“It’s kind of a little emotional actually. I came here in 2002 hoping for a bit of a shot. It’s turned out fantastic. I wish my mum was still alive to see this. Thank you to everyone who has ever put me on a winner, through my whole career, this is all down to you guys – you believed in me and I got it done. A big thank you to my wife, because if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be where I am. Fair Grounds has been very good to me over the years, I made a lot of friends and lost a lot of friends. Racing is life and we’re all a big family. Thank you to everybody. It’s unbelievable.” – James Graham after he rode his 3,000th winner, Vortex, at Fair Grounds, New Orleans, earlier this month.

YOU can still hear more than a tinge of a north Dublin accent in James Graham. It’s mixed up with American twang and the typical track talk you’d hear from jockeys and trainers when tuning in to watch the big races in the USA. He starts some sentences with ‘man,’ and recalls how a horse ‘ran good’, but he’s still a Dub at heart and seemingly has never lost a sense of humour unique to our capital.

That accent is only miniscule in the wholesale way his life changed when he and his then girlfriend and now wife, Lisa, first set foot off the plane in Chicago in 2002 and attended the first and only Breeders’ Cup held at Arlington Park. They were just a pair of kids looking for a change, for an experience and for “a bit of a shot”. If it didn’t work in the United States, Australia was next on the list, but it has worked in the USA, quite emphatically.

James is speaking from his home farm in Kentucky, where he and Lisa live with their four children – Hannah (15), Christopher (13), Ella (10) and Paisley (three). He is within an hour’s journey of all the places he needs to be for the majority of the year – Churchill, Keeneland, Ellis Park, and for the rest of the season he heads to Fair Grounds in New Orleans, where only one other jockey has ridden more winners than him.

Prior to its closure, Graham had a significant success riding at Arlington, where it all began for him. The latest of his five Grade 1 wins came in the Mister D Stakes at the track, known colloquially as the last running of the Arlington Million.

He has ridden in three Kentucky Derbys, and, according to Equibase, has amassed over $111m in prize money. More significantly, only Sir Anthony McCoy and Pat Eddery stand ahead of him in the winning-most Irish jockeys of all time and that undoubtedly makes him one of our finest ever racing exports. Not bad for the boy from Finglas who never sat on a saddle until he was 15 years of age.

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James Graham used to stare at the horses and ponies free roaming in the fields out the window of Coláiste Eoin Secondary School in Finglas. He had little aptitude for what was going on inside the window. The middle child of seven, he was born into what he describes as a working class family. His father Paul was a labourer and his mother Carmel took care of everyone and everything at home. The closest connection to horses was watching the Grand National once a year.

“I was no good in class,” Graham says. “I was distracted by the horses out in the field. You know Dublin is renowned for having loose ponies around the place. I suppose I was getting to the stage of having to leave school, when my career guidance teacher decided to put his foot down and gave me an application to the jockeys’ school (RACE Academy).

“I remember taking the application form home and my mother said, ‘Oh, I don’t know about this,’ but my dad stepped in and said, ‘Well if that’s what he wants to do, let him go.’

“I used to go to my grandad’s house on a Saturday and he’d always be watching the racing. He used to tell me I’m going to be a jockey and that planted a seed, but there was no connection in my family to horses. At the time, for a kid from Dublin to go to a jockey school, it was weird, it wasn’t a done thing.

“It was a big call for my parents. We grew up in the middle of Finglas, it’s not like we were rolling in money, my dad was a builder labourer. It’s not like he was running a business and had a lot of money to back me, but at the time it wasn’t needed. It was just like, if you want to do this, he gave the ‘okay’, and I went and I did it.

“I didn’t fit in right away (at RACE). It was kind of scary actually. You go from hearing police sirens and people talking and shouting stuff on the street in the middle of the night, to hearing nothing. Deafening silence didn’t work right away with me, because I couldn’t understand why it was so quiet I guess.”

First time

At RACE, Graham sat on a saddle for the first time. He had ridden ponies before, but only with a rope over their head around the streets of Finglas. He was a far cry from the rest of the kids who had riding lessons and ponies at home. Still, it was a mesmerising new world, in so many ways, but primarily the constant closeness to horses. Upon graduating, he was sent for his placement in John Oxx’s.

“After RACE you get turned loose, but I got very loose,” he says. “I was running around the place, not turning up for work, wasn’t paying attention and probably too immature to be getting paid as much as I was getting. When you’re getting 200 quid a week as a 16-year-old, I was like ‘wow’.

“They gave me plenty of chances and I still messed it up. I couldn’t get out of bed.”

After a short spell working on a building site, Graham ended up working for Pat Martin, when that trainer was based in Maynooth. The pair had a good relationship, as Martin used to drive in and out to Finglas every day to pick him up and leave him home, and he would provide Graham with his one and only winner in Ireland, Spurn, in an apprentice series maiden at Naas.

Everything changed for Graham when he met Lisa Caverley at the races.

