Richard O'Brien When I was growing up I always had a real fondness for racing and I tried my hand at riding but wasn’t very good at that and those closest to me felt it would be best if I did something else. They landed on dentistry so I went with it and qualified as a dentist! My cousin, Sean O’Brien, trains in Kilworth so that would have been where I would have cut my teeth with his had and his uncle and Sean was in Joe Crowley’s when I was about 14 and I went down and lived with Sean in Joe’s and worked there for a couple of summers and the bug wouldn’t go away after that. I took a year out after my Leaving Cert and tried to give the point-to-point riding as good a go as I could and I rode a winner pretty quickly but that was it after that — I was pretty hopeless! So I went to college and studied in Cork but always kept an interest with broodmares or a few point-to-pointers and it was always a question of when, not if, I would return to racing. I was just working my way back as quick as I could. A bit more time passed than I expected and it took 12 years from qualifying as a dentist to getting back training properly and now I’m doing both at the moment. I work as a dentist on Thursday’s and Saturday’s and on both of those days I have time in the morning to get the horses done. It is an unusual mix but if you are trying to get started at training racehorses you don’t make a penny at it so the dentistry is something that helped with the household for the last 12-months or so. David O’Meara has had a massive influence on my career. My wife, Norma, went to finish her studies in Edinburgh so we moved there and I had a filly that I was after starting off and doing a bit with myself so I sent her to David O’Meara and that is when I started travelling down to him in Yorkshire. She won a couple of races for him and after a while I asked David if I was to work in Edinburgh three days a week and spent the rest of the week with him and he agreed to it. So I spent Wednesday evenings through to Sunday morning with David, probably for about two and a half years and it went from there. Our parents would have actually known each other from home but myself and David didn’t know each other but now we’d talk regularly about how we do things. We gelled really well and David was always very pointed in teaching me about the obstacles in training racehorses, he has been a wonderful help. At the moment it is kind of like I have to pinch myself with the way my horses are going. All along I was pleased with them but up until recently I thought there was a little bit of unpredictability with them, and I’m sure that will come back, you go through these phases with them, but I couldn’t be happier with them at the moment and we’ve probably become a little bit better at hitting the nail on the head. I’d be pretty adamant that we need to push forward from where we are at now. We need to get the recent winners to last throughout the entire season, we need to get our hands on more horses, to build more boxes and to improve the facilities. It is going to be a case of expanding and investing and keep pushing on. I knew I was never going to be happy if I didn’t give this a go and I wanted to try and make an impact. I never gave the supposed domination in Irish racing any real thought and I still don’t. All I can really concentrate on or have an impact on is the horses we have here. My only worry last year was, when we had a few winners, I just wondered had I been very lucky to land a some very well handicapped horses. I feared that we could just get a rude awakening with more normal horses so my biggest challenge was trying to repeat the winners of last year but hopefully we are doing now. There’s no doubt I wouldn’t have been able to fulfill this dream without my father Willie. He has been the mainstay behind the whole operation and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without him. He has supported us and has put in a lot of hard work and it’s good to know that he can see that it is working. Catherine Dalton has been here with me since the first day and last year we went through an awful hard time trying to get everything done and get the horses to the races and if it wasn’t for her the whole thing would have fallen on its face. She has an incredible work ethic and she has also been a massive part of us getting going. Then in March a chap called Shane Hourigan joined us and he is an excellent rider and that has made a big difference. I was riding them all prior to that and now he allows me the opportunity to stand back to observe the horses more and with his feedback it has translated in much improved results so I’m very grateful to those three people and hopefully the whole thing can keep evolving now.
