Andrew and Robbie McNamara: Brothers in arms

They have always been there for each other, so the months after Robbie McNamara’s life-changing fall were traumatic for his brother Andrew too. Now the close pair, who enjoyed sparkling riding careers, are about to go their separate ways, as they embark on training careers.

Robbie is happy to sit on the sofa there, beside Andrew. Sure enough, nimble as you like, he flicks himself out of his wheelchair and onto the couch before you have the chance to feel even a little awkward about helping or not helping, before you have even had the chance to offer to help. His brother sits down beside him, same smiles, similar blue shirts, same team, same hymn sheet.

“I remember looking at my legs after the fall,” Robbie is saying, “and they wouldn’t work. But it didn’t even register with me. I was just in so much pain in my chest. I couldn’t breathe, and I was more worried about that than my legs.

“Even when I got to Wexford Hospital, they were asking me to move my toes, and I couldn’t, but I couldn’t really think about that, I was just trying to breathe. It wasn’t until about three days later that I realised I was paralysed.”

It was on April 10 this year that Robbie McNamara’s life changed. The actual fall from Bursledon in that handicap hurdle at Wexford was not that hard, but the impact of the horse behind him was. Like a juggernaut hitting you at full speed, he tells you. He means physically, but he could mean metaphorically too.

Andrew was riding in the same race.

“My horse had made a terrible mistake earlier,” he says. “So I ended up wide of Robbie. But for that, it actually could have been me who would have come up behind Robbie. I don’t really remember much about it after the race. They told me that Robbie had taken a bad fall. They kind of said to me, ‘It’s fine, you should ride for the rest of the day.’

“I knew they were very worried, that it was very serious, but I thought that I should ride on. I knew if I stopped riding, it would frighten the life out of everyone. So, for the sake of calm, for our parents, for our cousins, I decided to continue riding for the day. There wasn’t anything that I was going to be able to do at the hospital anyway.”

Broken ribs, collapsed lung. For two hours, Robbie couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t get his lungs to expand.

“I don’t think Robbie realised it at the time. We certainly didn’t realise it, but for about two or three days, they were afraid he would die. His lung was inflated in Wexford, but even after he was moved to the Mater in Dublin, they were still afraid he would die.”

“I remember bits of all of that,” Robbie replies. “I remember being in Wexford, and I remember them moving me to Dublin. When we got to the Mater, I remember telling them not to move me to the right, that there was nothing holding my right side together. Then they went to move me onto the spinal board, they still moved me to my right. My skin moved, my arm moved, but my body didn’t move. It was like picking up a bag with knives in it. I’ll never forget the pain. I don’t remember a lot about those days, but I remember that. I’ll never forget that.”

There was pain and there was reality.

“In the Mater, I had a little bit of feeling in my left hip, and I was thinking, ‘The feeling is coming back.’ But actually, that feeling was probably there all along. I was giving myself false hope. There was a little bit of spinal shock that might have worn off a small bit. I knew after two weeks. You’re still hoping, and that hope didn’t do me much good. You’d be waking up every day, hoping for a miracle. Once you accepted it, it was a lot easier.”

People who followed Robbie on Twitter would have been encouraged by positive messages and photos. “I don’t know if it was denial really. I think I was on so many drugs, it generally didn’t bother me. It was probably only after about five weeks that reality really set it. Spinal shock can last up to five weeks, and that coincided with the drugs wearing off. I was being weaned off them. I’d say either one of those on their own would have been tough, but the two together made it very difficult.” There was also the combination of the mental and the physical.

“When you are paralysed, you have to retrain your bowel and your bladder. That started in Dun Laoghaire and lasted a fortnight. That was just about the toughest thing I ever had to do in my life. I’ve got the hang of it now thank God. If it was just sitting in a chair and not being able to walk, you’d deal with that, but that was the toughest thing. That would break any man.”

Throw in the guilt he felt when he saw those closest to him struggling, parents Andrew and Kathleen, siblings Andrew and Elizabeth. They are a closeknit family. You can see it even in the warmth of the interaction between the two brothers as they sit in front of you on the sofa.

“We went through it all at a completely different time to Robbie,” says Andrew. “They call it a grieving process. We went through it immediately, while Robbie was drugged out of it. Me personally, I was probably starting to come around to the idea just when it was starting to hit him.”

The brothers speak with candour, with pragmatism. There is no hint of self-pity, no effort to play the victim, but nor is there an effort to dress anything up for what it isn’t. The incredibly sad reality is that their family had been through it all before with John Thomas McNamara, Andrew and Robbie’s first cousin, in March 2013.

The McNamara brothers have always been close. There was that obligatory period every person who has been an elder sibling goes through, when Robbie was Andrew’s annoying little brother. Even as kids they were tight.

“Andy wouldn’t really have said too much when I was growing up,” says Robbie. “He used to beat me up more than anything else. I remember he threw me out over the bottom of the bed one day and I hurt my back. Maybe it’s a bit ironic now, but I remember running down the stairs to my mother shouting that I was paralysed.”

“He was an annoying little fellow,” says Andrew. “He always wanted to be a jockey, but he didn’t think he would ever make it. He was small and fat. He grew about 6in and lost about two stone within a year.”

They both had sparkling riding careers. Andrew turned professional a week after winning the novices’ championship. He could have done whatever he wanted. The 515 points in his Leaving Certificate easily secured him a place on a computers and maths degree programme in Limerick, but gradually horses and racing trumped college.

It is difficult to pick a high point of Andrew’s riding career. Push him though, and two stand out: Newmill in the Queen Mother Champion Chase at Cheltenham in 2006, and Beef Or Salmon winning the Hennessy Gold Cup in 2007, when he got up to beat The Listener in the final strides.

