Rajan Bala, one of a rare kind

 

Epsom Derby-winning Martin Dwyer calls it a day

 

Martin Dwyer who won the Epsom Derby on Sir Percy which got him the award for the best ride of the year, announced his retirement last week after a long battle with a knee injury that refused to heal despite multiple operations. Martin who has won Group I races in several countries including the Indian Derby, will take up the job as the expert commentator. As Rolf Johnson put it, few have Martin’s ‘back catalogue’ of achievement and his invaluable advantage of the authentic Liverpudlian gift of the gab.

 

By Rolf Johnson

 

It’s a stereotype: they say Liverpudlians, like Martin Dwyer, could talk the hind legs off a donkey, “Honestly I’ve never ridden one – wait a minute, a few years ago I was on the cold list for losers; some of them were donkeys!” 

 

Dwyer, born in the heart of Liverpool, the UK’s most cosmopolitan city, famed for the Beatles and where everyone is reckoned to be a wit, is never short of a quip himself.

 

But this doesn’t promise to be the best time to talk to him. Twenty-four hours earlier he had been forced to announce his retirement from the saddle. An horrific injury to a knee that occurred in March 2022, not on the racecourse but the immaculate Manton training gallops, was declared irreparable.

Martin had known the inevitability for some time but the sadness in his voice reflects how hard he has fought to return to the saddle.

 

He had just finished another session at Oaksey House, a state of the art rehabilitation centre for sporting injuries in the heart of the racing village of Lambourn. Martin, 48, has a season ticket.

 

“It’s no good, the doctor says the knee will never take the strain of race riding. We were trapping along when the leather snapped right by the pedal. I had no chance of staying on board. I hit the ground about forty miles an hour. The pain was excruciating – eh, cruciate – excruciating, get it?” He’s back on form. (Cruciate, the cross ligament holding the knee joint together).

 

Words come readily to Martin who is an interviewer’s dream. If not, unfortunately in a literal sense, as quick on his feet as he was, he’s as sharp as any stand-up comedian. He’s now under orders for a sedentary career in the media.

 

He has to live with the truth.

 

“I only cry twice – when I hear my daughter sing and when I knew I’d miss the ride on Pyledriver.”

 

·       Derby winning rides on Sir Percy (for which he received Ride of the Season 2006); Oaks winner on Casual Look (2003), the Coronation Cup on Pyledriver put him in the best company – only Frankie Dettori and Ryan Moore have ridden Epsom’s three Group Ones.

 

·       Two Indian Invitation Cups, Group One winners in Canada, Hong Kong and Dubai, Martin’s has been a stellar career to which last year’s Group One King George and Queen Elizabeth Stakes – the UK’s all-aged championship – should have been a career pinnacle, alongside Sir Percy. But he was laid up with his injury by the time ‘his’ horse beat Europe’s best last summer.

 

Pyledriver’s unheralded success (he’d been a 50-1 winner of his two-year-old debut) over the Prix de l’Arc winner Torquator Tasso in the King George was a pill sweetened by the fact that the horse is trained by Martin’s father-in-law Willie Muir. He is sadness personified at the bad news. “Martin’s a fantastic father (a son and daughter). I’d told my daughter (Claire) never to have anything to do with jockeys and I’m proud of him.”

 

Lester Piggott’s father-in-law was trainer Sam Armstrong – part of the old time tradition of intermarriage in racing. Martin had no background in horses other than his father being a racing nut.

 

Pyledriver’s breeders couldn’t find a buyer at any price so they put the son of the unfashionable stallion Harbour Watch into training - since when they have won just shy of £2million including first prize money again at the recent Royal Ascot meeting in the Hardwicke Stakes (Gr2).

 

This though is Martin’s story – even if it is one of repeated agony. “The night before the Derby I won on Sir Percy I got kicked in the chest at Bath – left a lucky horseshoe imprint. Next day I had to show my fitness to the medic at Epsom. Hughesie (Richard Hughes), my mate, was waiting in the wings. Well I wasn’t going to let that happen was I? The doc’s tests were agony. I passed them with nothing to spare.

 

The 2006 Derby finish was the closest in the premier classic’s two hundred and forty-year history: short head, head, short head.

 

“I went up the inner (they call it the brave man’s route). Frankie (Dettori) leaned all over me. I said, “Do you want to ride my horse as well? You’ll know what it’s like to ride a Derby winner then!

 

“To be fair he won it next year and a couple of times after that.”

