Jarlath Fahey

We have our sights trained on the weather round the clock at the moment and seeing the rain cascading down at Royal Ascot has not had us jumping with joy.

We are planning on running Sea The Lion in the Duke Of Edinburgh Stakes on Friday but we definitely wouldn’t want it to continue to rain.

He is going well. We have him as fit as we can have him given it’s his first run of the season. He seems in good form. His last two bits of work have been good. We are just hoping that the weather comes right for us. Thursday and Friday are supposed to improve but it’s hard to know. The drainage is very good at the track but we need the rain to stop.

We were very lucky to get our hands on a horse of his calibre. He didn’t run as a two-year-old when with Michael Halford and owned by his breeder, John Connaughton. He won a three-year-old maiden at the Curragh but broke down then and was off the track for almost three years.

John gave him to Tom Whelan to look after at Churchview Stables after he got injured and he became a bit domesticated then so he left him with him. Tom pre-trained the horse for a while and then sent him onto me. We took a share in him and he runs in the colours of Tom’s wife Kathleen and my wife Suzanne.

He is very much a young eight-year-old as a result of being so long off the track. He has very low mileage, and is a great strong horse. To win as a three-year-old was probably a good achievement by him and showed the potential he had.

He won two-in-a-row for us in his first season back and then last year, won three on the trot at Leopardstown, Cork and the Curragh, where he was winning the Ragusa Handicap for a second consecutive season.

He followed that up with a brilliant run when third in the Ebor at York, when he was only beaten five lengths and that is the ultimate aim for this year if we can get into it. On all we have seen to date, he has been improving and we are just hoping that he is still improving this year for the assignments ahead of him.

He is rated 104 so there are no premier handicaps in Ireland for him without carrying 10-4 or 10-5 on his back. We knew we were going to have to look to England for their heritage handicaps. He is fit and ready now and Royal Ascot just came up.

It wasn’t Plan A. The plan is to try and keep him racing where he is or increase it a little bit to make sure he gets back into the Ebor this year. But Royal Ascot is Royal Ascot and we will take anything we can get there.

We have wonderful memories of Jennies Jewel winning the Ascot Stakes three years ago and it is as fresh in our memory as if it was yesterday. She was the only horse we had in the yard that was worth putting into that calibre of racing and to have one as good as she was was something else. You need the good horses to get the publicity.

She was so versatile, she also won a Grade 3 chase and a big handicap hurdle. She was brilliant for us.

So it’s great to be able to see her every day. The owners are breeding from her but we have her on the farm. Her yearling by Walk In The Park is there and she has a Shirocco at foot. She is out there with the cattle. It’s like therapy going down to see her every day.

We have about 15 in horses in training. We are a family-run business and our overheads aren’t big so we we don’t need a large number of horses to make it viable. We have our own gallops and stables. I do a bit of farming along the way as well.

My mother and father were into pony racing. Myself and the other brothers Seamus, Peter and Paul were the first generation to go into horse racing, first riding and then training.

We have had plenty of good days and it was nice that Maunganui won at Sligo on Tuesday. That is a boost ahead of what will hopefully be a trip to Ascot.

As I said, the Ebor is the main priority and what we do after this will depend on how he gets on. If he runs to his mark or improves a little bit, we mightn’t run before the Ebor again. If he doesn’t we will have to run him again.

Going to Royal Ascot you would like to have a prep run into him. But he is as fit and as we can have him. He won last year on his first run out. The previous year he was unluckily third in his first run in Killarney after three years off the track. He can be forward on his reappearance. We have him as forward as we can.