Norman’s Wisdom
For Norman Williamson it certainly had been an action-packed day. Newly returned to ply his trade in Ireland on a full-time basis, Thurles represents a new reality for a man who has long been regarded as being one of the most stylish practitioners of his trade.
A fall while schooling a horse in the morning; a fall from Just In Debt at the second last in the three mile Chase and no winner from six rides. A new reality indeed.
"Take today a typical sort of day all work and no winner," he smiles. "In England you have a day like that and you can go out the next day or the day after and get a winner, but here you can't. You just sort of have to sit back and chill out a bit."
Norman is chilling in the antiquated dressing room, ruminating on his move home. As he gets dressed after his eventful, if fruitless, afternoon, it is hard not to miss the ruin that is his lower right leg. It looks, quite frankly, like someone took a sledgehammer to it. "Occupational hazard," he smiles.
It broke in two places as a result of a fall in Punchestown last April and Norman rubs it gingerly as he recalls the pain. A large lump, roughly the size of a child's fist, indicates where the bones snapped and knitted again.
He looks down at it dispassionately. "They say it is bone which has grown over it, so it shouldn't break again." The laugh that follows drips with irony.
"It was nasty and it was very sore up 'til about three weeks ago, but now it feels fine. I haven't started running yet, but I will do soon. I broke a thighbone a couple of years ago and that only took three months to heal, but this took a good bit longer. They say that once it happens to you below the knee it gets a bit tricky."
The incident coincided with his decision to abandon his career in England and return to his roots in Ireland with his wife Janet, but he says that the break was not the deciding factor. "No, it wasn't instrumental in my coming home. I'd been thinking about it for twelve months before I decided to do it. At the time I did the leg I was thinking about it anyway but that did not make the decision. I suppose it made the decision easier. I was in Ireland for the summer anyway and was recuperating and it was then that I made the decision to come home for good.
"I was here so much anyway. I was here every Sunday and the odd day during the week and I was also home for June, July, August and most of September because the people I was riding for over in England didn't have runners during the summer.
"Edward O'Grady has a great team of horses and, while I didn't take a job as first jockey with him, I was hopeful I'd still ride them. So that, along with the prizemoney being so good and what with not having to ride seven days a week, all added up to me deciding to come home.
Norman was riding in Ireland most Sundays for the last two years anyway and, as he says, "you can't ride for someone on a Saturday in the UK and tell them you can't ride for them on Monday." It got to the stage where his big day of the week was Sunday and having to go back and do Plumptons and Fontwells on a Monday, well, he just didn't want to do it anymore.
"No, that's wrong," he says. "It was not that I didn't want to do it, I'd been doing it for ten or 11 years and I'd had enough of it. This arrangement is much more sensible."
He's taken aback when reminded that his first winner in pony racing was a little machine called Little Boy Blue "Jesus, where did you pull that one from!" but those are days he remembers fondly and which ultimately shaped his stellar career.
But did he think then that he could have achieved what he has achieved to date?
"No you never thought like that back in those days and there were plenty of hard years in between. When I first went over it took me two or three years to get to grips with it, but it turned out well.
"The late Gerald O'Donovan in Bandon trained me and he was probably the biggest influence on my career. I had worked with PP Hogan and served my time with Dermot Weld. I learned a lot from both of them, but Gerald O'Donovan saw me riding in point to points and stood by me. He was the one who told John Edwards about me. He was a great backer. He took me to Cheltenham for the first time and you don't forget things like that.
"But going to England was tricky. At that time you couldn't really go over there and come back because if you did come back, you were a failure really. John Edwards saw me at a point to point in Carrigtwohill and he asked me to go over. I went over for the Cheltenham of 1988 and rode for him there. I rode for him a few times after and he offered me a job and I went over.
"But about six or eight months afterwards I came home again. I was very homesick, when I went over, I found it a lot tougher than I thought. A lot of good lads had gone over and were getting on fine and chalking up maybe 30 winners in a season and my first year there I only had 10 winners so I had to sit back think about it.
"I realised that I couldn't rush it and that I had to work at it. But it was very difficult because I had been doing so well at home and I thought I shouldn't have to wait for success to happen for me. But there was a pecking order and you had to be patient and wait for things to happen."
