If you’re not growing, you’re dying, says impatient Gavin Cromwell
GAMECHANGER: Gavin Cromwell has no doubt that his stock wouldn’t be this high had he not decided to give up alcohol seven years ago. Pic: Healy Racing
No sport sits still. Horse racing has, at its core, remained unchanged for thousands of years. Strip away the layers and it’s still a race to be first past the post, but evolutionary leaps have altered utterly how horse and jockey continue to get to that point.
Saddles and stirrups changed the game aeons ago. Selective breeding has fine-tuned the animals for centuries. And everything from starting gates to track maintenance, nutrition and veterinary science proved revolutionary in the 20th century.
The most seismic change in the 21st? Quite possibly the mobile phone.
Gavin Cromwell is sitting in what is effectively a small shed in his yard in Co. Meath and decoding the various whiteboards on his wall. It’s a blizzard of names — people’s and horses’ — accompanied by numbers and lines squiggled in various colours.
The language of, and for, his tribe.
This is the nerve centre of his day, of an operation that is one of the game’s coming forces. This is where he arrives long before dawn to work out which of his twentysomething riders will ride which of his 160-strong string of horses, for how long and for how hard.
The divvy is done long before the first car pulls into the yard in Balrath, a plethora of WhatsApp messages having already landed in phones across the surrounding countryside. It’s a world away from how it used to be. Before Covid.
Back then it was chaotic as dozens of people poured in and back out of that tiny building to receive their instructions for the day. Here, in one small corner of the horse racing world, is a snapshot of just how these modern trainers can build empires of a size once inconceivable.
“I always remember years ago hearing that Noel Meade had 120 horses and thinking how could one man manage all that,” said Cromwell as he explains the workings of a revolution that has passed so many by, “and here I am with a good bit more than that.
"Absolutely you can (do it), it's all about having the right people around you. I had a good chat with Noel about it one day and he was saying - and it's something I never thought of before - 'the mobile phone changed everything'.
"He said he used to go in the evening and would have to start returning phone calls and messages that came in during the day, and he'd be there until half-ten at night phoning owners back, but that's gone now.
“Once the mobile phone came in, that was it, you do all your business during the day and when you're driving your car. If you're gone racing for three hours on the road you can phone as many people as you like.”
Cromwell, like so many trainers, has a wide variety of owners who expect daily updates on their investments. So one of his team spends the lion’s share of her day taking videos of the horses on the gallops, to which the boss will add a voicenote.
WhatsApp does the rest.
It’s impossible to see how this web of information and work could get done without the smart phone. And it’s not as if Cromwell is an outlier here. Willie Mullins is working with a small army of animals that has long since drafted figures north of 200.
Ciaron Maher, the Melbourne Cup-winning trainer in Australia, has somehow put together a behemoth of a stable that boasts in or around 1,000 horses across a variety of locations having started life as a trainer with just ten under his care.
Cromwell began his story with just eight. And he lived in the loft above their stables when he began this chapter two decades ago. Training was, as we know by now, really just a hobby at first. It was his work as a farrier that was keeping the lights on.
That background was the making of him. So many small trainers find that they have to hold on to a horse that they should really be letting go simply because they have nowhere else to turn. Things never got that stark for him, and there was luck in there too.
If there was a point when he found himself thriving rather than just surviving then it was in March of 2016 when Jer’s Girl gave him his first Grade 1 success in the Irish Stallion Farms EBF Mares Novice Hurdle under Barry Geraghty at Fairyhouse.
She added to that at the Punchestown festival the following month when taking the Grade 1 Tattersalls Ireland Champion Novice Hurdle. All this from a home-bred filly that her owner, Ger Bourke, brought home unsold from the sales at an asking price of just €7,000.
Cromwell was the beneficiary of that.
Fast forward to the present day and he is up there in the vanguard with some of the most respected and successful Irish trainers. If Willie Mullins and Gordon Elliott remain out in front in the jumps game then Cromwell is on Henry De Bromhead’s tail.
A double in Punchestown early last month confirmed his most successful season over jumps yet. And the Jockey Club’s decision to bring the UK media to his yard for a pre-Cheltenham trip shortly after only confirmed the mounting interest in his operation.
Cromwell will bring stars such as Hello Neighbour and Sixandahalf to the Cotswolds this week in the hope of adding to his six festival winners, and he will turn his attention straight to the flat once Punchestown’s Gold Cup is run at the start of May.
He never stops.
“For all of us, if you're not growing, you're dying,” he says.
There is an impatience in him that is common to all high-achievers. He has a neighbour by the name of John O’Brien who does work in the yard, turning his hand to whatever maintenance or construction project need seeing to.
The next project lined up for O’Brien is a barn across the road to ease the squeeze for space in the existing stables. And another walker with it. Over a million euro has been pumped into the place in the last 18 months as his imprint increases.
There was a first ever Irish winner in Bahrain in December when Snellen claimed the Al Muharraq Cup and, if he ever returns to Australia, where he spent some time years ago, then he only sees it happening if he is bringing a Melbourne Cup contender with him.
You wouldn’t rule that out.
Himself and Caoimhe brought the kids skiing over the New Year, a rare window of escape given the demands of a year-round calendar and a mental focus that saw him call time on alcohol in an attempt to maximise his potential.
What started as a break for one week has turned into seven years and counting. He wasn’t the type to pop into the pub for one or two pints and the idea of making a bad call on something because of a hangover just didn’t sit right anymore.
There isn’t a part of him that misses it. Racing and family have poured into the nooks and crannies left empty by that side of life and he has no doubt but that his stock wouldn’t be this high if he hadn’t made that change.
“I suppose sometimes you probably should slow down and enjoy those moments but listen, I don't drink, my celebration of something... I don't know what it is really. Going out for something to eat is probably the height of it really. So it's all about work, really.”
Is he a workaholic? By the narrowest of definitions, yes. But then what trainer isn’t? And Cromwell takes the view of countless others in his profession that it can’t be work if you enjoy it so much. Which isn’t to say that it is unfiltered joy.
He said once that winning at the start was brilliant, that it’s still brilliant, but the difference now, with so many more people and responsibilities depending on him, is that he has to have a winner these days.
Look, it’s one of those good problems to have. He thinks of Pat Martin, who has taken up a role with him after ending his own 40-year training career recently, and the struggles he had at times to get just the one over the line in first place.
“We're in a position now where there's so many people involved, there's so many owners involved. If you're not having winners there's something wrong and that's the monster we've built.”
