A boy from a council estate in Liverpool with no family links to horse racing, Martin Dwyer reached the pinnacle when he partnered Sir Percy to win the 2006 Derby at Epsom. Recently retired through injury, this popular weighing-room figure speaks to Steve Dennis
GB: It was a close-run thing. Yes, you say, we know. The 2006 Derby at Epsom, closest bunch finish in the long history of the greatest Flat race in the world, four horses separated by a short head, a head and a short head. Martin Dwyer won it on Sir Percy, fine ride up the rail. But what of it?
Dwyer remembers it well, will never forget it. A Derby win lifts a jockey to another plane, provides a secure place in history, grants racing immortality. The roll of honour dutifully records that the winning margin was a short head, a close-run thing. Dwyer grins. He knows just how close a call it was.
“The night before the Derby, I was down to ride a very temperamental filly called Siren’s Gift at Bath,” he says. “It was her debut and I think I had four goes at getting on her, and when I was on she threw me off, threw me against a concrete post and I cracked a few ribs.
“I knew I’d have to pass the doctor to ride in the Derby, so I went to see her in the morning, full of painkillers. Richard Hughes was on stand-by to take the ride. The doctor knew my ribs were sore, but I didn’t tell her they were cracked.
Didn’t feel a thing
“She made me do a few press-ups, hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I did them. She could see I wasn’t perfect, but she knew I wouldn’t fall off, wouldn’t be a danger to anyone, wouldn’t make a fool of her if she gave me the all-clear. And she did.
“It hurt, but when the gates opened for the Derby I didn’t feel a thing.”
When Dwyer was a little boy he wanted to be either a jockey or a stuntman, and you might say, given his Derby story, that he managed to be both. But neither jockeys nor stuntmen can go on defying the breaks and the bruises forever, and earlier this month Dwyer had to call time on his long career when a different doctor said no instead of yes. Doing press-ups didn’t help; his knee was the issue.
In March 2022 he wrecked his left knee in a fall on the gallops, tearing his ACL and damaging the top of the bone. Two surgeries a year apart failed to resolve the issue and Dwyer, 48, was given no alternative but to quit the saddle, retirement thrust unwillingly upon him rather than embraced at a time of his own choosing.
“The doctor said I could be in good shape, have good quality of life, but no skiing, no squash, no riding. I can’t even run for a bus at the moment,” he says.
‘I have to move on’
“Later on I could have a knee replacement, I suppose. But I’m not getting any younger and I have to accept it, I have to move on.
“In an ideal world I’d be able to choose when I retire, when I was good and ready. But it’s not an ideal world, is it? And look, there are people far worse off than I am.”
Dwyer’s was an excellent career, the sort to leave no regrets save for the one about its premature conclusion – a Derby, an Oaks, a rich harvest of international G1 glory, 1,543 wins in Britain and plenty more elsewhere.
It was also an unlikely career, the sort not generally pursued by a boy from the wrong side of the racing tracks, born and brought up in urban Liverpool with a partisan fervour for Everton football club and no connections to the ‘sport of Kings’ whatsoever.
But he liked John Wayne films, loved horses, occasionally borrowed one to gallop up and down grass verges, was sold on the speed, the excitement. When he was 15 his father wrote to trainer Ian Balding, way down south in Kingsclere, to ask if his son could be apprenticed to the stable, and like the Epsom doctor, Balding said yes. Dwyer’s life changed overnight. The culture shock makes him shiver even now.
“It was like going to the other side of the world, a real eye-opener,” he recalls. “I’d been there a couple of weeks and was told to trot off somewhere behind Highclere Castle [the real-life Downton Abbey] and lay the scent for a drag-hunt.
“It was pissing down and freezing cold, I got lost, my map disintegrated, and then all these dogs appeared, chasing me. I climbed a tree. Then people arrived, and told me to get down.
“I said there was no way I was getting down with all those dogs there. Someone said ‘they’re not dogs, boy, they’re hounds’. What could I say to that?