 

Frankie Dettori (52), also retiring this year, splashes incessantly across headlines. Whereas Frankie will be touring the world captivating the crowds, Martin will settle for a home audience working as a TV pundit. He himself has been a wayfaring rider. His first visit to India in 1998 was at the instigation of former jockey Ray Cochrane who saved Dettori’s life pulling him from a burning plane at Newmarket.  In 2003-5 Martin himself went on a world tour with Andrew Balding’s Phoenix Reach landing Group Ones in Nad Al Sheba, Hong Kong and Canada at Woodbine.

 

“I’ll always be entirely grateful to the horse and the Baldings,” he asserted.

 

Grateful too to the great stayer Persian Punch who ran sixty-three times, the last fifteen with Martin partnering and winning six top staying races.

 

“Punch was the household name. He had a fan club. Him not me!” Martin could not speak when the great stayer, aged ten, died under him at Ascot in 2004. He’d found the words after their Goodwood Cup triumph that could have been the great stayer’s epitaph. “He knows where the winning post is, and towards the end, when I was tiring, he went, ‘Right, come on. Let’s go and win’.” They duly did and strong men wept.

 

But I have provoked Martin’s memory, memories that are too close to home of that awful Ascot day. There is silence.

 

Let’s start again.

 

“When I was fifteen my Dad wrote to Ian Balding and I got a place at their Kingsclere apprentice academy – the academy. It was some transition, from city to country life.”

 

Ian’s son Andrew who took over in 2003 said: “I inherited Martin. He rode my first classic winner (Casual Look) in my first season. He had, has, many attributes not least that he’s a cool, confident person who can communicate on many levels. He’s bound to make a name for himself broadcasting.” 

 

Martin’s career could have ended, often, more prematurely than it has. A smashed helmet and six unconscious minutes as result of a spill at Southwell; another fall left him with a broken elbow on one arm, a smashed wrist on the other; just two of many calamities.  He dismisses his history of mishaps with a trademark pertinent quip: “Horseracing is the only sports where the ambulance follows you round.” He might have added “ambulance chasers, the lawyers who specialize in accident compensation, could have made a fortune following him.

Once, returning from the races he drove his car into a flood and nearly drowned himself and a fellow jockey - called Drowne!

Is it true Martin, on a plane, you recognised somebody and shouted out “Hi Jack” and were tackled and arrested? Not one to waste a good story, he doesn’t give the game away but at least his grin suggests he’s recovering his joie de vivre.

 “I’ve got my head around it. I've known for quite a while. I've thrown the kitchen sink at the rehab. The surgeon after another operation two months ago said it’s not going to be stable or strong enough to ride professionally. 

“It is what it is and I've just got to get on with it. I've been in pain for a long time and it just throbs all the time, but I've been in good hands. I've got to accept my career is over and I have to move on. 

“It's tough because I’m not finishing on my terms – I’d like to go out like Frankie, but I might only have been touring at Wolverhampton and Southwell rather than Santa Anita and Shatin and Australia like him!”

A host of foreign jockeys who used to spend lucrative winters in India now clamber for the riches of the burgeoning Gulf racing scene, or stay home for improved prize money now on offer in domestic winter racing on sand.

Some years ago, after a successful season, Martin told the quizzical English Press who wanted to know what the money was like in India. He fired back: “It would take a lot of brass monkey nights at Wolverhampton to match it.” The quote was repeated in Major Nargolkar’s Legacy of Champions.

 

Wolverhampton can be a depressing place at the best of times.

 

Martin’s Indian sojourns ceased after the Ice Age imbroglio that crossed continents and taxed international racing authorities. It isn’t something to drag over the coals again and Martin has nothing to add to the innocence he protested at the time - and was in a large measure vindicated.

 

·       Back in 1999 when he was still a promising if successful apprentice, Martin rode Running Flame to win the Indian One Thousand Guineas but had to return home prematurely. Richard Hughes rode her to win the Indian Oaks.  In 2003 he won his first Invitation Cup on Zurbaran.

 

·       “Paddy (Padmanabhan) had me down as a ‘front-running’ jockey but I took a lead and it worked out fine.” He is circumspect about classifying Indian horses. In 2012 In The Spotlight was Paddy’s first Indian Derby winner and proved herself arguably the best filly bar Jacqueline to land India’s number one Classic. “You could take her anywhere in the world and she would have won good prizes” is as near a judgement as he will confide.

 

·       Richard Hughes, whose triumphs on Jacqueline and in duels with his chum Martin and Becket in 2010 lit up the Indian racing scene, gives his take on what may be a passing era of foreign riding involvement.

