A winner all right
It’s the eye that has it — or, rather, an angry red scar beneath the right eye, the ugly-looking war-wound from a nasty fall at Naas. “Two stitches and a bit of glue,” was all it took to put things right, according to Ruby, even though on-lookers at the track initially feared the consequences might be much worse when, having crashed to the turf with King Of The Refs, the full weight of the chasing Boro Bee came down on top of the jockey, grinding the side of his head into the ground.
The incident was variously reported next day as a “nasty fall” and a “Cheltenham scare” but, even as he lay on the turf, Walsh says he knew immediately, from hard-won experience, that the damage would be no more than “superficial”.
Just as, back in November, he instantly knew that he was in for a whole world of trouble when he suffered a terrible fall at Down Royal. It was a day in the life which summed up the roller-coaster nature of a jump jockey’s career. Just an hour earlier, Walsh had won on fellow household name Kauto Star and then followed that up with another win, this time on The Nightingale. “So everything was going hunky dory,” he recalls, as he approached the last fence in the last race on board Corrig Bridge. “And then,” he says, “the horse just got half-way up and turned a cartwheel and the whole weight of him came down on my right leg, between the ankle and the knee.”Ruby’s first thought?
“I didn’t hear the snap but I knew it was broken.”
How?
“(Rueful laugh) It was facing the wrong direction.”
Readers of a squeamish disposition might prefer to look away now. “The first thing I did was I bent over, took the boot off and turned the leg straight. Because the first minute or two, when your body goes straight into shock and you’re warm, that’s the least painful time to do anything. I read that in a book years ago.”
His wife Gillian, who happened to be at the last fence, saw it all at close-quarters. “I was telling her my leg was in shit,” Walsh recalls. “Probably shouting at her. It can’t have been easy for her.”
He is full of praise for the prompt medical attention which saw him attended to on the track, put on a hydration drip, given some morphine, strapped up well and ferried to the Belfast’s Royal Victoria by ambulance. The bone was repositioned on his first night in hospital and the following morning the surgeon recommended the fitting of a Llizarov frame, or external fixator, a Russian invention in which a rigid circular supporting frame is held in place by wires going straight through the leg.
“It’s used for quite bad fractures,” says Walsh. “I’d broken the leg in two places, maybe even three, and it was a spiral fracture going right down into the ankle joint, not to get too technical about it. The frame is commonly used in the north, mostly for motorbike accidents. Smashed legs. The idea is to allow you to put weight on it so, straight away on the Monday, they had me out of bed.”
From Belfast, Ruby was transferred to the care of surgeon David Moore at Tallaght Hospital, attending his clinic from then on. Meanwhile, Ronan O’Gara had been in touch to advise Ruby to consult Irish rugby physio Brian Green who then took charge of the jockey’s rehab. Initially Ruby couldn’t do too much on the leg so Green devised a programme which focused from the off on maintaining his core strength. The gym sessions were tough going but Ruby made steady progress and by Christmas was beginning to “load the leg fully”, as he puts it.
“Brian is good at his job,” he says. “He pushed me as far as I could be pushed without pushing me over the limit. I made progress all the way.”
Indeed, if anything, the psychological challenge proved more difficult than the physical, Walsh tormented by the realisation that he was missing out on the height of the national hunt season — an even more punishing form of purgatory than when he was previously sidelined, from April to August, with a broken arm.
“I watched it all anyway,” he says. “That was down to Gillian as much as anything. She was saying, ‘If you want to ride these horses at Cheltenham, you’ll want to see them run well so you’ll know what’s happening.’ And she was right. Although it hurts, in a selfish way. You’re thinking: ‘that should have been me’. But, then again, if they’re not winning, they’re not good enough. And you have to have something to come back for. So, I’d say I’ve never worked as hard when I’ve been injured. It was constant work. And if, say, I was due to meet the physio on Thursday night and Willie (Mullins) had three winners in Thurles that day — well, you’d just go and take it out on the gym.
“Anyway, there was no point in lying on the couch and pulling the curtains. And I never did feel like doing that. Look, I had a broken leg. I wasn’t dead. Or look at this country and the way it is at the minute. Look at people who are really struggling. Houses, jobs, things like that. I was just injured, not struggling near as bad as other people. Somewhere along the way, you need a bit of perspective. You have to stay in the real world, as well.”
Some of that valuable perspective was also supplied by his daughter Isabelle, who is now 16 months old (And a brother or sister is scheduled for arrival at the end of April).
“She’d always bring a smile to your face. Although for the first six weeks, it must have felt to Gillian like she was looking after two kids. But Isabelle was great. Kids, have to be looked after. They make you get up in the morning. And she was even part of the rehab I did at home — I was using her as a weight (Mimes lifting her above his head). She thought it was great craic.”
Ruby had to wear the external frame for just over 14 weeks. The day it came off is fixed in his mind as the most momentous date on his long road to recovery.
“There is always going to be a worry when it does come off: is it going to be fixed, is it going to be right? And thankfully it was. Mr Moore took the frame off, under anaesthetic, in Blackrock Clinic on a Thursday morning. He put a (surgical) boot on me. And when I got into the car, I took it off. I called into my parents’ house on my way down the road and when I got out of the car and walked from the car to the house without the boot, I knew we were in business.”
And how long before he was back on a horse? “That was a Thursday and I rode on the Saturday morning,” he says with a slightly guilty chuckle. “Well, the doctor said I had to trust my own judgment. He said: listen to the leg. Which was a good way of putting it. Dad has an Equicizer, which is a mechanical horse, so I rode that on the Friday. I was on it again on the Saturday morning and I just thought to myself, ‘ah, f**k it, and I went and tacked up a quiet one and off I went.”
Of course, there will be another cost to pay in the fullness of time, the inevitable payback for a risk-laden career which has seen him dislocate both shoulders, break his right leg twice, dislocate his left hip, break his right hip, suffer crushed vertebrate and sustain a handful of concussions as well as innumerable soft-tissue injuries. Oh, and not forgetting the removal of his spleen after getting kicked in the stomach by a horse in 2008, meaning he will have to take antibiotics for the rest of his life.
So does he also fear an arthritic future? “It’s a gimme, ‘course it is,” he says, matter of factly. “I’ve dislocated my hip, so it’s a gimme it will have to be replaced. Maybe in my late 40s, early 50s. It’s a fact of life. But the body has a great way of forgetting physical pain. Physical pain goes. Mental pain doesn’t. So when you’re talking about life down the line — the mental pain of losing a relative or something like that, that never leaves anybody. Physical pain goes.”
Right now, of course, he’s not thinking any further down the line than today and this week. It’s all eyes, including Ruby’s bashed-up one, on Prestbury Park. The bookies already have him 11/8 favourite to be crowned top jockey for a sixth time while the romantics would love if, for the third time, he could steer Kauto Star to Gold Cup triumph.
“What would it mean to me? (Long pause). I guess it would mean the shit of the last 11 months was worth it. Although any winner will make the effort and support worth it. But Kauto winning would be the fairytale.”
But is it not enough just to be taking part this week? Ruby Walsh narrows his eyes. “Amateur sport is about taking part,” he says. “Professional sport is about winning. Taking part doesn’t do me any good. It’s all about winning.”
