Emily Finnegan was sitting behind a table in the immigration department in the Migration Centre in Adelaide in August 2015. Her whole world up in flames.
“Will you fill out this form please Miss Finnegan?” an official said to her.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Just fill it out for now. You can come back to it later.”
“I can’t fill it out. Sure I’m stuck on the first question.”
1. When do you intend to leave Australia?
“I’m not leaving Australia.”
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Home for Christmas, Emily Finnegan sits back in her chair in the lobby of Trim Castle Hotel and reflects back on what has been another huge year in her career as a jockey in Australia.
“It just keeps getting better and better,” she proclaims.
Just before leaving Australia, she rode her 211th winner at Balaklava racecourse. Three weeks before that she was crowned the Dux (best apprentice) of the South Australian Apprentice Academy. She has ridden for over A$4 million in prize money and she has three more winners to ride out her ‘city’ claim, having already achieved that feat in the provinces and in the country.
Last year the 24-year-old from Trim, County Meath also broke through at listed level with two winners and came agonisingly close to a Group 2 winner in Morphettville, the main metro track in Adelaide.
She has represented Ireland in an international jockey’s challenge in Macau and she will soon spend two weeks in Singapore under a temporary contract to ride against some of the best jockeys in the world.
So why isn’t the name Emily Finnegan a racing household name on these shores?
“I don’t know!” she says laughing.
“Look, I suppose it’s the time difference and Australia is just so far away, it’s another world really. There are so many Irish racing people there and in New Zealand doing so well. I’d recommend it to anyone.”
To Finnegan it seems like only yesterday she was back in Ireland trying to break through. She comes from a family with a rich racing history. Her grandfather Cathal Finnegan was class act of a jockey and he rode the Francis Flood-trained Garoupe to win the Irish Grand National in 1970.
Her father Mark always had a point-to-pointer at home and so the racing bug was easy to catch.
She learned the ropes in Carmel Smith’s riding school in Kilmessan. Herself and Colin Keane out “batin’ around ponies” every week.
At 15, with school the last thing on her mind, she successfully applied for the 10-month trainee jockey’s course at RACE. Her placement was with Mick Halford but it was here she realised the size of the mountain she was attempting to scale. There were lots of apprentices coming through. Gary Carroll was there. Julie Burke was there. Conor Hoban and Marc Monaghan were there as well. All hungry, talented, ambitious. All trying their damndest to make it.
“I would have looked up to Julie Burke a lot. She was a very good rider,” Finnegan explains. “She was struggling to get going at the time and that kind of put it into perspective for me. She and Gary (Carroll) pulled me aside one day and said ‘Go and finish your Leaving Cert and then see what you want to do.’ So that’s what I did.”
Going back to school was not easy. Double maths is hard enough on a Monday morning when all you want to be is a jockey.
“All the time I was in school I was still riding out. I was up at Joanna Morgan’s and Gerry Keane’s during the weekends. After school I spent a year at Pat Martin’s yard in Slane.
“I used to ride out for man called Paul Kiernan as well,” she recalls. “It was myself and Colin (Keane). We’d throw our bags into the back of his Land Cruiser jeep after school and head up to Tankardstown gallops to ride out a few. It’s funny when you look back on the year now - Colin won the jockeys championship and I rode my 200th winner in Australia this year (2017).
“Paul gave me a ride in one of the schooling races up at Dundalk and that was the closest I ever came to anything at home.”
AUSTRALIA
It was Emily’s sister Leona who first suggested Australia. Leona emigrated to work in a finance position in Adelaide in 2013. Through classic Irish networking she had come to know a few Irish people working in the racing industry. She became friendly with a girl called Katie McManamon who was working as head girl for well established trainer Philip Stokes. She told Katie about Emily and the pair of them in turn told Stokes.
The trainer said send her out and if she’s no good we’ll send her back. Nearly five years down the line that hasn’t happened yet.
“It was a big decision as I was only 19 at the time. The big thing was having my sister there. And sure I knew it was a simple thing of just coming back if things didn’t work out,” Finnegan explains.