 

·       “India’s own jockeys know every blade of grass. And they know how to gain and exploit marginal advantages in a race. They’re sharp. In the UK ‘sharp’ can mean lots of things but I mean astute, aware. That’s why Martin did so well, he’s sharp too. In England there isn’t the same pressure, you get beat, you get beat. In India you’re always having to defend yourself. When we went down to Breach Candy it was for recreation: people thought we were carving up the races. You were never at ease. What do they say? ‘Only Bollywood has more rumours than Mahalakshmi’. Indian jockeys have to ride to strict orders but we were taught there are times when you need to use your own judgment and imagination” – which Hughes did on Jacqueline when he got up Martin’s inner in the Indian Derby.

 

Martin smiles ruefully in remembrance. He’d been flown out to ride Becket: when the Derby placings were reversed in the Invitation Cup Suraj Nareddu had replaced him.

 

·       “Riding’s not a job but a lifestyle,” said Martin. “I learned a lot in India. I’d advise any young jockey to go there. The Indian jockeys are very experienced and a youngster will learn that they give no quarter. It’s not rough riding, they aren’t cowboys, they know the game inside out. The likes of Prakash, Pesi Shroff, Aslam Kader, PS Chauhan, the Nareddu brothers, they and others would hold their own anywhere. Neeraj Rawal did for Mark Johnston here last year.

 

“And don’t imagine we foreign jockeys were above the law either.”

 

Reminiscing he said: “I rode eleven Classic winners, all for Paddy and Sharmila who were just like the Baldings to me – second family.”

 

The Padmanabhans assure me the sentiment is mutual.

 

I am still intrigued as to how Zurbaran and In The Spotlight’s form would have held up abroad?

 

“Remember they would have been racing and training in entirely different conditions to India. It’s the problem for all Indian horses, travelling abroad.”

 

Ah, the bugbear of jockeys in the UK - travel. “Endless miles behind the wheel, 35,000 a year and counting, to countrywide tracks, it’s like being a hamster in a wheel. Frankie won the Derby on Golden Horn and then had to ride at a bog-standard Lingfield meeting in the evening. In Japan for instance, they’d never dream of asking you to do that, you’re treated like a superstar, like a Premier league footballer.

 

“Japanese racing fans blew me away. Indian fans would have done too – only in a different way,” he adds mischievously.

 

“What I will remember without regret was the relentless racing seven days a week. You could be up at five in the morning on the gallops, have an afternoon meeting, then on to an evening meeting, a 9.30 finish and then home, sometimes after midnight - and start all over again at five next morning. It was punishing.

It became an addiction, like a drug.

 

To close on a lighter note, I suggest it’s a pity he couldn’t have ridden a decent recent Indian horse called Knotty Ash, named for the Liverpool district adjacent to his birthplace in Norris Green.

 

“Is that right?” he laughs. Also from Norris Green came the legendary footballer, Everton’s top goalscorer Joe Royle. Lucky that, Dwyer is an obsessive Everton fan.

 

“Dad is buried in Anfield (home of Liverpool FC) cemetery – at least he’s at the Everton end where he can look over Goodison (Everton’s home ground). I wanted to be a footballer – rode my first horse in football boots.”

 

He’s back on song.

 

“I've met some fabulous people and it's been an unbelievable journey. The Derby was an amazing day and watching it back I think, 'Did it really happen?’”

 

Martin appears to have gone reflective on me again with: “Trouble comes in threes they say. Wife broke her leg, I have my accident and that only left Everton to go down”: (relegated from the top division of football).  His sanity is preserved: his team survived the drop.

 

“I’m proud of where I came from. I grew up in Merseyside on a council estate (economy housing). I go back to Liverpool quite often and that’s how you keep your feet on the ground. There was a woman in the pub that came up and said, “Are you that jockey? That’s nice. Is that your main job?” That sort of thing brings you down to earth. On the other hand, knowing you’re heading to Royal Ascot life seems all it might be. I have to put that behind me.”

 

Frankie gets to tour the world – Martin will get to tour television studios – hopefully with a better season ticket than the one to Oaksey House. He’s finally found himself again. “I’ve had a few head injuries so many I can’t remember them all,” he jokes. “I talk nonsense every day might as well get paid for it.”

 

Jockey turned pundit is a well-worn path. But few have Martin’s ‘back catalogue’ of achievement and his invaluable advantage of the authentic Liverpudlian gift of the gab. Racing has given him a great life – it’s a mark of the man that he wants to give something back.