2015 was another solid year in Fran Berry’s career. He rode 71 turf and all-weather winners in Ireland, 60 of them coming in the Flat Jockeys’ Championship, which left him in fourth place.

Interestingly, the three guys who finished in front of him – Pat Smullen, Colin Keane and Shane Foley – all had a significant majority of their winners provided by one contracted trainer. Smullen rode 69 winners for Dermot Weld, Keane rode 57 winners for Ger Lyons and Foley rode 37 winners for Mick Halford.

Berry’s most success came for Jessica Harrington, whom he rode 11 winners for. But he also rode nine winners for David Wachman, six winners for Tony Martin and five winners for Charles O’Brien. He rode three winners for five different trainers, two winners for another seven different trainers and one winner for another 11 different trainers.

That’s typical Fran Berry. Popular, loyal, hardworking.

2015 was also a landmark year for the son of Frank Berry, the 10-time champion jumps jockey. He rode his 1000th career winner. By any jockey’s standards, that’s a significant hallmark of success. He also won good races, on Harrington’s classy fillies Bocca Baciata and Jack Naylor, and for raiding British trainers, on Mark Johnston’s Fire Fighting and David Griffiths’s Take Cover. His wife Laura had just given birth to the couple’s first son, Jordan, and, at 35, everything looked in a good place for Berry.

Then Berry decided to take a big leap.

“I just always had it in my mind I wanted to try something different,” he says, reflecting back.

“I’d ridden in Japan for six winters and I thought about trying to get out there and have a go at it full-time. The thing was it would have taken a full year to get set up and learn the language, it was bit of a risk. Singapore was on my mind as well but I was thinking of riding in Britain for a long time.

“I was 35, coming off another good season in which I’d ridden my 1000th winner, it just felt like the right time to try something different.”

It was through the renowned jockeys’ agent Tony Hind that Berry connected to Ralph Beckett. Hind booked Berry for plenty of rides on British raiders in Ireland down the years, including on Kool Kompany, whom Berry rode to win the Group 2 Railway Stakes in 2014.

Beckett was a classic-winning trainer and he was a progressive trainer. Like Berry, he was coming off a good 2015, a year in which the 56 winners he trained was his biggest tally to date. There was lots of nice horses for Berry at Kimpton Downs; the likes of Alyssa, Moonrise Landing and Kinema. These were exciting times.

The partnership started off well with the pair teaming up to win a listed contest with Moonrise Landing at York. Then came a signature success when Kinema won the Duke of Edinburgh Handicap at Royal Ascot, allowing Berry to join a truly unique club of jockeys to have ridden a winner at the royal meeting and a Cheltenham Festival winner, which came courtesy of Khayrawani in the 1999 Coral Cup.

However not long after Ascot, a back injury ruled Berry out for two months. It was a desperate blow, in that it came right in the pit of the summer and just as things were getting going. Berry returned for the second half of the season but in October there was more bad luck - a fractured foot keeping him out for four months.

“It was one of those things,” the rider recalls. “I came back at the beginning of last season and the horses just weren’t working as well as before and I suppose Ralph and I just felt it was the best for both of us to go separate ways, sooner rather than later. I was keen to have as much of the season to ride as much as I could to build up contacts.”

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2005 could have been a fateful year for Fran Berry, but it ended up being a year that changed both man and jockey, thankfully for the good.

Berry was riding at the peak of his powers when he arrived at the Curragh on August 20th. He held a clear lead in the jockeys’ championship and he had a decent book of rides with the potential to extend that lead. One of his rides was on a Noel Meade-trained filly called Indian Rite in a one-mile maiden.

“There was only six or seven runners in the race,” Berry recalls. “You don’t take anything for granted but that’s not the field you expect anything bad to happen. Midway through the race, the filly broke her leg and went down straight away. It was one of those situations where you have no time to react and I was kind of rugby style spear-tackled into the ground.

“These were pre Adrian McGoldrick days and the care at the time was very bad. Mick Kinane was involved in the same incident and they put him onto a spine board and into a collar. But I think they only had that one piece of equipment with them.”

It turned out Berry had done serious damage to his C2 and C6 vertebrae. He was able to stand up and walk, but he shouldn’t have been let do anything of the sort.

“They had me walking from the ambulance to the ambulance room. They had me take my top off over my head, when I had broken bones in my neck, it was very close to being a complete mess-up.

“It wasn’t until 11 o’clock that night that I was brought to Blanchardstown Hospital. Dr Fred Kenny used to look after dad and that generation of jockeys. He was a retired orthopedic surgeon and he was one of the stewards that day. He was the one who arranged for me to be transferred to hospital to be put under the care of his son Dr Paddy Kenny.

“I was eventually moved to a spinal unit in the Mater Hospital. I think there were six or seven other people in the unit at the time and I was the only one who walked out of it.

“I was just incredibly lucky.”

Even with the injury cutting his season short, Berry was only beaten by nine winners in the flat jockeys’ championship. He almost certainly would have won it had he finished out the season.

Yet, he looks back on the time philosophically: “You know, I think I probably would have been champion jockey, considering I missed over two months of the season, but when I look back now, I probably learned more about myself, and how to have perspective in this game. That has probably served me better than if I had gone on to be champion jockey.”

