WHEN the white flag drops for the first time at Castletown-Geoghegan tomorrow afternoon, it will herald in the beginning of a new point-to-point season.

The start of a new term may offer the prospect of a blank canvas full of new possibilities, but the sport’s top rider Barry O’Neill and handler Colin Bowe will be aiming for more of the status quo.

The pair have been the dominant force in their respective divisions of late, and for O’Neill the 2022/’23 campaign brought a seventh consecutive national title, among a haul which also included further regional titles in the northern and eastern regions.

“It was a great year and Colin had a great year too. When things are going well for him that is great for me, because it usually means I am having a good season too,” the 34-year-old quipped on the eve of starting what will be his 15th season as number one rider to the Milestone Stables supremo.

“It is mad how fast the years go, I know everybody says that, but in particular the last few years have really flown by.

“I know a lot of lads would ride out in different yards, but for the last 14 years Colin’s has been my base.

“There has never been a problem if I have wanted to go and do something, but I was probably a bit tunnel visioned in that I really wanted to make it work there because of what he was building with the team.

“When you can be a part of something like this for so long, it’s no longer just a case of getting up and down off a horse and moving on to the next one, it is about their training and helping to bring them along the way.

Great kick

“I get a great kick out of when there is a horse that maybe needs a bit of extra attention, or it goes a different route because you have directed it down there because of how well you know the horse from home, and it justifies that, wins, and gets sold on. I would get a great bit of satisfaction out of that.

“You realise in this game that what goes on in the yard Monday to Friday is as important as what happens when I’m on the horses on a Saturday or Sunday, and Colin has a great team to make that happen.”

It is perhaps no surprise that the time has passed so swiftly, with Bowe having supplied him with over 400 winners since what for some people may have been his surprise decision to leave Paul Nolan’s, at a time when the Enniscorthy trainer was emerging as a breakthrough force on the National Hunt scene.

“A lot of people would have loved to have had the job that I had with Paul, but at the same time Colin was having plenty of winners in points.

“He probably had around 40 horses there and he was keen to get me. To be a hungry 20-year-old and be offered a full yard of 40 horses to ride, it would have been a hard offer for anyone in my shoes to turn down.

“Plus, I had also grown up with Colin and knew how driven he was so, so even though he had already got the yard up to 40 horses, I knew there was only going to be one way he was going to go and that was to become bigger and bigger.”

Top handlers

He certainly wasn’t wrong. Milestone Stables is now home to over 100 boxes that will be full most of the year round, but the Wexford rider can also call upon the support of another handler who has consistently featured in the top five handlers in recent years in David Christie.

“David had a tough season last year with a health scare, but even through it all he was still at the top of the game, and he has such a great bunch of owners and horses.

“Bold Enough was a superstar in opens last season, and the likes of Vaucelet, Winged Leader and Fern’s Lock were brilliant hunter chasers. There is a lot to look forward to this season for their owners now.”

O’Neill will have very little room for breath in the season ahead as he juggles those racing commitments with his role within Tattersalls Ireland.

As an inspector for their National Hunt sales, he will be scouring the country from January onwards to source horses for the 2024 store sales, alongside securing horses throughout the season for the company’s Cheltenham sales.

George Mernagh Fund

The Ratoath-based outfit have an involvement in the George Mernagh Fund, which earlier this summer announced an exciting partnership with Equuip that will award subsidies and bursaries in a bid to help retain and attract qualified riders to the industry, a much-needed initiative that O’Neill is only too keenly aware of through his role within the Qualified Riders Association.

“It is a very encouraging development for qualified riders as a whole. There is no getting away from the declining numbers of people taking out the QR licence, but hopefully this will be an initiative that will encourage more new people to take the next step into the QR ranks, because that is very important in order to protect the future of the qualified rider.

“Whether you are only looking for a bit of sport as a hobby or if you are an aspiring jockey looking to get a really solid grounding at the start of your race-riding career, becoming a qualified rider can give you that and open up so many opportunities. Hopefully this bursary now will be the final push that anyone thinking of doing it might have needed.”

For those qualified riders already in the sport, there was only one talking point last season and that was the focus the IHRB placed on whip offences as over 145 days’ worth of suspensions were handed down to point-to-point riders’ last season.

Whip review

“That was a real issue for everyone in the weigh tent. We brought it up at the review day that was held at the end of last season, and then a few of us met privately with the team up there in the IHRB.

“We got our points across to them, so we just have to hope that a bit of common sense will be applied this season, albeit the rules are still there with the guidelines for giving out days for suspensions.”

With so much of the weigh tent comprising of younger riders learning their race riding craft, O’Neill hopes that officials will approach it with more of an educational viewpoint when it comes to how they enforce their whip rules.

“We are hoping that they won’t be as harsh as last year, we’ll just have to wait and see how it goes.

“I brought up with them that they were trying to mirror the track in many ways, but with the suspension days on the track there was some leeway given as to when the track jockeys would serve their days.

“We tried to get that across the line for point-to-points too, and they have thankfully given that to us for the one-day suspensions. It is only a smaller point to the whole issue but hopefully it will help someone along the way.”