WAITING for racing to resume these past couple of months has at times felt like Waiting for Godot. The author of that play, Samuel Beckett, once said: “We are all born mad. Some remain so.”

It is not clear if he had horse racing fans in mind when uttering these words but I suspect it is a shade of odds-on that he may well have been referring to us. Like all true fans of our sport, for whatever reason and where horse racing is concerned, I certainly seem to have been ‘born mad’ and am glad to say that I remain so some 46 years on!

My racing journey began at the age of about six, and the very first race I remember watching was the 1979 Derby at Epsom won by Troy. Growing up outside Trim in Co Meath, my family had a passing interest in horse racing but the real catalyst for me was our neighbour and my sometime babysitter, a man called Paddy Doyle.

ITV Seven

Paddy was a devoted racing fan and not having his own TV, would arrive at our house on Saturdays equipped with all manner of newspapers to watch the racing in the days of Dickie Davis and the ITV Seven.

Watching racing with Paddy was like serving a form of racing apprenticeship and I quickly became fascinated by what was a whole new world of fillies, furlongs and photo finishes played out against a background of three-crossed doubles and yankees. Before long, Saturdays came to mean racing.

As my interest developed, I began to name all of my toy cars at the time after racehorses I had seen on TV. I seem to have been dual-purpose in my approach with the earliest boxes in my imaginary barn filled with all manner of horses, from the legendary Red Rum, to Chinrullah and Ela-Mana-Mou as well as some lesser luminaries such as The Vintner and Harry Hastings!

I held frequent race meetings for these cars/horses under the kitchen table and down the hallway, replete with colour racecards and my own form book.

Jockeys

In the early days, it was the jockeys that most interested me in racing. The great rivalry between the silky smooth Lester Piggott and the doggedly determined Willie Carson. Although it was clear that Piggott was cut from different cloth, I rooted for Willie and remember being very pleased when he guided Henbit home for a second successive Derby success.

I was soon out trying to emulate these jockeys on my bicycle, riding finishes up and down the road. Some days I was Lester Piggott, sitting motionless (usually going downhill), while on other days, I was Willie Carson, pumping away furiously three furlongs from home (usually going uphill).

I also took to following the jockey Mark Birch around then. His name was quite similar to mine and so I would change the ‘ch’ in his name for the ‘d’ in mine in the newspaper racecards and voila, I would have a full book of rides on the couch every Saturday.

Riding lessons

In order to stave off the destruction of the sofa, my mother agreed to let me start riding lessons soon afterwards. It was a good deal tougher than it looked on TV but I loved it and soon had aspirations of being a jockey.

As I got a little older and with some riding experience under my belt, the horses themselves began to interest me more and more. This also coincided with some of my first trips to the races, which were mainly to the summer evening meetings at Kilbeggan and Roscommon.

The very first horse I remember seeing live on a racecourse was a Bargello mare called Pencil Lady. My dad had backed her at my prompting and we roared her on to victory at Kilbeggan one evening when I was about eight or nine.

There were some good ‘local’ horses running back then too, who we followed closely, including Gus O’Brien’s Corryvreckan, who was a renowned point-to-pointer of the time, John Fowler’s Royal Dipper, who was a personal favourite, and Michael Cunningham’s wonderful filly Cairn Rouge. I somehow managed to weasel a day off school in 1984 to watch our neighbour William Flood’s Manpower run third in the Triumph Hurdle.

Shergar

The two horses that probably caught my imagination the most however were Shergar, who seemed a different species to his rivals in 1981, and the utterly brilliant El Gran Senor, whose duel with Secreto at Epsom remains one of the most compelling races that I have ever seen.

Like all true fans of the sport, I can pretty much recall most events in my youth by remembering what I was doing when any major race was run. So it is that I know my U-11 hurling team won the county title on the day that Michael Dickinson saddled the first five home in the Gold Cup and that I missed Steve Cauthen’s tour de force on Slip Anchor at Epsom in 1985 because of an art competition I had been entered for. Declared in error I believe!

Ice-cream van

As my interest grew keener, I soon had my dad plagued with trying to arrange lifts for me to the races. My uncle John Finnegan often took me as did our neighbours Henry Balfe, Frank Guy and Matt Lynch, all committed racegoers at the time, as well as Eddie and Mary Travers.

My favourite travelling companion, however, was Patsy Murtagh from Longwood. The main reason for this was that Patsy would travel in the back of the local ice-cream van. Indeed, one of my favourite day’s racing ever was going to Salsabil’s 1990 Irish Derby in the back of that ice-cream van.

Before long, boarding school presented challenges in retaining my interest in racing. I soon developed a good relationship with the school caretaker, however, who used to allow me into the TV room for Cheltenham week, while my English teacher showed a surprising interest in my essays on how I would place my imaginary four-year-old hurdler in the season ahead.

The biggest challenge in keeping my interest alive came when I emigrated to Asia after university to work as an equities analyst. Trips home were arranged to coincide with the Galway races and my first venture onto the internet back in 1995 was to see Ridgewood Pearl win at the Breeders’ Cup. I suspect I may have been the only subscriber to The Irish Field during spells working in both Taiwan and Vietnam during this period!

I was lucky enough to be able to leave my old career behind in 2002, returning home to work for the Turf Club as a handicapper and swopping the analysis of stocks and shares for the much more fulfilling task of analysing racing.

Over the years, what I have come to love more than anything about racing is that no matter how long you have followed the sport, every day remains a school day. To properly appreciate the sport, there are so many intricacies to understand in terms of interpreting form, race reading, how horses are trained and how they have been bred.

These complexities continue to hold the same enduring fascination for me now as they did when I began to follow the sport back. To have a role now in helping to set some of those puzzles as a handicapper is a real privilege.

Racing is as much about the journey as the destination and along the route I have been lucky to meet some marvellous people and see some outstanding racehorses (none better than Frankel perhaps).

The ‘game’ is a wonderful blend of entertainment, escapism, euphoria and angst, played out against the backdrop of the sport’s rich historical traditions while all the time remaining focused on the future and on the next race. No matter where I have been racing in the world, I have always found that same sense of familiarity and camaraderie in a day at the races the world over.

Beckett may well have been right that as racing fans we may well all have been ‘born mad’ and remained so but if my first 40 years following the sport are any guide, I can’t wait for the next 40 to resume. The waiting is almost over, hopefully!