NORMAN'S big break came went he went to Kim Bailey's yard. "I'd ridden a few good winners before then for John Edwards, but he didn't have so many good horses. John actually wanted me to go to Nicky Henderson and I went and had an interview with him, but it turned out that I would not have been able to ride horses like Travado or Remittance Man because Richard Dunwoody still had the ride.
"Typical Lambourn, though where everyone knows everything I was driving out the gate of Henderson's and the phone rang and it was Kim and he said, "you're in Lambourn, come over and see me". So I drove straight over there and he said to me 'you can have the job and you can ride every single horse I have.' I took it straight away.
"It was a good move for me and it was good for Mick Fitzgerald as well, because he was in the door to Henderson after me and he was happy to take the job without the two good horses, but he worked hard at it and that got him where he is today.
"I'm happy I went with Kim Bailey at the time and even though there's lot of stories about all sorts of things that happened, we ended up great pals and we had some tremendous winners between us, including a Gold Cup and a Champion Hurdle. But there were a lot of other things as well I rode my first 100 winners in a season for him and we were a great partnership. I think I rode over 300 winners for him.
"I left Kim and I'd had a bad spell with injuries. I broke my leg and I dislocated my shoulder a couple of times and Venetia Williams was just beginning to get going. I was riding a few here and there for her and it just seemed natural for me to team up with her. She's a remarkably shrewd woman and I suppose Teeton Mill was the best thing that happened for us.
"He won at Wincanton and I felt he'd run well in the Hennessy. He hacked up in that and I said he'd win a King George and he hacked up in that too. He was a tremendous horse and, while Venetia has had loads of winners since, she's lacked a horse of that class since. Indeed, if she had a Teeton Mill last season or a Champion Hurdle horse, I'd probably still be in England.
"But I felt I had to make a decision about my future and, oddly enough, getting married had nothing to do with it. Indeed my wife didn't want to come back at all. We were settled over there I'd been there most of my adult life and she'd been there two or three years and we were settled. She thought I was mad coming back to Ireland, but at the same time she's happy now.
"We haven't been here that long and while obviously I'm going to end up living in Ireland and I would hope that I'd start to do something else on the off days. We haven't even bought a house yet, so we are a long way from being settled yet, but I have an eye on the future.
"Retirement is a bit away yet, but you have to think about it. I'm 34 in January, so it is not going to last forever and you have to realise these things. I don't know what I might be interested in. There's plenty of opportunities and I've done a lot of television, so that's something I might get into more, but it's not as if I'm retiring next year or even the year after that, for that matter. At the same time it is one step closer."
Any top sportsman enjoys competition and Norman is no different. "It's very very competitive here in Ireland with Ruby (Walsh), Barry (Geraghty), Paul (Carbery), David Casey and even Charlie (Swan) over hurdles, so it can be hard to get on good horses here right now, so I'm very lucky I'm riding for Edward O'Grady because he has a good team of horses."
The bumper last year in Cheltenham was indicative of how good Irish horses are at present, Norman was second, controversially, on Rhinestone Cowboy for Jonjo O'Neill, touched off by O'Grady's Pizzaro. The thing is, Norman rides both this year.
"I rode Over the Bar to in the Sun Alliance, Pizzaro won the Bumper, Rhinestone Cowboy was second and Back in Front (also O'Grady) was third. For me now it is a matter of staying on them if I can, but it's working out at the moment anyway."
For now however, Norman is enjoying his new reality. It has been a big change and change is not always easy.
"Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday you're thinking, 'Shit, I should be over there,' and it is very difficult to sit back and say 'no' to offers. I was over there recently for a few ordinary rides at an ordinary meeting and I was doing my business and I thought to myself, 'That's why I'm in back Ireland.' It's not so much riding novice chasers or other bad horses, it's the hassle travelling and getting there. I hope to be there for the big meetings obviously and everyone would but it's hard when people ring you and say 'I think this will win' and you say 'no'. That's a difficult thing to do, but as soon as I get things up and running over here, that will keep me out of harm's way.
"A lot of people in England think it was a crazy move, but I'm not riding as much, there's a great class of horse here, it is very competitive and the prize money is better. In England I'd have had another two seasons. Riding here I hope I'll have more."
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