The Horse racing thread

[Our Nail Loney]

were is your bookies Nail?

Lurgan...

[bigfrank]

Hatfield and Sean Grahams took up alot of my time alright,could turn into quite and expensive day:)Would go back to it in the morning tho:DPicking horses in pub and then take turns runnin over to put on bets,great craic!

[Clown]

1st La Estrella 2/7

If McLeans are gonna offer 11/8 for a 1/3 shot im gona be all over that!!

[girt_giggler]

It may be a 1/3 pay out when ya go to collect though....

[full back]

1st La Estrella 2/7

If McLeans are gonna offer 11/8 for a 1/3 shot im gona be all over that!!

It wont be 11/8
There will be a rule 4 on it

[cavan4ever]

Nail this happened over the christmas in a bookies in town.  

A man backed a horse and wrote down the Number of the horse on the docket.  The horse won and he went up to collect.  It was number two but the women behind the desk said that it was number 21 on the docket as there was small mark beside the 2 which im told looked nothing like a one.  There were only 10 horses in the race.  Would you pay out?

[armagh leg-end]

Hatfield and Sean Grahams took up alot of my time alright,could turn into quite and expensive day:)Would go back to it in the morning tho:DPicking horses in pub and then take turns runnin over to put on bets,great craic!

ahh great times!!

cant wait to get back down there now!!

[Our Nail Loney]

Nail this happened over the christmas in a bookies in town.  

A man backed a horse and wrote down the Number of the horse on the docket.  The horse won and he went up to collect.  It was number two but the women behind the desk said that it was number 21 on the docket as there was small mark beside the 2 which im told looked nothing like a one.  There were only 10 horses in the race.  Would you pay out?

There seems to be a lack of common sense with a lot of stories I hear about other bookies, there is a bookies beside mine as well that is a real stickler for correct speling etc... With me in this situation, common sense would prevail and I would have paid him out given the amount of runners in it... Though you would not believe the amount of people trying to get 'one over' by writing down ambiguous things etc...

[cavan4ever]

I was in boylesports over xmas and went to back the Fav at Soutwell but wrote down the price and number of the fav at a race in Limerick that was going at the same time. Jus coped it about 10 seconds before the race started and went up to the counter.  The girl didn't want to change it because i had the number on it but i told her that the number of the horse that i had on the docket was 20/1 and fair play to her she changed it.

[Our Nail Loney]

I was in boylesports over xmas and went to back the Fav at Soutwell but wrote down the price and number of the fav at a race in Limerick that was going at the same time. Jus coped it about 10 seconds before the race started and went up to the counter.  The girl didn't want to change it because i had the number on it but i told her that the number of the horse that i had on the docket was 20/1 and fair play to her she changed it.

As long as you are up before the off times of ither race then this should not have even been a problem for her... Dunno why she even hesitated... Some of them are real jobsworths, I have even had people working with me getting on like that and I have to put them in line...

[Homer]

A fella I know went into the bookies a few years ago and noticed that they had a poster up for Big Brother advertising odds for 'Last Man Remaining in the House' it had a couple of contestants names on it along with their odds and 16/1 bar.

The favourite that year was a transvestite so yer man stuck 'her' name and 16/1 down on the docket and up to the cashier who accepted the bet. Sure enough the transvestite went on to win it out but the bookies refused to pay up and would only refund the bet. A nice try though.   

[Treasurer]

Picked the wrong day to NOT back Schindler's Hunt!!!   

[girt_giggler]

I lumped on Merchant Paddy yesterday, won easy & got 5/2! Had £5e/w on Schindler's Hunt also @ 16/1.

It cured my hangover I tell ye!

[Homer]

Good article in the Sindo about the bould Oliver Brady at the weekend.

Had a nice winner there today with Ebadiyan who will now certainly head to Chelt. If he reacts like he did for a 3rd place Baron de Feypo, imagine what he will do if Ebadiyan can pull one off.