For Robbie, it was all about Cheltenham 2014. “I’d probably built Cheltenham up a bit too much in my own head,” he says. “To ride a winner at Cheltenham. I’d ridden a good few fancied horses there, Rite Of Passage, Elegant Concorde, Abbeybraney, Becauseicouldntsee. It was the one thing. I’d say if I had had a winner ridden at Cheltenham, I’d have stopped riding two or three years ago. Honestly. There were years there when I’d be starting off again, at the start of the season, when I’d be having to lose weight, and the big thing that kept me going was the thought of riding a winner at Cheltenham.”

It meant a lot to Andrew that his brother would break that duck too. “If you’d asked me a few years ago if I gave a shit whether or not Robbie rode a winner at Cheltenham, I’d have said no, I’d much prefer if I rode another one. I didn’t think it bothered me at all.

“Then I was in the owners’ and trainers’ bar, watching him on Becauseicouldntsee in the Kim Muir in 2012. He jumped the last in front and I started screaming at the television. He was run out of it in the end by Sunnyhillboy. I turned around, and everyone was looking at me, this eejit screaming at the television. And I thought, I hadn’t realised I cared that much!”

It was before the Champion Bumper in 2014 that Robbie got the leg up on Silver Concorde. “I have no memory in my life as clear as my ride on Silver Concorde that day. I remember coming down the hill. Just at the bottom of the hill Ruby [Walsh] was in front of me and Tony McCoy was just on his outside. As we turned around the bend, I knew McCoy was going to come in on me around the bend, so I just gave my fellow a squeeze, to hold my position. He took off on me. I nearly stopped riding then, because I knew then that I was going to ride my Cheltenham winner.”

He didn’t stop riding. He rode Silver Concorde up the home straight, up the hill and punching and kicking all the way to the line.

“We hit the front about a furlong out, and he started to idle on me. And I thought, ‘Ah no, don’t do this to me now!’ But when we passed the line… It was just something I had built up in my own head. The elation, doing something I wanted to do all my life, finally doing it. I’d had the moment. On the way back in, I was looking around for my father [Andrew Sr], I knew he’d be there. And I caught his eye. He just did that.” He gives the thumbs-up signal.

“That was all. I went into the weigh room and I cried for an hour.”

The following day, he went out and won the Kim Muir on Spring Heeled.

Ironic that the two brothers will set up as trainers within a couple months of each other. Andrew has been thinking about training for a while now. He has had problems with his back and always knew he wouldn’t ride until he was 39 or 40. “I’ve been learning as much as I can from different yards. Picking up bits and pieces from different trainers. I didn’t just decide, ‘OK I’m going to do this tomorrow.’ There are certain things that I will do. I know that I’ll do a lot of flat work, for example. Sharper work over shorter distances.”

Robbie’s set-up is a little further away. Next April, he says. He knows what he wants to do. He took in seven or eight horses last year and broke them, got them going. He will base himself on The Curragh, and he already has promises of horses from some good owners, most notably from Silver Concorde’s owner, Dr Ronan Lambe.

“The facilities on The Curragh are second to none. The key is to know how to use the gallops. I know The Curragh very well. I’ve seen how people like Dessie Hughes and Dermot Weld use the gallops, and I have a very definite idea in my head as to how I will do it.”

He spent a morning with Aidan O’Brien, and that was really beneficial, a wonderful opportunity. “When I have been going around to different trainers over the last nine or ten years, you’d always come away with one or two things that you could do, but you’d usually come away with three or four things that you shouldn’t do. When I left Aidan O’Brien’s, I didn’t come away with anything that I shouldn’t do.”

Neither brother is under any illusion about the magnitude of the task they face. National hunt racing in Ireland has never been more competitive. Some very good trainers are struggling, others have given up.

“For me,” Andrew muses, “it is similar to when I left college to be a jockey. I wasn’t champion amateur or anything then, I was starting from scratch, everyone was telling me that I shouldn’t do it. I very much want to do this, work hard at it, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But I want to give it a good go.”

“I’m very grateful to Dr Lambe, who is going to back me from the start. That is a huge plus,” Robbie admits. “That will make it a lot easier for me. If I can’t train winners, it will be because of the way I train horses, not because of any other reason.”

Robbie moved into a new house in October. He got his car early last month. Slowly, gradually, he is getting his life together and getting into a routine. He tries to get out of the house as often as he can, three or four days a week at least. It’s important to get out. Important to be active.

“I had been living with Bryan Cooper for the last four years, that was grand, but it wasn’t a viable option to stay there. I didn’t really want to go back home either. It would have been very easy to go back there, my mother would have looked after me, but I wanted to get out on my own. Even when I was in Dun Laoghaire, I got out as often as I could, so when I left Dun Laoghaire, out into the big bad world, it wasn’t as difficult as it might have been. I had done a lot of it already.”

He hasn’t held back. He went to the Galway Festival, he went to Navan, he went to see his old friend Forgotten Rules, he went to The Curragh on Irish Derby day, he went to Las Vegas.

“I had always wanted to go to Vegas. There were five of us: myself, Tony McCoy, Carl Llewellyn, Alain Cawley, Dominic Elsworth. That was some craic. We had four full days over there. They were a right few days.”

He has a golf machine that you drive around the golf course like a wheelchair, but when you want to take your shot, it stands you up so that you can swing. He was playing off five when he had his accident. He accepts that he probably won’t get down to five again, but there are a few lads he plays with who play off 14 or 15, and if he could keep his handicap at around that level, he would be happy.

He is getting on with things. Good people around him and a good plan for the future in place. A family and a brother who would do anything for him. Content within himself. Sitting on the sofa.

This is an abridged version of an article that features in this year’s Irish Racing Yearbook 2016, available in bookshops or on www.irishracingyearbook.com