Racing’s quiet man set for fond farewell
Noel Fehily retires as a professional jump jockey today, having enjoyed a scintillating career. The 43-year-old explains why he’s getting out now and doing so with no regrets
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The plaudits have been raining down on Noel Fehily since he caught everyone unawares by announcing his retirement, while still at the peak of his powers, as a professional jump jockey. He would appreciate them, but be embarrassed too. Ideally, he would have slipped out the back door, but he was too good to be allowed to do that. It always seemed incongruous that the least-flash pilot you could think of would have a fan page on Twitter, dedicated to extolling his brilliance as a rider and his many generous interactions with racegoers. A service was done by @FehilyFans, because too often — as the man from Dunmanway, Co Cork, calmly added another major prize to the CV that burgeoned so dramatically in the past decade — his part in proceedings was overlooked.
It isn’t that jump jockeys are brash by nature, but Fehily never said anything that would hit a headline. He never blamed anyone, never seemed to get angry or frustrated, though of course he must have. Post-race debriefs didn’t provide juicy copy, sensational in a positive or negative sense, and it often seemed to mean his own endeavours went, if not unappreciated, then under the radar. As Brendan Powell Jnr hinted at, when declaring the above quote his favourite Fehily utterance, that is how the 43-year-old would have liked it.
It is why he is not going for some lengthy farewell either. He appreciates the good wishes, the guard of honour by jockeys at Cheltenham following his announcement, and the one that he will get today at Newbury. It just makes him a little uncomfortable. The only time he ever wanted to be under the spotlight was when riding winners and only for as long as it took for the next race to come along.
“If I hadn’t made the announcement, I would probably have carried on as normal like I had done for the previous two weeks or however long it was [since I made the decision]” Fehily reflects ahead of today’s final fling. “But it is the fact that I did ride a winner [that] I made the announcement. I didn’t want to carry on too long and just be talking about it. Could I go to Aintree and ride at Aintree, but I don’t really want to go into Aintree after announcing it. Rightly or wrongly, it’s just the way I wanted to do it. I am not saying I hate [the reaction], but I just don’t like a fuss being made. It was a nice thing the lads did and everything else, but I wouldn’t be one for having a fuss over me.”
The winner in question, a 50-1 shot Eglantine Du Seuil in the Mares’ Novices’ Hurdle, had a touch of fate about it, if you believe in those things. It was that type of ride hailed a masterclass when you get up by a short head as Fehily did to deny another Willie Mullins-trained mare Concertista. Had the lollipop been placed two strides earlier, it would have been Danny Mullins being lauded... and the retirement would have been postponed.
“Absolutely brilliantly judged,” says Fehily, before breaking into a laugh. "They did go very, very fast. She’d been a bit keen going to post, so I thought I’d take my time. After two out, I was thinking: ‘They’ve gone so hard, there’s no way that all of these are going to keep going.’ I was planning on trying to nick plenty of prizemoney, but luckily we nicked it all.”
To do it in the colours of Jared Sullivan, for whom he had ridden Silviniaco Conti to six Grade One pots, including two King Georges, and been an adviser — he doesn’t like the term racing manager — was the icing on the cake.
“That was fantastic, because I have been riding for him a long time, I have ridden a lot of good horses for him and to ride my last Festival winner for Jared worked out really well."
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Natasha Fehily painted a very stark picture during a television interview last week. She had to be cut short by ITV’s Alice Plunkett with the next race — her husband’s last ever at Cheltenham — almost upon us. But we got the picture. Fehily had missed a fortnight in January after having keyhole surgery to remove his appendix, but at the beginning of February, he suffered complications and was sidelined for another period. His wife lifted the lid on the pain he was in throughout it all, her helplessness as he lay writhing on the ground, and the decision to bring him to the hospital herself when the promised ambulance had still not arrived.
