Our series continues with Britain’s winningmost jockey of 2023, whose career could soar to the next level via three serious G1 chances over the Derby weekend – including Macduff in the main event
A picture is worth a thousand words, they say; a thousand rides paints its own picture. It conjures an image of hard graft in unglamorous places, long hours on the road both early and late, a willing slave to the rhythms of a modern sport that demands as much as it gives.
Not all rides are created equal, though, and next week Rossa Ryan will go to Epsom for two rides that present a major opportunity to send his career soaring to the next level.
With a first mount in the Derby and a strongly fancied contender in the Oaks, the young Irishman has the chance to shine more brightly in the space of five minutes than in all the length and breadth of last year’s four-figure workload.
A thousand rides? And the rest. Ryan, 23, took a table-topping 1,090 rides in Britain in 2023 and in the short grey afternoons of late December pushed through the 200-winner barrier, a very significant milestone for the calendar year.
He finished the year as the winningmost jockey with 202 victories to his name, which didn’t make him champion owing to the arcane rituals of the British season, and we’ll get to that, but for quantity he was well ahead of the field.
With that quantity came the first flowering of quality, the sugar-sweet kick that makes all those black-coffee mornings and evenings worthwhile, as Ryan made his G1 breakthrough on the slow-starting, fast-finishing sprinter Shaquille, that vital boost to recognition and confidence that every youngster needs. That marked a sea-change in his career, yet forthcoming events at Epsom could change his life.
Milestone Derby ride
Ryan’s milestone first Derby ride is the live outsider Macduff, a son of Sea The Stars trained by Ralph Beckett, who staked his claim for Epsom when runner-up in the G3 Classic Trial at Sandown in April.
He has yet to win outside maiden grade, but his pedigree – his dam is a half-sister to the crack miler and sire Kingman – his potential and the sheer possibilities of the occasion have Ryan counting down the hours until next Saturday.
“It’s everyone’s dream to win a Derby,” he says. “Epsom is a special place and it’s been good to me over the years, so hopefully it can be even better now.
“Macduff is a big barrel of a horse. He’s got a good mind, which is definitely what you need, and he’ll take the Epsom atmosphere in his stride. He’s done everything right. He looks a picture, he was always going to tighten up from his first run and his work at home has been solid.
“He’ll only give you what you ask of him at home, so there might be a bit more under the bonnet than we’ve seen so far.”
Twenty-four hours earlier, in the Oaks, Ryan will partner Macduff’s Beckett-trained stablemate Forest Fairy, unraced at two, unbeaten in two starts at three with success in the Cheshire Oaks at Chester rubber-stamping her big-race credentials.
Moreover, fellow Beckett trainee Bluestocking will be a major player in the same day’s G1 Coronation Cup following the strapping four-year-old filly’s stakes breakthrough in the G2 Middleton at York.
“It’s exciting to go to a race like the Oaks with a big chance,” says Ryan. “Forest Fairy is going in at the deep end now but she learned a lot at Chester, and I’m sure she’ll move forward again off that second run.
“There are no stamina worries, and of course she’ll need to improve but she has a very good brain and was still quite green last time before she got the job done. There’s an engine there.
“And there’s also Bluestocking, who is finally fulfilling her promise. She’s such a big filly who just kept growing all last year but she’s definitely Group 1 class now.”
These are the thirst-quenching fruits of the tree that Ryan is climbing now, his eyes on the top.
Guarantee of quality
His role at the powerful Beckett yard is a form of menage arrangement with fellow riders Rob Hornby and Hector Crouch that evidently satisfies everyone, with its guarantee of quality underpinning Ryan’s work ethic that brings in the quantity.
“At Mr Beckett’s you tend to stick with horses you’ve ridden,” he says. “Get on a two-year-old and if it goes well you maintain the connection. An owner might prefer a certain jockey – it can be swings and roundabouts – but it works for everyone.”
It’s an ideal job for a rising star, but Ryan has always seemed to be in the right place at the right stage of his career. The boy from Galway was a pony-race ace with 150 notches on his belt – “Pony racing really teaches you racecraft, it’s great experience” – and rode his first professional winner at Dundalk at the age of 16.
Then, almost before the adrenaline rush had subsided, he was off to the big leagues in Britain. He had been headhunted; that seems to happen to Ryan a lot.
“It was very flattering,” he says, as well he might. “The original plan was to see out my schooldays, Dad [trainer David Ryan] thought I might get too heavy so he advised me to stay in school.
