Jim Bolger interview: ‘I know I still have to come up with a good horse every few years’
Trainer Jim Bolger at home at his Coolcullen Stables in County Carlow. Picture: Healy Racing
“It was a huge gamble,” Jim Bolger says, as he looks back to the afternoon in September 2006 when he paid €430,000 for a chestnut colt by Galileo, who was subsequently named New Approach. “I had to put the money down and he didn’t come cheap. All the shrewdies were there and they obviously didn’t think that he was worth that, so I had to scratch my head and wonder, well, could I be right? But we didn’t have to wait very long to find out that I probably was.”
Bolger was 64 when he took his punt on New Approach, an exception to prove the rule that people tend to become more risk-averse with age. It has turned out to be a gamble that keeps on giving, and will pay out perhaps its most satisfying return if Bolger’s colt Mac Swiney joins New Approach, his sire, on the Derby’s roll of honour at Epsom on Saturday afternoon.