“She used to work for Declan Gillespie and Tracey Collins. She didn’t even like me at first,” he says now laughing. “I was trying to get her to lead up one of my horses and she just refused – she didn’t want to be associated with a fella from Dublin! Through one thing or another, I ended up getting her to give me her phone number – I think I tricked her into it, and we eventually started hanging out. That’s how it went and she has been the driving force for me since.

“When we decided to give America a go, it was just a case of ‘let’s try somewhere else.’ We came over to America for the chance of getting a good job, decent money, hoping to live a bit lucky, maybe become an assistant.”

Shortly after arriving in Chicago, the couple moved down to New Orleans and began prepping horses for trainer Jeff Thornberry for the winter season. Lisa quickly became assistant trainer, while James quickly developed a reputation of hard work and full commitment that has defined his career.

“They have these training races, like barrier trials,” he explains. “You went in there, and someone would say to you, ‘Hey jock, do you want to ride this?’ You were a gallop boy essentially. You weren’t getting paid, but they might give you 20 bucks if they thought you did a good job.

“I loved getting on horses. It’s probably the happiest place for me. The guys would be throwing you up on anything. You’d be on the horse going into the gate and wondering ‘what is this?’ and they’d be like, ‘it’s fine don’t worry about it!’ And I didn’t, I loved it.

“Lisa would end up working later into the mornings, so as it happened I’d be sticking around the place, so I just put my hand up for anything. It wasn’t long that I was riding in these training races and started thinking, I can do this, I can ride with these guys.

“It was a great schooling and it was all televised in the morning, on the days when there was no racing on. Guys would start talking and they’d be saying, ‘this horse worked real good with the Irish kid’ and everyone would then be asking, ‘who’s the Irish kid?’”

Gamechanger

The training races experience was the groundwork, Graham linking up with former trainer turned agent Britt McGehee was the game-changer. He describes McGehee as like “that uncle that sneaks a fiver into your hand every time you see him”. He was taken under a wing and then pushed hard in every way to improve. What was a winner nearly every two to three meetings for Graham, soon became nearly every meeting.

McGehee sadly died of cancer at the age of just 58; it seems like one of his legacies will be the continued success of Graham, who had him firmly in his thoughts after his landmark win last week.

“We killed it for 14 years,” he says now. “From day one he had my back. Everywhere we went, we did really good and that was throughout my circuit because I’d go from New Orleans in the winter, Keeneland in the spring, Arlington Park for the summer, which was a five-month meet, and then back to Kentucky in the fall and then back to New Orleans in November. He was there every step of the way. He pushed and he pushed and he helped me get better.

“I remember Britt saying to me shortly after I met him, how important it was to ride for fifth, that if you can get fifth, you can pay for your owner’s fees. Then he’d say if you can get fifth, you can probably get fourth, if you can get fourth, you can probably get third and so on.

“It just instilled in me how important that was. I give every horse 110%, whether it be a Grade 1 or a claimer, 365 days a year and 366 days on a leap year. Britt, along with Lisa, was a driving force for me.

“Bobby Springer (trainer) was another one that had my back from the start. I rode my first training race for Bobby. He and his wife are like grandparents to my kids. I don’t know, he just took a liking to me. I remember hearing that people were asking Bobby, why was he using me, and Bobby said, don’t worry, this kid can ride. That meant a huge amount.”

He was right as well. Graham would ride 135 winners in just his second year in America and has surpassed the century mark every year since. Among his haul are five Grade 1s, the latest coming in the 2021 Mister D Stakes, a hugely popular winner of what was essentially the final running of the Arlington Million in its now defunct home, where he has had so much success.

Reading through various American racing publications is described by journalists as affable and hard-working, 100% commitment guaranteed, a steely competitor on the track but very friendly and popular off it, and it was quite clear to see the love from his colleagues and various other racing people when he hit his landmark win this month.

Asked about how he thinks the 22-year-old that hopped off that plane in Chicago all those years ago would respond if told he was going to ride 3,000 winners, he says: “I’d have just laughed. I’m laughing at it now. I think it’s about the work that I put in. I’ve tried my heart out every time I ride a horse in a race. It’s very hard to put into words but I’ll empty myself out on a horse if I think I can get them to win, so you know what I mean?

“I am where I am because of Lisa. It’s because of her we are where we’re at because she was the rock. When it was a bad day, it was a bad day, but she’d always turn around and look at the positives about everything, never let me get too down on myself. That’s just the way it is. If I didn’t have Lisa right now, I’d be lost.

“We’ve four children and they’re all mad. Lisa has her own ponies and she retires a horse here and there, tries to give them another job and she’s a capable rider, she enjoys it a little bit and she has the farm, she’s got cows and chickens to look after.”

And Graham, at 44, still has plenty to strive for.

“I’m like 300 wins off of being the all time leading rider at Fair Grounds. That’s kind of what the end goal is. If I win 50 over the next six seasons, it might round around that marker. I’m not saying I can’t do it before then, I just find that if you’re having a good meet and you’re in the top four or five, you can hit that 50 mark.”

From Finglas to Fair Grounds, and everywhere else in between, it’s been one hell of a success story.