“It didn’t stop me crying my eyes out in the airport. And then when my sister came to collect me on the other side, I started crying again – the journey was so long I didn’t think I’d ever make it!
“My first day riding out was daunting. It was on a Tuesday so it was a gallop morning, on the main track at Morphettville, and I had no idea what I was doing!
“At Morphettville there is a trotting track, a sand track, a track that goes Sydney way (right-handed), two grass tracks and a pro ride galloping track. And they’re all being used at the same time. You’re heading out there all the time looking for oncoming traffic.
“Philip had me up on a horse and he said ‘Go out there and do a half-mile evens, home 400 in 24’ and I was like ‘what does that mean?’ A half-mile evens is 15 seconds a furlong and then you step up for the last 400 metres. So you go 15s, 15s, 12s, 12s and I was meant to count this in my head to the split second.”
It took a while to adjust, to the 3am starts, to the different tracks, to the timing, to the darkness in the early mornings, to riding like an Australian rider – sitting lower, driving harder, but Finnegan got there and in just eight months she had her first ride, out in the country, at Penong racecourse.
“You could only get to Penong by plane,” she recalls. “And the plane was tiny. The course is something like a point-to-point except with no grass!”
“My first ride was on a horse called The Headliner and he won. I came in delighted and one of the other jockeys told me I’d have a double because he knew my other horse, Northside Star. He was right. It was unbelievable.
“When I got back to Adelaide everyone was congratulating me – Katie, my sister, Paul Gallagher – an Irish jockey out there at the time and Nicky O’Shea – an Irish trainer.
“It was huge because it seemed like I was ages trying to do anything in Ireland and here on my first day at the race in Australia I had two winners. It gave me huge confidence.”
Word quickly got back to Adelaide that there was an Irish girl with a bit about her. Finnegan started picking up rides everywhere and after quickly reaching 20 winners, she was allowed to ride in the city. She got momentum, a wonderful thing for a jockey, and the winners started flowing in. Doubles and trebles were commonplace. She was flying.
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“I couldn’t believe it,” Finnegan says, recalling her experience in the Migration Centre.
“They were saying ‘You’ve been in hiding and now you’re going home,’ and I was saying ‘How could I be in hiding – I’ve been riding horses nearly every day since I’ve been here.’
“I was telling them that just that week gone I was on the front page of the local newspaper because me and another girl were the only two apprentices with rides in the Adelaide Cup. I was doing the opposite to hiding!”
Finnegan called everyone – her sister, her parents, Philip Stokes, the South Australian racing board. It was hugely stressful time.
“You get a temporary six-month visa while you are waiting for your two-year visa to get processed and I just thought you get two years from when you receive the two-year visa. But they include that six months in the two years. It was an honest mistake and I was desperately trying to explain myself.
“When you’re getting up at 3am each day and doing the same routine, the last thing you’re thinking about is things like this. It just got by me.”
Eventually things got sorted, and in a roundabout way, it worked out okay with Finnegan obtaining permanent residency. However it came at a huge cost – A$22,000 in fees and she wasn’t able to ride for three months.
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Naturally it took a while for things to get going again. Finnegan comes across as streetwise now. She talks about the importance of being in the paper, to be seen riding winners, the multiplier effect of success. It was less than ideal not being seen for three months.
But she put the head down, worked hard and Stokes was good to her. She says of the trainer: “He’s the only man who works harder than me. He’s hands on – riding out each morning, he’s in the stables a lot, getting things done himself.”
He got her going and the winners started trickling in again. That early momentum came back. He put her up on a filly called Entrancing at Gawler and she won and he put her up on the same filly again at Morphettville two weeks and they won again.
Finnegan was home in Ireland for her sister’s wedding in November 2016 when she received a text from Stokes saying she’d better make it back in time for Ballarat Cup Day – Entrancing is in the first race on the card.
