Ross O'Sullivan

They were saying that was the worst snow since 1982, the year I was born, and I hope it is another 35 years before we have anything like it again. If you talk to anyone in racing they’ll tell you how hard the last week was but everyone was in the same boat.

At a time when the Workplace Relations are topical, if people took videos and photos of racing stables during the last week they’d have seen that we are very much an agricultural sector. People were walking through snow covered fields with water and feed for horses, standing over taps trying to defrost them, clearing the way to access stables, it was fairly full on but the staff all did their best to get in to us and some of them had to walk lengthy distances because the roads were impassable. It certainly makes you appreciate the nicer days.

Talking to most people over the last few days I think everyone was in a very similar situation and treated last Friday like a Sunday and gave horses an easy day because there was just so much snow it was impossible to get all the horses out.

After spending five or six years renting, I recently moved into my own place in Kill, just across the road from Goffs and with easy access to the likes of The Curragh and it’s working out really well thankfully.

We put in a 33 stable barn with a couple of isolation boxes outside and our first two runners, Doonard Prince and Call It Magic, both won, so it was a great start and it seems to be working out really well.

It’s a barn that is easy to manage, the horses seem really happy in it, there’s plenty of air in it, air circulation is very important now when you are building a new barn and when the horses switched over, they seemed to settle in very quickly which is the most important thing.

Renting was a good way to start off because it allowed me to see if I was going to enjoy training horses and it was going to be the correct career, rather than plunging straight in and then suddenly realising that training wasn’t for you.

Racing was always going to be my thing though and it didn’t take long for me to start planning and thinking about getting my own place and now it is fantastic to have it and everything we put into it is our own and we can look forward to trying to continually expand it in the future.

Home for me is the Curragh and we didn’t have stables but we always used to keep horses with a neighbour, Chally Chute, and once I was 16 I got my amateur licence and then we swapped the ponies for the racehorses and we always had a horse or two to run for me to get a few rides and get a bit of experience and one of those was a mare called Commedia who won a four-year-old bumper first time out and gave me my first ever winner.

Commedia was only my fourth ride on the track so from that day the bug had bitten me and both my parents, Ann and Johnny, would have been a major influence on my career.

I would have rode out for Peter McCreery and John Mulhern but I spent five years working for Jessica Harrington and I was lucky enough to be there at the same time as some very good horses like Moscow Flyer and I won a bumper on Macs Joy.

When I finished school Jessica Harrington’s was like college for me!

I loved it there. She was a tough woman but I learnt a lot from her. Since then the yard has just grown and grown. It’s actually a place that I probably didn’t really appreciate at the time I was there because I was so young and it was later on that I appreciated how good a trainer she is, but she is a remarkable woman. When I got there she might have had 80 horses and 10 of those would have been flat horses, max, and now there’s 150 there split nearly half and half. She’s some woman.

Then I was fortunate enough to spend time with Colm Murphy during some of his very good years too and I won a couple of bumpers on Feathard Lady.

Now my hope is to have a runner in the Irish Grand National on Easter Monday and the English Grand National on April 14. Both Call It Magic and Baie Des Iles are owned by the same lady, Zorka Wentworth, who has been very good to both myself and my wife, Katie, and to have these two horses is just a dream.

Baie Des Iles will go straight to the English National and this has been the plan since the start of the year. She’s best fresh and it’ll be very exciting just to have a runner in it and to have my wife riding it adds that extra bit of excitement. It’ll be my first runner in the race but Katie has plenty of experience around there and you never know what might happen.

Call It Magic will run in the Irish National. He has won five for us, two this season, and he’ll have a nice weight down the bottom and while all the focus is on Cheltenham at the moment, it’s very exciting to be looking forward to both Nationals.

Both races are a bit away yet, so in racing anything can happen and we have to get both horses there first but I couldn’t be happier with both of them at the moment. I’ve got my fingers and toes and everything crossed that we all get there in one piece, everything goes smoothly and then see what happens.

National Hunt racing was always my love growing up but I really do enjoy the Flat as well and we’ve got a nice mix in the yard now of horses for both codes as well as some breakers and pre-trainers and I love having them all because it helps the yard work well.

We’ve got five staff here now and with having all those different types of horses it just allows us to be busy all year round and not having to let staff go and then try and find new staff when you get busy again.

The yard is going well and we’ve room for any type of horse and the aim is to continually add bits and pieces we learn over time and keep improving and upping the standards and hopefully continuing to improve the quality of the horses.

Like everyone with a passion for jump racing I can’t wait for Cheltenham next week. I came close to a winner there when I was riding, finishing third on Cheeky Lady for Colm Murphy and second on Openide for Brendan Duke, both in the Kim Muir. It would have been nice to get one there but I’ll get just as much of a kick if Katie can ride another winner there next week. I’d get an even bigger kick if I could train a National winner though!