A top fella and hopefully he will be with us for a while yet.

http://www.independent.ie/sport/horse-racing/the-miracle-of-oliver-brady-1598315.html

The miracle of Oliver Brady

T HE doctor from Blackrock Clinic had phoned on Wednesday morning. The commotion he heard when Oliver Brady answered told him, as he feared, that the trainer was out and about. The temperature gauge in Monaghan had plunged to minus 10 and outdoors in such Arctic conditions was nowhere for a man in Brady's condition to be. Shock tactics were the order of the day. "You know if you catch a cold and get pneumonia," the doctor said sombrely, "you'll not come out of it."

But on a morning like this where else could Brady be? Never before had the winter chill brought his home and yard to a virtual standstill. The pipes in the house were frozen, a coat of thick ice covered the swimming pool inside the barn and, for the first time since its installation, the all-weather gallop on the hill behind his house was out of commission.

So this is how you find him: ferrying buckets of water to thirsty horses, fixing the heat in the barn to melt the ice, arranging for horses to travel to Dundalk for their daily work-out. In the afternoon there will be meetings at the recycling plant he co-owns 10 miles down the road in Castleblayney. Mustn't forget, either, to leave money out for the woman coming to do the horses' backs in the afternoon. Every day a thousand different things to do.

The manic pace of his life is easy to explain. Six years ago Brady sat in the Mater Hospital, a cyst the size of a golf ball in his stomach, and heard the grim prognosis that he had six months to live. Just over a year ago he had a quadruple bypass operation to unclog arteries that were up to 97 per cent blocked. He is diabetic and has problems with his lungs. In short, he is a walking and breathing miracle.

He wears his illness, like all his affairs, lightly. He tells of the day last month when they strapped a machine to his chest and monitored his heart-rate for four days. When they checked the results, the graph was pleasingly stable until, for a short period, the reading almost went off the page. The doctors were stumped until Brady cleared up the mystery. "I'd just had a winner [Saddler's Native] at Clonmel. It was my first for a while and I was a bit excited. So I said, 'doctor, that's not hard to explain. I was after having a winner during that time'."

It's just as well, he thinks, he wasn't wearing the monitor when Ebadiyan -- the four-year-old he bought "for a song" last October -- sauntered home by 22 lengths in a maiden hurdle at Naas last Sunday. He knows what would have happened. They would have prescribed him another pill to add to the 17 he already has to take daily to keep his various ailments in check.

They try to kid him along now, like a stubborn old colt, issuing constant warnings to mind himself, hoping that enough of them stick. They tell him to rein in his wilder side, but not too much. Because if there's a fair chance the horses end up killing Brady, they know it's not much of an exaggeration to say that it is the same horses who have been keeping him alive.

"The doctors keep telling me when you get those winners don't be getting too excited. Be relaxed, stay cool. And I do tell them 'Jaysus doc, I only get a few in the year. It's not as if we're doing this every day of the week'. All things considered I'm flying. The horses keep me going. They help me get over the illness."

* * * * *

To understand where Brady comes from, though, you must leave the horses behind for a minute and head for the smart reception room of Shabra Plastics Limited on the fringes of Castleblayney. Brady established the firm in 1986 with his business partner and owner Rita Shah. At the start they had two workers. Now Shabra employs 76 people and has an annual turnover in the region of €10m. It is the pride of Brady's life.

At first they manufactured bags from imported raw plastic until Shah wondered why they couldn't recycle the waste themselves instead of importing it. Year by year the business grew. The beauty of it is that nothing that enters the factory premises goes to waste. The water they use comes from the rain and the dirt they filter away from it is sold as compost. Everything has its use. Everything is renewable.

The same philosophy underscores Brady's other life as a trainer. He never dreamed of taking on the bigger stables like Meade or Mullins. You would be broke in a year. Instead, he developed an eye for a horse that others had given up on. He saw promise where others saw only deadwood. He noticed potential in others' cast-offs. There were bargains to be had if you looked hard enough.