“But things got better, and I’m very, very grateful to Ian, to his wife Emma and to [their trainer son] Andrew for everything they did for me. They helped make me the jockey I was, the person I am.”
Certainly the Baldings helped, but Dwyer was bred in the traditionally resourceful manner beloved of Liverpudlians, with the ready wit, the quickness of thought, the impulse to get on in life, and he shaped those rough-hewn virtues into an approach that took him all the way to the top.
“I didn’t go pony racing as a kid, I had no relatives in racing, I did it all on my own,” he says, his voice lit from within with pride. “Hard graft from the bottom up – everything I got, I worked hard for.
“I want youngsters to know that, to believe that they can come into racing from any walk of life – it’s an important message for racing, because there’s a staffing crisis at the moment. It might look like a closed shop from the outside, but my story shows that a kid from a council estate in Liverpool can win the Derby.”
‘I had to reach for Plan B’
Back we go to that sunny afternoon at Epsom, Dwyer all strapped up with nowhere to go on the third-favourite, two furlongs to run and the race to win.
“I wanted to be just behind the leaders, but it was a rough race, I got shuffled back, had to reach for Plan B,” he says, with the photocopy recall every athlete brings to the assessment of their art.
“They’d gone quick up front and I was coming through, leaning down the camber, and there were horses in front of me and I had to decide whether to pull out and go round them or go up the rail.
“I was never the sort of jockey to play safe anyway. I had the attitude that I rode to win, I made quick decisions designed to help me win, and if I got beat trying to win then so be it.
“I went up the rail. It was close, but there was room. It was a gamble, but as my old pal Johnny Murtagh would say, life’s a gamble. And it paid off.
“It’s the greatest memory of my career. My dad was there too, and it was like full circle because that’s how it all started off, his letter to try to get me a job in racing. Like a fairytale, really.”
There were plenty of other big moments for Dwyer. He had won the Oaks three years earlier aboard Casual Look, saw the world from the back of the doughty Phoenix Reach, winner of the 2003 Canadian International, the 2004 Hong Kong Vase and the 2005 Dubai Sheema Classic – “That must be what a pop star feels like, jetting in and out, getting the job done, an amazing feeling.”
He also won several Group races on mighty stayer Persian Punch, and when he won the 2021 Coronation Cup on his old pal Pyledriver he became one of the few jockeys to win all three G1 events at the big Epsom meeting, a notable accomplishment.
Good days, great days. Yesterdays. Now he moves on.
Dwyer appreciated his time in the jockeys’ room, reckons that his generation had the best of it before social media, camera phones and constant external pressure shifted the landscape, that they could be truer to themselves, could have more fun.
He’ll miss the camaraderie, and on a more fundamental level will miss what all athletes miss when the time comes for them to join the ranks of civilians again.
‘I’ll miss that drive’
“The competitiveness – I won’t be able to replace that edge,” he says. “Going through the form before a race, working out how to beat the rest, how to win. The drive, I’ll miss that drive.”
And in case this might be getting too close to the bone he lightens the mood, that enduring Scouse irreverence irrepressible. “I won’t miss the drive round the M25, though. And there are lots of youngsters coming through – you’re soon replaced, aren’t you, whatever you might think.”
Dwyer is a great talker, a natural for a career in the media, and now he will build up his work for the Racing TV channel, previewing races, offering a jockey’s insight, 30 years’ worth of experience counting for plenty in the eternal search for authenticity. He’ll also lend his analytical talents to an ambassadorial role for betting operator Unibet, pleased that he can maintain his involvement in a sport that has been so good to him.
“I enjoyed every minute of it,” he says. “I’d just turned 18 when I rode my first winner, and if you’d told me then what sort of career it would be I’d have snatched your hand off.
“I’m proud of what I’ve achieved. When I got my opportunities, I didn’t let anyone down. I did my part, left it all out there on the field.”
On the most important field in the sport, too. As an aside, Dwyer won the British ‘Ride of the Year’ award for his tour de force on Sir Percy in the 2006 Derby, but its significance went a long way beyond that. Nothing else could come close; it was the ride of his life.
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