“Then things started to happen fast. John Bleahen, a family friend, spoke about me to Ross Doyle, who buys a lot of horses for Richard Hannon, and he spoke to Mr Hannon. Then Mr Hannon spoke to me and, as Dad said, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“Being away from home wasn’t too hard at the start, I’d had working holidays with [jump racing giants] Willie Mullins and Enda Bolger, and it all went very quickly to begin with. After a while I started to notice the time away, but I just got my head down and got on with it.”
Getting his head down and getting on with it is the essence of Rossa Ryan. He is at pains to stress that, like his grandfather and father before him, everything he has achieved has come through hard work.
“You have to work hard in life, otherwise someone else will get the things you want,” he says, a refreshing attitude and one that sits at the heart of all those long drives, early mornings, late nights, thousand rides. “My girlfriend Clare is great, she understands the lifestyle,” he adds.
It went well for Ryan at the Hannon academy, a very big yard, hundreds of horses, a grand spot for an apprentice willing to learn, and then he was headhunted again, this time as more of an internal appointment.
The big-league football agent Kia Joorabchian was beginning to assemble what has now become a racing empire, and offered Ryan a retainer to ride his burgeoning string of expensive and talented horses. Dream come true, part two.
In the hotseat
“I had just made a connection with Mr Beckett and won for him on an Amo Racing [Joorabchian’s stable name] horse,” he says. “Then Kia offered me the job. It was flattering, exciting, the opportunity to ride good horses in good races, the sort of thing that would help me up the ladder.”
Joorabchian’s attitude to recruitment evokes to those of a certain age that of Daniel Wildenstein, who was never slow to rearrange the personnel at his disposal, but even though Ryan’s time in the Amo hotseat lasted only two years, their personal relationship seems to run deeper. Racing is not a game for bridge-burners, and Ryan’s experiences with Joorabchian illustrate that.
“It wasn’t like riding for a boss, I felt it was more like a father-son thing,” says Ryan. “When I lost the job as retained rider, we probably didn’t speak for two weeks, and then he rang me and said ‘I miss ya’, and we still talk and get on well.”
Ryan continues to make the occasional appearance in Amo’s purple silks, and it is one of life’s little ironies that in their post-split landscape he was the man in the saddle for Joorabchian’s first Royal Ascot success, the 150-1 boilover of Valiant Force in last year’s G2 Norfolk Stakes. He brings the topic to a close with the resonant words “in racing you never know what’s around the corner”.
The uncoupling with Joorabchian meant that Ryan had to rekindle some old relationships and forge some new ones. His agent Steve Croft was a major asset through the process of rebuilding, but what Ryan really needed was the same as all jockeys really need: that one good horse. It came; he says he was shocked to get the ride on Shaquille in Britian’s premier sprint, the G1 July Cup at Newmarket, but not as shocked as he was after they’d won.
“I was beginning to think ‘will it ever happen, will I ever win a Group 1?’” he admits. “I’d come close but never got across the line – and in the July Cup everything went wrong in the race and he still won.
Shell-shocked
“I was just shell-shocked after the line, I didn’t know which way to look, which way to turn. Later on I rang home on FaceTime and everyone was round my granny’s house, people were crying. It was incredible – everything me and Dad had worked for.
“Shaquille couldn’t have come along at a better time for me, he really opened the door for me. I owe him a lot.”
The shock will wear off as the big wins come more frequently, but it’s plain that Ryan’s life is all about the little wins too. He is on the verge of the 500-ride mark for 2024, long before the year is even half over, and holds a wide advantage at the top of the all-year standings. That won’t win him any prizes, though, as the British championship season for jockeys only runs, implausibly enough, from May to mid-October.
If Ryan wants to be champion – and he definitely does, although as the prospect has solidified from idle daydream to distinct possibility he has begun to play it cool – he has to start again from scratch in a parallel competition. It grates, a little.
“There isn’t much recognition for whoever rides the most winners in a year,” he says, making the general point as well as one specific to himself. “There should be something alongside the official title, to promote the grafters and the young jockeys on their way up, a championship for everyone.
“But until that happens I’ll just keep working hard, try to make as few mistakes as possible, and maybe the title will fall my way one day.”
And a first Classic win too, perhaps sooner rather than later. That would be just one ride among thousands, but to Rossa Ryan it would be worth so much more. You get the picture.
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