His first winner, Barr's Hill at Navan in 1985, set the template. He found the horse when he was in Newry one day, just as he was being prepared to be sent to Scotland where a bitter end awaited. The asking price was £135 and Brady had to act quickly. "You'd better buy it today," the seller told him, "because it won't be here tomorrow."

Few would have considered it a worthwhile investment. In 11 runs Barr's Hill had finished last 10 times and managed to beat one rival in the other. But Brady took her home, gave her time to settle and then sent her to win at Navan. A few days later she won a valuable handicap on 2,000 Guineas day at The Curragh. In all, Barr's Hill would win six races and amass the equivalent of over €60,000 in prize money.

A few years earlier, Brady had walked away with over £100,000 in winnings from the 1981 Cheltenham Festival and, with it, he bought the land where he built his house and stables. When he could, he added to the mix. When Gazalani won the Jameson Gold Cup at Fairyhouse in 1997, carrying a wedge of Brady's cash at 33/1, he started building an all-weather gallop. When the same horse won at Punchestown a year later at 16/1, he finished it.

As a trainer he has been guided by no philosophy other than a disdain for having to pay a king's ransom for a horse. As well as Ebadiyan he bought another colt from the Flat last year, a three-year-old called Icy Cool for the grand price of €50,000. He thinks Icy Cool will be a nice horse but in all his years Brady had never paid so much for a horse and, even now, he bristles at the pressure such a splurge brings.

He is happiest at the other end of the scale. In 2003, he paid €9,000 for Baron De Feypo. The five-year-old hadn't won in 22 outings but, in Brady's hands, won five of his next 15, earning in the region of €400,000. In his yard he has a colt formerly trained by Michael Stoute that fetched €500,000 as a yearling. Brady bought him last year for the knock-down price of €12,000.

As part of his arrangement with Shah, everything they win is ploughed back into the horses. Brady had worked for Shah's father in Kenya and in the Middle East in the 1970s and when Rita was sent to run the factory with Brady, the only condition imposed upon her was that she support the social side of the business as well. The social side meant only one thing: horses.

The closeness between them is striking: the ebullient, larger-than-life figure from Monaghan and the steely, determined woman from Kenya. In the darkest days, when the cancer was eating away inside him, Shah was a constant presence, accompanying Brady on the long round-trips to Dublin and she is there still, nursing him along as best she can, gently cajoling and reassuring.

"Sometimes I think it's worse he gets," she says smiling. "He doesn't know really. Oliver just wants to enjoy life. Tomorrow we have to go down to Dublin for his check-up. I know he's forgotten about it. I'll have to remind him in the morning. 'I'll be down to collect you at two o'clock. Be ready.' I have to keep his diary for him."

It was at Shah's insistence that Brady had his heart checked before he left on a business trip to Kenya last year. Although the doctor had cleared him to go, Brady thought to mention the difficulty he was experiencing while walking to the top of his gallops in the morning. If he was rushing to meet the horses, he would be out of breath before he had reached half-way.

"The doctor said 'oh, we'd better check you in to have a look'. In I go and I get an angiogram. Told I needed things called stints. They're wee things they put in your heart but they couldn't get them in. The arteries were too blocked. Before I knew it I was been wheeled in for surgery. It took from 7.15 in the morning till 3.30 in the afternoon. My heart was stopped. I was on a machine. But I didn't feel a thing."

It seems typical of Brady's character, though, that as he talks about the operation he drifts off on a tangent about how he'd tucked into a box of chocolate biscuits the night before, a shocking indulgence, and, from there, to the irritation of having no water to shave that morning, as if the threat of cancer and heart problems were little more than everyday nuisances to be casually brushed aside.

Because his health problems are widely known, the overstated joy with which he greets his horses in the winners' enclosure is well-received and increasingly cherished. It is assumed that the vigour of Brady's celebrations is a consequence of his illness and the joy he must feel at the continuing gift of life but that isn't entirely true. Exuberance has always been his way.

