Michael Halford

There’s great excitement around our yard this week, the Irish Derby is such a huge race and we are really looking forward to having a runner in it.

I am local to the Curragh and it means a lot to have a runner in the Irish Derby and the team in the yard are every bit excited as I am that Platinum Warrior is going there and deserves to be going there.

Derby weekend itself is always a wonderful occasion but to be involved in the main race is exciting and it would be rare for yards like ourselves to have runners in the race so we are going to enjoy it.

I have been training 35 years and it is 13 years this August that we bought the land where we are now and turned it from a green field into Copper Beech Stables and you have to be ambitious in this game. There is no such thing as standing still and if you are not trying to go forward you are going backwards.

Another big plus when we moved was that we were able to keep our same staff and our same back up, like farriers, vets etc.. and we’ve got a great team of owners around us as well which is very important.

We moved with the intention to get the best horses we could and train for the best owners we could and it is all about getting the quality of horses.

In recent years Fabian Burke joined us and is my assistant and I would deal directly with him a lot and he is a massive help to me but we’ve a great team behind that too and there is always a great buzz in the place which is good. A lot of our staff have been with me an awful long time.

Ken Condon and Jessica Harrington have highlighted it this year but all around the country there are numerous good trainers in Ireland that if they had the stock they would be well capable of training them — and that is across both codes.

We built a state of the art facility and we put everything we could into the place with the intention of getting our hands on the best horses we could and doing the best with those horses so it is nice when you do come up with good horses like Platinum Warrior.

Touch wood, Platinum Warrior is a very straightforward horse to do anything with and his preparation has gone really well and we’ve had no worries or headaches on that front and that is always a big help.

This will be my second runner in the Derby and my first one was 32 years ago! Fighting Hard was my first runner in the race and it wasn’t necessarily the plan. He was owned by Seamus Purcell, who owned the good two mile chaser Buck House, and he won his maiden first time out for us at Roscommon and Seamus called me to talk to me about running him in the Derby.

Mouse Morris had him as a yearling and I didn’t even know that he had been entered in the race as a yearling so Seamus said ‘why not have a go and a day out’ so we did and we had good fun. Gabriel Curran, God be good to him, rode the horse and he didn’t make a show of us but he didn’t get involved.

I was born and reared down the road from the Curragh so it is huge to have a runner in the Derby. My father was the farrier at the Curragh for years and I remember sitting on the wall and watching the cars of people going to the Derby and there was always great excitement around. It goes back a long way and it was always an ambition to have a decent runner in the race and the Curragh is a special place.

Having my 1,000th winner at the Curragh was an amazing day really. I hadn’t a clue how many winners I had trained, I genuinely wouldn’t know even how many winners I had this season because I am just concentrating on doing our best on a day to day basis, but to train 1,000 winners was a lovely landmark.

And you couldn’t have really wrote the script. It came at my local track, in a Group race, with Platinum Warrior going on to run in the Derby and with Shane Foley riding it after having a long association with us and the icing on the cake was that the whole family was there on the day. It would be most unusual to get us all together at a race meeting with the kids having their ponies and Louise with showjumpers, it is rare, so it couldn’t have worked out better.

We are looking forward to Saturday. Obviously it is a massive task with the calibre of horses in the race, Saxon Warrior and whatever else Aidan decides to run as well as Dee Ex Bee who was second in the Epsom Derby and he is obviously a high class horse. It looks a very good race and we are delighted to be part of it.