“Yeah, the pain was absolutely horrific. It was as bad as any pain I ever had. At the time, I didn’t know what the problem was. I went into hospital and found out it was the appendix fairly quickly and had the operation, but that wasn’t the end of it either. I ended up getting infections, and then I came back out and then I had more complications, where the intestine got attached to the scar tissue where they removed the appendix from. Then, when I was eating, it was getting blocked. It was just ongoing. I couldn’t stop being sick for a week, it was just horrendous.
“I was very ill. Every day you are thinking it is going to get better tomorrow, but it wasn’t getting better tomorrow. It was dragging on and it dragged on an awful lot longer. I was very ill. I lost an awful lot of weight. I was very weak and light. It took a long while to rebuild after that. It knocked me back plenty. Even now, every day I am stronger. It takes a while, it took a lot out of me. It was fairly severe.”
You can delude yourself about injury and Fehily knows all about those. You forget pain. As Ruby Walsh once said, if a mother can decide to have another child after going through labour once, you’d get over a broken leg very quickly. This was different, though, particularly coming on the back of a broken neck suffered at Punchestown last April.
I probably would have kept going. I could easily have pulled the plug at the end of last season. It was never on my mind to do it. I had ridden over 100 winners, things had gone well and I wasn’t ready to walk away then. Then I broke my neck and wanted to come back and get going again.
"I didn’t want to walk away after breaking my neck. I wanted to get going again. Then the plan was to ride until the end of the season and see how it was going at the end of the season, if I wanted to go again or not. If I had gone straight through and everything was going well, then I might have carried on. When I got ill and I was facing an operation at some stage that would have ruled me for the rest of the season, then the thought of coming back again in the summer, starting from scratch again after a long while off… it gets harder every time you have a break, to come back, get fitter and come back again. Every time you do that, it is harder. The thought of doing that again through the summer and going for another year, that made me think: ‘I’m not sure if I can do that again.’”
Once the thought was conceived, even for a man of Fehily’s undoubted physical and mental constitution, there was no turning back. He could leave, and he could leave a happy man.
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The Cork accent remains very evident, despite spending the majority of his life in England. He lives in Lambourn with Natasha and their two children, Niamh, six, and Michael, four. They are, he reckons, very aware of their Rebel roots.
“They have been back often enough, anyway. They do know plenty. They love going back to see their cousins, going home to Cork.”
While Michael is too young to weigh it all up, Niamh has been taking in events of the last week or so and has legitimate concerns.
“She was worried about me retiring. She was worried about her Christmas presents.”
He departs on top. That’s nice. He won’t get anywhere near the 100 winners he recorded the previous three seasons and in four of the last five, but a broken neck, dodgy appendix, and all that came with that, placed a few spanners in those works. At 43, he is riding as well as ever. Eglantine Du Seuil told you that. So too, getting Capone up by a nose for one of his earliest believers, Charlie Mann, at Huntingdon on Tuesday. Mann gave him a job as an amateur in 1998 after a short stint with David Nicholson failed to amount to anything. He maintained a close relationship with the Berkshire handler when becoming Jonjo O’Neill’s second jockey, but injury scuppered that opportunity.
He was 22 when he joined Mann, already late to the party. He became champion conditional three years later. The first Cheltenham winner came on Silver Jaro for Tom Hogan in the County Hurdle in 2008, the maiden Grade One on the Mann-trained Air Force One a few weeks later. It says a lot about his perseverance that he was 32 by now and his best days were ahead of him. His remaining 26 Grade One triumphs have come this decade. Many of them were provided by Paul Nicholls, who turned to him when Ruby Walsh was injured. He got on well with the prodigious Master Minded to win the Amlin and Tingle Creek, but, having not been long back from crushed vertebrae and a dislocated collarbone, he was trying to ignore a wrist problem. In the end, he couldn’t, even though he was being lined up to be legged up on the legendary Kauto Star in the King George.
“I’d have crawled around a room full of broken glass to ride Kauto Star,” he said in the Sunday Independent, but instead he had an operation and was out for nine months. That turn of events probably denied him the position as Nicholls’ retained pilot, when Walsh opted to end his association with Ditcheat.