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2010 was a “funny” year for Fran Berry. It was a year when the perspective gained from five years ago came in for good use.

The retirement of Mick Kinane at the end of the previous year meant Berry moved into the hot seat at John Oxx’s Currabeg base. Berry had spent nearly 10 years riding second jockey to Johnny Murtagh and Kinane. He’d done his time, completed his understudy and you’d struggle to have found someone at the time who would have begrudged him the top job at Oxx’s.

With the help of Oxx and other trainers Berry had forged a good relationship with, particularly Jessica Harrington, the rider rode a personal best 88 winners. Harrington provided him a Group 1 breakthrough with Pathfork in the National Stakes. He also rode the same trainer’s Laughing Lashes to win the Debutante Stakes and then finish second in the Moyglare Stud Stakes.

The extra firepower from Oxx was also significant. He was riding first string horses in group and listed races and that was a huge thing.

Then a game-changer. Johnny Murtagh’s tenure with Aidan O’Brien had fizzled to an end towards the end of the year. It wasn’t long at all before the Aga Khan announced Murtagh would be riding all of his horses again. That effectively removed Berry from the number one job at Oxx’s.

In at the start of the year, out at the end of it. That was a sickener.

“Johnny had a long relationship with the Aga Khan so I could understand it. It was just disappointing and frustrating,” Berry reflects.

“It was something I didn’t see coming off the back of such a good year. Looking back at it, Johnny and the Aga Khan had a long history together so I suppose the situation was inevitable once Johnny left Ballydoyle and I just got caught in the cross-fire unfortunately.”

It was then that Berry made the decision to effectively go freelance. There was plenty of support available to him; Charles O’Brien, Tony Martin, David Wachman and Tommy Stack were among those keen to use him.

The relationship he had developed with Jessica Harrington, whose flat team was strengthening significantly, was probably the most important. The following year Berry rode 17 winners for Harrington, including on some nice horses like Siren’s Song, Bible Belt and Dragon Pulse. The latter-mentioned won the Futurity Stakes and then came to within half a length of beating Power and giving the pair back-to-back wins in the National Stakes.

The next five years saw Berry ride 269 winners. He was an established freelance jockey and the go-to guy in Ireland. For many it was a surprise when he decided to make the move to Britain for the 2016 season.

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2018 has been a good year for Fran Berry. He has already ridden 66 winners, the same total he rode through the entirety of last season. He is well settled and well established, and more importantly so are his family.

“It was probably harder for Laura coming over here. It’s all well and good me going off riding everyday but it was a big change for her. Thank God, we’ve settled in well though, we’ve lots a friends around the area and Jordan has just started school last month. We had a baby girl, Emma Jane, who turned one last month as well.”

“The first thing I did when I came over was organise a driver, Nikki Henton. You couldn’t be driving everywhere around here, it would take away from your riding.”

Berry’s typical week is a very busy one. On Monday he was at Windsor for three rides in the afternoon and at Kempton for four rides in the evening. He had four rides at Leicester on Wednesday and then another double day on Wednesday when he had three rides at Nottingham in the afternoon and three more at Kempton in the evening. Then two more rides at Chelmsford on Thursday evening.

In the mornings, it varies. He is in Henry Candy’s twice a week. Then he could be with David Menuisier for one morning and another morning at Ian Williams’.

If he is in Newmarket, he could be in David Simcock’s or David Lanigan’s amongst others.

“I’m really enjoying it,” Berry asserts. “I’ve no regrets about coming over. If anything, I should have come sooner. There was just a couple of things I wanted to do at home.

“Sometimes you need a new challenge. Over here you have to put yourself out there more to meet new people. So not only from a riding point of view, but a personal point of view, it’s been a wonderful experience. I got off to an interrupted start, and kind of had to start from scratch last year but things are going well now, progressing well. I couldn’t be happier with the way things are.”

And it could be about to get a lot better. Tonight he will try and win a second career Group 1 on Thundering Blue in the Canadian International at Woodbine. David Menuisier’s five-year-old is favourite for the mile-and-a-half contest after a successful fact-finding mission to Sweden.

“It was great to win the Stockholm Cup at Bro Park. Going to Sweden was all about seeing how he dealt with travelling on a plane and how he got on over a mile and a half, and he did both fine.

“I don’t know much about some of the runners he’ll face on Saturday but his third to Roaring Lion and Poet’s Word in the Juddmonte International at York is probably the best form on offer. We are very hopeful of a big run.”

Berry flew to Canada last night but he is back in Britain on Sunday for two rides at Goodwood. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

Whatever happens this weekend, 2018 has been a good year for Fran Berry and the future looks bright for 2019 and beyond.

His time spent with John Oxx

“Riding for John and Caitriona was an absolute pleasure. I look back on that time of my career most fondly. I was riding behind Mick Kinane and Johnny Murtagh and that obviously brought me on quite a bit.”

The difference for a jockey riding in Britain compared to Ireland

“It’s busier alright. But I feel because I’m busier, my riding is sharper and got better. Also you don’t have time to dwell on anything. If you have a good day - great, but if you have a bad day, you could easily have six more rides the next day, so you’re on again.”

The future

Look you never say never but as it is at the moment, we’re very happy here. We’ve settled in well and things are progressing now. I’d never rule out anything and I’d love to ride in Singapore again but we’re happy where we are at present.