. But he believes the marketing team at Horse Racing Ireland, led by Barbara White, are moving in the right direction. Social media is the way forward, he maintains, and tapping into the young people involved in the stud business. Leopardstown’s innovations have shown what can be done and the new Curragh will spark interest too.

The industry, he insists, is in rude health but improvements can be made in drug-testing and other areas.

“I think that the stewarding could be sharpened up a bit. I’ve great admiration for the people that are there but they need to get their act together a bit better. They miss things on the track. I wouldn’t be the sharpest chisel in the box but I see things on the track that should come to the attention of stewards and it doesn’t, you know? In fairness, I’m very happy with the idea of, for want of a better word, amateur stewarding. We couldn’t afford professional stewarding anyway.”

“In your own line of business as well, I think there’s too much deference to the advertisers; the bookmakers and the stud owners – anyone who advertises. Particularly in the Racing Post.”

Now though, he’s winding down for the three or four days holidays he takes in a year.

“I can recharge the batteries in 48 hours. I’m fortunate I suppose, I don’t stress easily. Or as my doctor said recently when he checked my blood pressure. ‘Good as ever but of course, you don’t have blood pressure, you give it!’

Describing himself as “fairly adept at keeping six balls in the air at the one time,” he has boundless enthusiasm and energy. And though he insists it is a team effort, as it has to be, in Coolcullen, Oylegate (Redmondstown) and Rathvilly (Beechy Park), everyone is marching to the beat of one pulse.

NATIONAL HUNT

“I don’t like to see this huge emphasis on the French-breds. But again, Ireland has to compete. We were sellers of National Hunt horses big time up to a few years back and there’s a price to be paid for that as well. Hopefully, there are enough mares out there to re-establish the Irish-bred National Hunt horse. But they haven’t been doing too badly when it comes to Gold Cups and the chasing stayers.”

HURLING FOR CANCER

“I’ll have to tell you the truth now. You see, Davy won’t mind me saying it but he fancies himself as a hurler and he even fancied himself more six years ago. He wanted to get a few jockeys together and hammer my staff, which I knew would have been difficult for him anyway but at the same time, the late Professor Fitzpatrick asked me could I come up with some idea to raise money for cancer research that he was heading up.

“I don’t know how it dawned on me but I went back to Davy then and said we should broaden it out a bit, take it up to Newbridge and bring in a few golden oldies and it all started from there.

“Then we must have been feeling a little bit cocky at some stage because we got the Artane Band. I remember driving past the cemetery in Newbridge on the way in and I said to Jackie ‘What do we do if there’s nobody here only the band and the players?’ We probably had 1,000 people the first day and it just took off.”

SHOW JUMPING

“It was very sad to see over the years all the mares being exported and we left the Dutch with a lot of our progeny.

They’re top of the tree now so I felt maybe something could be done about that so I keep a couple of Sport Horse broodmares.

“It’s very neglected. (The government) should be putting 20 million a year into that and they’d get a great return for it.”

BROODMARES

“Kevin Prendergast keeps warning me about the broodmares. I said ‘I’ll be careful.

“I might give half of it back but I won’t give it all back.”

PAT SMULLEN (left)

“We did talk (after he labelled Smullen’s ride on Rehana, interfering with Bean Feasa, as ‘disgraceful’).

It wasn’t acrimonious. Pat apologised and that was the end of it as far as I was concerned.

“Having said that if he’s upsides Colin Keane with one to go and I have a certainty, I’ll be asking my jockeys to give it up!”