“Obviously, I was absolutely in pieces at the time,” Fehily recalled in The Irish Field. “When the doctors told me that I would be out a minimum of six months when they operated, I thought: ‘I’ll be doing well to come back from this.’ When you’re off that long you soon get forgotten in this game and I thought I’d be doing well to come back from it, let alone come back to ride nice horses, so I was distraught about it at the time, but I’ve never looked back on it and thought ‘what if?’ and I’m glad I don’t. I’d probably be bitter if I did. You’ve got to move on. It’s done. You can’t do anything about it.”
Move on he did. Nicholls didn’t forget him and supplied the ride on Rock On Ruby to win the Champion Hurdle in 2012. From then to now, he has been mainstream. There was another Champion Hurdle, on Buveur D’Air in 2017 and, when he followed up on the Wednesday with Sizing Tiara in the Champion Chase (“growing up that is the race that every jump jockey wants to win”), he was the first pilot in 46 years to bag the opening two championship contests.
Silviniaco Conti, Unowhatimeanharry, and Summerville Boy were others to benefit from his quiet, Walshesque style. He even attended to the chasing education of the mighty Altior, guiding Nicky Henderson’s world record holder to his first three successes over the larger obstacles.
“Yeah, made him what he is,” he drawls. “Ran away with it three times!”
Central to his approach and becoming the elder statesman of the weigh room was an emphasis on fitness. It wasn’t there from the start, but by his mid-20s, he was an advocate at a time when many jockeys viewed themselves as horsemen, not athletes.
“You would never see a jockey running the track or anything like that back then. It was unheard of. There was no racing on a Sunday, they turned up drunk on a Monday and go from there. That is the way it was. Different times. It will change more over the next few years. Some of the lads in their 20s now, they are getting so much better looked after starting out than we were. It won’t be long until you see jump jockeys riding up until the best part of 50. The whole thing has changed. Fitness and diet and physios; there are physios on every racecourse now. I am not sure how long that is there, but probably no longer than five, six or seven years. That makes a big difference. Jockeys are just looking after themselves so much more than when we were starting out.”
Harry Fry, with whom he has had a long and fruitful relationship going back to Rock On Ruby, when Fry was directly in control of the horse’s training as an assistant to Nicholls, will provide him with his last ride this evening at Newbury on the potentially high-class Get In The Queue. It would be something else to go out on a winner at his local track, with his parents Mick and Joan, family and friends around. But being able to walk away is the thing, particularly when the injuries remained a constant. Two years before the broken neck, he was airlifted from Newton Abbott with no feeling in his legs and arms, after fracturing two vertebrae between his shoulder blades and suffering spinal shock.
He isn’t sure what he’ll do, except he won’t go into training. He hasn’t discussed a continuation of his unofficial role with Sullivan, but has plenty to keep him going, with more than 20 young horses at home. True to his nature, he isn’t stressing. One imagines that Natasha must be pleased, though.
“Yeah, but at the same time, since we have been together, it is all she has known, and all I have known. It is going to be a different way of life, and will be strange for a few weeks and months, but obviously she is glad I am getting out in one piece. It is going to be a shock to the system. Life is going to be very different. I have been in the same routine for the last 20 years, day-in, day-out. Life is going to be different, but hopefully something is going to come around the corner and we will get our teeth stuck into that.”
Former Ireland and Munster rugby star, Donncha O’Callaghan spoke about yearning for the camaraderie of the dressing room after his retirement. Fehily concurs.
“I will miss it like crazy. It has been a great way of life, and I will miss it big time. I will miss the weigh room the most, dealing with the craic and banter in the weigh room every day, seeing the same lads every day. Luke Harvey always describes it as a pub with no beer and that’s exactly it. It’s just great banter every day and we have great time in there. Everyone looks out for each other and I will miss all of that.”
After such a lengthy and successful career, though, the nub of it all is he got to make the call.
“Yeah, that’s it. If I had been forced out at the end of last year, I wasn’t ready. That would have been disappointing. I am happier to do it this way around. I am ready now.”