When he lived in England in the early 1980s, he knew a man who had owned a Royal Ascot winner. One day Brady asked him to recount his greatest day in racing, certain the man would regale him with the story of that great day at Ascot. But he didn't. "'No, no, no,' he said. It had passed him by. He was afraid to let himself go. He forgot to savour it."

Every morning Brady stands at the top of his gallops, watches the sparkling grey coat of Ebadiyan sweep by and knows these are days to savour. On the day of the sales at Goff's, Ebadiyan was the first John Oxx-trained horse to enter the ring and, at €18,000, the cheapest sold that day. Brady had heard the warnings floating around beforehand but, true to his nature, paid no heed.

"Word was that he had a wind problem. But I had my vet check him out before the sales and he said there was nothing wrong. John Oxx told me he was a nice horse and he thought he'd go for more. He felt he'd run him in two races he shouldn't, when the ground wasn't suitable. This fella needs good ground. I wasn't planning to run him until February but then the frost came and the ground dried up."

Brady had €5,000 each-way at 12/1 when he made his hurdling debut at Leopardstown last month but he was carried out at the second flight and backed him again at 10/1 when he was third at Punchestown four days later when he knew they'd got the tactics wrong. Over two miles Ebadiyan needed to be forcing the pace rather than waiting behind horses with superior speed.

At Naas last week, they got it right. Ebadiyan blasted off from the front and never saw another rival, giving Brady his easiest winner in 24 years of racing. He'll run him again at Punchestown's rearranged fixture tomorrow and then, he hopes, all roads lead to the Triumph Hurdle in March. He is sure the horse is the best he's ever trained but he just has to prove it now.

His stable teems with talent. He has space for 24 boxes, many of them filled with young, recently purchased horses, a sign that Brady has no intentions of slowing up anytime soon. They were stricken nine days ago when Maralan -- dearly, beloved Maralan -- capsized on the gallops and died in front of them as they stared helplessly on.

"Poor old Maralan," Brady says. "We were hoping to run him on Sunday in the Pierse Hurdle. He ran a brilliant race in it two years ago. He just had a massive heart attack. He was dead within five minutes from the moment he went down. It's never easy when you lose one like that, especially a great old servant like him."

He's seen so many go before him, both equine and human. Cancer has claimed six of his nearest family. Two years ago it took two of his brothers, Benny and Johnny, within the space of a week. Why he himself has been spared he doesn't know. He jokes sometimes that he's holding out for the big one, the Cheltenham winner. Two years ago Baron De Feypo finished a gallant third in the Coral Cup and, to general approval, Brady took over the winners' enclosure. In Brady's case, the old racing cliché rings true: have a Cheltenham winner and die happy.

There is more to do as well. On Friday, he is off to Kenya where he is involved in a project to build a school for orphans. Last year he raised €77,000 for the African missions and this year he is aiming higher again. Through Shabra Charity Foundation he is hoping to raise in excess of €600,000 for causes dear to his heart. Shah and a Roscommon man, Frank Campbell, have each donated a horse he will offer for syndication and, in April or May, there will be a major golf classic at the Slieve Russell in Cavan.

"It's a lot of work but we're nearly there. I'd like to raise between €600,000 and €1m if I can. We've registered the charity because money donated can be claimed back in tax. The plan is to sponsor a machine in St Luke's Hospital in Dublin for the not so well-off and to help for heart research as well. The balance of the money will go to Kenya for the school for orphans. I'm keen to get it done. In case I drop off at least I'll have something done."

As he speaks, he's back in the yard now, showing off the swimming pool, explaining how it fills itself from two pipes turned upwards to collect rainwater that then slope down to fill the pool with 64,000 gallons of water, saving him a fortune and sparing the environment in the process. And the thought strikes that the pool is a fitting metaphor for how he has lived his life: self-sufficient, miraculous, renewable.

[gunnar mrydal]

open sesame, 4 10 at great le, odds not great but meant to be a good thing