Peter Fahey with his first winner Intyre Trail at Dundalk in 2010© Photo Healy Racing
Thankfully we’ve enjoyed a great start to the new season and things have been going well this summer but we’re just lucky to have the nice horses to train.
As much as I’m happy to see my own horses running well, I’m equally as happy to see any of the lads, Seamus, Jarlath, Paul or Mark have winners. There’s four of us that are brothers with a trainers licence and then Mark is my nephew. Seamus, Jarlath, Mark and myself would all train out of my home place in Monasterevin and then Paul is over in Nurney. It works well.
There’d be mornings where we would meet on the gallop here, the four of us use the one gallop, but we’d nearly all be doing something similar anyway so there’s no real major issues and we stay independent enough of each other. I would also use the Curragh training grounds quite a bit to do our fast work, most of that is done over there, so it seems to work well and long may that continue.
Despite having four brothers training and three of us out of the home place, there’s actually 10 of us in my family altogether so we’re not all trainers but they’d all have a connection or interest in racing in some way.
Training wasn't high on my agenda either for most of my life. I’d absolutely no interest in being a trainer to be honest. I started off pony racing as a child and have been around racing all my life, I rode as an amateur and spent a few great years working with Jessica Harrington before going to America for a year. When I returned I set up my yard to pre-train and break horses and I was happy out doing that.
However, like in so many different walks of life, in 2008 or 2009 that end of the business just started to get a bit quieter and a few of the clients I had built up were asking me to take the horses to train so rather than have a yard full of empty boxes I took out my licence and I’m loving it now.
The set-up works well and we’d have about 25 horses in training but it would be a busy spot with the other lads getting their horses out too. It’s nice to be able to run things by each other but we usually keep ourselves to ourselves to be honest and you’d get a great kick out of seeing any of them have a winner and thankfully they’ve all been running well for the summer.
Galway was a great week but that’s what you are always aiming for - the festival meetings. We’d a couple that finished second there, Mine Now was only beaten by a nose but Serefeli and Dayna Moss both won and that’s what the sport is all about. Dayna Moss ran in a bumper at Fairyhouse and we said after that we’d head to Galway. It was an added bonus that he’d get his head in front there.
When I look back on it now I was happy with how Peregrine Run ran at Galway too. He’s our stable star. The winner (Rathvinden) could go on to be a very good horse over fences this season and while Peregrine Run might go to Killarney or back to Galway in the meantime, the plan for him would be to go back to Cheltenham for something at the November Meeting where he won last year. That was something else. It wasn’t the March festival Cheltenham meeting but it was still a winner around Cheltenham and the owners were there and had a really enjoyable time and thankfully now we have clients that are more willing to spend money on trying to find horses for those sort of occasions and we are probably buying horses with better pedigrees than we could have before. That all helps.
I never set myself one goal or target only to give every horse in the yard a fair chance and time. I’ve won with horses that have had no pedigree and been lucky to get some nice horses and that’s what it is, we are just lucky to have been sent a few horses like Peregrine Run and Black Zambezi who has won two for us and is owned by a syndicate.
Most of the horses I have in at the moment would be National Hunt horses but we’ve a few for the flat and we might have a couple of runners in point-to-points again this season so we’ve a nice team to look forward to and hopefully they can keep running well.
Looking back on it now, although at the time I had no intention of being a trainer, the year I spent in America certainly was a help but I would have learnt an awful lot from the Harrington’s and even now you’d still be looking on closely at their horses and delighted for the recent success. Where we want to go now is up to the next level and have horses to compete at the very top and be regular visitors to all the big festivals.
