The Lorry
In the course of a relatively short conversation, Michael Winters twice returns to a situation that seems to be bothering him. There is no room for an extra passenger in the lorry. It’s a week before the Cheltenham Festival and he is sending over a very live contender in Chatham Street Lad. These are the anxious days when patience is scarce and dreams can die on the back of a simple question. Is that a skin rash? Did he step on a stone just then? Did he scope dirty? But it’s a different question that’s troubling Mick Winters, and it’s not about his horse.
Winters trains from a small yard amid the lush rolling meadows and clear streams that surround Kanturk, Co Cork and like most sons of Duhallow, he has the same relationship with words as an AK47 has with bullets. He uses lots of them, they come at you rapidly and you can’t ever be too sure what target they are aimed at. But the lyrical stream of consciousness always seems to find its way home.
Only the absence of a free seat on the lorry causes him to pause. With only 20 boxes in his yard, he employs a small team who work closely together, each of them respected and all of them valued. One of the group passionately wanted to travel this week as understandably, she wants to be there on the big day.
“That young lady would love to come, I wish she could,” he laments. “but there’s only one seat in the horsebox and with Covid-19 everything has to be done to the ‘T’. Forms to be filled in, all the regulations and such. I tell her that she’s young, that there’ll be lots more time, I promised her next year, but...”
Cheltenham Festival
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There is an old saying in politics - everything that comes before the ‘but’ is bullshit. In Michael Winters’ world, this is clearly not the case. He’s a boilerplate of the ‘what you see is what you get’ man of the townland and without the time or inclination to prepare a face to meet the faces he meets. He parks the lorry and his words rebound to the horse.
Despite making five entries he says he never had too much doubt about which race Chatham Street Lad will contest.
The Horse
“We’ll go in the Peter Marsh on Thursday,” he confirms. “You couldn’t begrudge Envoi Allen the way he’s done it so far, but they all still have to go out there and perform and anything can happen on the day. He’s by Beneficial, a great chasing sire and we went up to Goffs with the owners and paid fifty thousand for him. He’s a generation ahead of most of them so that should help him.”
Chatham Street Lad is at least two years older than any of the other serious contenders, including Envoi Allen. How come such an old soldier is still running in Novice Chases?
“He took his time. He’d have the odd setback and he’d take his time to recover. He’s a big strong horse, not like those ones from France that get going early, he was a big raw-looking horse above at the sales. We had to build him up.
"Then when he went chasing first he unseated his jockey at the second last in a race at Ballinrobe when he was going well which might have been a blessing in disguise. He was given his (handicap) mark over fences based on his previous run and that was twenty-pound less than hurdles.
We always knew he’d be better over fences in the long run.
He is dead right - it did prove a blessing in disguise. The numbers prove it. When he restarted over fences last October he was rated a lowly 118. Five months later he goes to post today off 156. The damage was done by two handicap wins in Cork followed by a demolition job in the Caspian Caviar Gold Cup at Cheltenham in December, where he effortlessly won a lucrative handicap chase, and the 15-length margin of victory looked like it could have been longer.
His young jockey, Darragh O’Keefe, a local from Doneraile, explained to TV viewers immediately after he pulled up on Chatham Street Lad, “When Micky Winters comes over to England, he’s got to be taken seriously because when he has the ammunition, he’s well able to train them.”
There’s the rub.
Despite his eccentric post-race celebrations and easy presence wherever he finds himself, be it Royal Ascot or Roscommon, Micky Winters can certainly train them. Like he trained Missunited to win or place in 22 of her 29 starts, blending a win in The Galway Hurdle with a narrow defeat in the Group win in the Ascot Gold Cup.
Like he trained Rebel Fitz, (26 of 30) to win the Galway race the year before his stablemate’s triumph.
The Ghosts
“I said if he won, I would do like the pig and roll in the muck as that is what the pig does, so I had to back it up. Well, the crowd was small and we were privileged to be there so why not make the best of it.”
Winters explains why he rolled in the grass of the winner’s enclosure after the Cheltenham win while a puzzled Alice Plunkett of ITV looked on with an expression that abbreviates on the internet as ‘WTF?’
Alice didn’t realise that she was watching the duality of Mick Winters; train in black and white, paint your life in colour.
People are his palette and his brush settles on his old mentor and neighbour, the legendary point-to-point champion jockey, Connie Vaughan, sadly no longer with us, but respected in his old friend’s words as though he were still in the room.
“Connie was a great amateur jockey,” he remembers. “He won the four-mile amateur chase at Cheltenham, but he was a home bird and very shy with the women. He had no problem talking about horses. He’d often call over at 6 o’clock and at 11.30 you’d have to tell him you were going to a dance or something to get away from him. But he’d be very shy with the women. They were down at start once and nobody wanted to make the running, so they all got stuck into Connie over women and got him all revved up. Off he went like a bull at a gate, far too fast to be honest.
“Another time, when he was working at Vincent O’Brien’s, someone was walking along below and they (stable lads) got a pot of piss and threw it out of the window. It landed on some big, bould kind of a lady, and she caught a hold of Connie who had nothing to do with it but couldn’t talk. She gave him a right whacking!”
Winters sounds as excited in the recollection of long-gone mischief as he does about the prospect of saddling a Cheltenham festival winner.
“Do you have the time for one more?” he asks, the good manners unnecessary.
It’s not difficult to imagine a North Cork future where Winters is joyfully recounting a newly made old story, the one where he took a strongly built, slow maturing Beneficial gelding to the Festival and how he snapped at the heels of giants.
He nervously concedes that his horse looked exceptional when winning at Cheltenham but tries to blame this on an optical illusion. “I don’t know how they film English racing,” he says, “it makes them look like racing cars, they seem to be going so fast they look like Ferraris on TV. But the English handicapper liked what he saw alright (raised the horse 15lbs) and I suppose and as I said earlier, anything can happen on the day. He’s an old dog for the hard road anyway.”
A hard road, but with only one spare seat in the lorry and a Ferrari in the back.
