Joseph O'Brien© Photo Healy Racing
Joseph O’Brien is keeping most of his large string of Flat horses ticking over on Owning Hill in the hope of action soon returning.
The former champion Flat jockey has taken the training world by storm since starting out less than four years ago with UK and Ireland total prize-money of nearly €14 million plus huge success worldwide including the Melbourne Cup and Breeders Cup.
Still just 26, he’s sent out over a hundred winners in each of the last two Irish Flat seasons and made a quick start to the current curtailed turf campaign at Naas last Monday when Numerian landed the Listed Devoy Stakes.
The dual-purpose Piltown trainer has also saddled over 250 National Hunt winners during his short career.
With those impressive numbers and big string of horses also comes a large work force and he’s hoping the current cancellation of racing due to coronavirus will not impact too severely on his stable staff.
Speaking on Racing TV’s On The Wire podcast O’Brien said, “With big numbers you have a big amount of staff and a big wage bill every week. I’m lucky that I have very good owners but when there is no prize-money coming in then it’s a huge hit in the short to medium term.
“It will be a huge hit for the smaller trainers as well but this is affecting the vast majority of industries around the world. There is no doubt it is going to push some businesses too far. I don’t think that is any secret and it’s not confined to horse racing.
“I’m going to keep as much staff as I possibly can and I’m in a good enough position that I have the Flat horses. However, it all depends how long this goes on for. The longer it goes on then the more difficult it will be but in the short term I’m going to keep as many people as I possibly can.”
The uncertainty of when racing will return is also the chief problem with organising his training regime.
“The problem with training horses is that you can’t say on April 19 we are racing and then have runners on April 20. There would be at least a four-week training programme up to that and a lot longer for some horses.
“It’s a difficult position to be in with no notice and it’s really the uncertainty that is the biggest problem. If someone said you will be racing at the end of May then you could plan for that but you don’t know what is around the corner.
“You can keep horses ticking over to have a certain level of fitness but you can’t have them in full training.
“If the National Hunt type horses don’t have an option of Punchestown then it doesn’t really make sense for us to keep them in work.
“The view that I have taken is that they can have their summer holidays a bit early. The weather is lovely and there will be some good grass. Hopefully we might be able to have them back a bit earlier.
“The Flat horses we will keep going as best we can. Hopefully we will be running at the end of April and if not then in May or maybe June. You can’t stop with them at this stage and you just have to continue to prepare.”
O’Brien fully supported the move to put racing behind closed doors earlier this month and was very happy with all the protocols in place at racecourses.
“I have no doubt that it was the right thing and was executed professionally. I’d be hopeful that once the guidelines from government relax a little bit that we might be able to get back racing behind closed doors initially.
“Everyone took it very seriously and personally I thought it was a big success. I think that was the general consensus.”