“I got back that week and the race was on the Saturday. My brother Cathal drove me to a meeting in Naracoorte on the Friday. Naracoorte is four hours from Adelaide but it was well worth it because I rode four winners. We then drove on another four hours across state to Ballarat and I won on Entrancing. I’d rode her three times and won on her three times. It was a huge two days and that’s a highlight for me and Philip.”
If that was a highlight on the track, a low-light was getting beaten a half-length in the Group 2 Queen Of The South Stakes at Morphettville last April. Riding Have Another Glass for trainer Sue Jaensch, Finnegan got the mare over from stall 11 of 11, a feat in itself, and sat second throughout. She drove her horse to the front with 100 metres to go only to get done late by the Darren Weir-trained, Melbourne Cup-bound Amelie’s Star. They got beat by “the best of the best” on the day but it was still a sickening feeling.
LIFE DOWN UNDER
There aren’t as many Irish in Adelaide as Melbourne and Sydney, but the racing community, like most racing communities, is a tight knit one. The day-to-day lifestyle is one of a strict work routine and Finnegan admits to still finding the 3am starts tough. On the plus side you’re in early and out early, by 9am, and then you’re either off to the races or you have the whole day to yourself to go shopping or go to the beach.
Finnegan lived with her sister for two years but after gaining permanent residency, she bought a house for herself.
There are lots of others who helped her get on her feet and one of the biggest to help is a man named Mick Quinn, another expat from Meath who knew Emily’s family, and now a retiree, is more than happy to drive her up and down to the races when he can.
“Mick is a legend, he’s like my Australian dad,” Finnegan says laughing. “I’m well settled now. I do like the lifestyle and I’m well used to it. Once I ride my claim out in the city I won’t have to get up at 3am, I’ll get a little sleep in until 4:30 when I can just rock down and jump up on a horse. It won’t stop me working as hard though.
“I’d never rule out coming home. I’d probably be looking to buy a house back here as well, although I probably should have done that last year!
“I’m not desperate to get back or anything but I like the lifestyle in Ireland as well. Put it this way, if I could move mam and dad out here, then that would be the ideal situation.”
Finnegan would recommend Australia to any young jockey. She points out all the Irish doing well down under already – like Johnny Allen and Declan Bates in Victoria, Louise Day in New South Wales, Liam McGorrian in Sydney and Samantha Wynne over in New Zealand.
There are lots of female jockeys at the very top in Australia. The likes of Jamie Kah, Kathy O’Hara, Katelyn Mallyon and Michelle Payne. Finnegan talks about the ladies jockey’s rooms often being busier than the men’s. She rode at Leopardstown when she was home for her sister’s wedding and recalls the ‘cupboard’ of a dressing room she shared with Ana O’Brien.
“I think you’re just seen as a jockey in Australia – if you’re good enough, that’s it. I don’t know about this thing in France (female jockey’s allowance) – I don’t know why they need to differentiate.”
There are other advantages for aspiring jockeys in Australia. Losing your claim is perhaps not as consequential as it is in Britain and Ireland.
Finnegan explains that you get three different claims; one each for the country, provincial (counts for country winners as well) and city tracks. To fully ride out your claim you have to partner 80 winners in each district.
It allows the rider more time to get the benefits of a claim, allowing more time for experience. Finnegan has already rode out her claim in the country and in the provinces, so is already a well established figure, which bodes well.
For the 24-year-old, there is lots left to achieve.
“I’d like to firstly establish myself as senior jockey,” she says. “Then maybe down the line I’d be looking to get 100 winners in a season. And if I could do that, then I’d be looking to beat Jamie Kah in a jockey’s premiership (championship) in South Australia.
“I suppose coming out here, it felt good to prove a few people wrong. But my main motivation is winning. I always want to win. For myself yes, but also for the people I’m riding for. I couldn’t care less about the money.
“Nothing can replace the feeling you get from coming back into a winner’s enclosure to a bunch of delighted faces, knowing that you’re a part of that, that you’ll be in the winning picture on somebody’s wall. That is the buzz I get.”