‘I would watch Braveheart on repeat, with my bottle of vodka’: Horse racing’s troubled star Oisin Murphy

On a fair day, the champion jockey Oisin Murphy says, there is a peculiar kind of peace to be found balancing on a racehorse, the balls of your feet the only part of you in contact with the mount as it surges forward at 40mph, while thousands of baying punters caterwaul around you and a dozen rivals jostle either side, followed – with steady, necessary menace – by an ambulance.

“Well you never think about the ambulance. The second you think about that, you have to stop,” he corrects. “But yeah, things can really slow down when you’re going at 40mph. It comes with practice. When things are going well, though… it can be very peaceful, very satisfying.” He takes a long draw on his cigarillo before a slow exhale. “Doesn’t always go well, though.”

On Sunday, Murphy rides at Longchamp, Paris, in The Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, the showpiece event of the European Flat season. There is prize money of €5m (£4.36m) available, but more than that, it is the one race he has always wanted to win above all others. A few weeks later, on Champions Day at Ascot, he is likely to be confirmed as the season’s leading Flat race jockey for a fifth time, aged just 30.

It will be quite some achievement, not only to defend the title he also won last year, and in so doing becoming the most dominant jockey in the championship since the great Kieren Fallon (even Murphy’s friend and idol, Frankie Dettori, won just three titles). But also to manage it despite the seemingly never-ending number of fences Murphy throws in his own path with his tumultuous personal conduct.

Most racegoers would concede that, along with the veteran Ryan Moore, Murphy is probably the best jockey in the world these days. The trouble, as he describes in his new book, Sacrifice, is that he also possesses what he calls “a self-destruct button that’s omnipresent”.

So far, in a dozen years as a professional jockey, the consequences of that button have included a litany of failed breathalyser tests, a three-month suspension after a positive cocaine test in France (it would have been longer, were he not able to prove he did not take the drug, but instead absorbed it by having sex with a woman who had), and a 14-month ban for breaking Covid rules and further alcohol breaches in 2022.

After most of those misdemeanours, he has given a heartfelt and conciliatory interview, declared himself changed and sober, returned to racing, and summarily resumed winning. So it was this time last year, telling my colleague Jim White, “I made many, many errors that I wish I hadn’t. I was given a period of time to think about that and come back with a different mindset.”

Nine months later, in July this year, Murphy was fined £70,000 and banned from driving for 20 months after pleading guilty to a drink-driving charge following a crash in April. The Irishman had tested “just shy” of twice the legal limit for alcohol around seven hours after the crash, which saw him go off the road in afemale friend’s Mercedes A-Class, then collide with a tree. Murphy and the friend, who he insists remains a friend, were both subsequently taken to hospital.

Murphy is happy (or at least willing) to talk about all that, and indeed anything else, when we meet on a sublime Monday morning in Upper Lambourn, Berkshire, at the heart of the so-called “Valley of the Racehorse”. Here, Murphy lives alone in a large five-bedroom home that backs onto the stables and gallops he and others use daily.

Living and working in the villages around are other jockeys, trainers and owners, or businesses otherwise connected to the sport. And up the road is Kingsclere, where Andrew Balding’s operation is based. Murphy has worked with Balding, one of the late Queen’s former trainers and younger brother of the broadcaster Clare, since he arrived from Ireland aged 17.

Diminutive and wiry, wearing a crisp, blue Oxford shirt, a grey sleeveless sweater, slim jeans and blue loafers, Murphy emerges through a fug of cigar smoke. He is, he says, perfectly comfortable here, with more equine company than human.

Murphy’s book mentions a girlfriend, Lizzy, who is daughter of celebrated racehorse owner Bjorn Nielsen (he’s also thanked in the acknowledgements). Lizzy, a chef, stood by him throughout many of his ordeals. “I know he is a good person – or I wouldn’t be with him,” she once said. They split, amicably, after four years last December. He’s now single.

Murphy grew up on a cattle farm in Killarney, first sat on a horse aged four, and initially wanted to be a showjumper. He settled on racing at 14, inspired by his uncle, Jim Culloty, who once won the Grand National and the Cheltenham Gold Cup. But anything on horseback thrills him. A racing insider describes him as “probably the most complete horseman among all jockeys”.

Isn’t it a little like living above the shop, I say, as we gaze out at a young thoroughbred being exercised. “It is, but I like it. I love the fact I can get up in the morning, and five minutes later I’m on a horse.”

In the house, a choir of birthday cards making his recent 30th cluster on a windowsill. A book of Sylvia Plath poetry rests on the kitchen island. Murphy has long been a fan. “I got that just yesterday. You have to be cautious when you pick it up,” he says. “It can really turn the mood. She ended up killing herself, of course.”

We settle in the living room, which is largely decorated with trophies and memorabilia, as well as a few books. Among them are the predictable tomes, like Laura Hillenbrand’s racehorse biography Seabiscuit, and some less predictable, like Patrick Cockburn’s The Age of Jihad.

Murphy’s own is on a side table. Sacrifice details a year in his life – specifically, the 2024 season – and gives an astonishingly honest account of what it’s like being a professional jockey. From the brutal torture of “wasting” (fasting to reduce excess weight) to the relentlessness of the schedule, he makes the life sound utterly miserable. Why did he want to write it?

“Firstly, I didn’t. My career to date has already been written about so much, and I didn’t think the positives could nearly outweigh all the negatives. But the publishers said they just wanted me to concentrate on one championship season. That sounded achievable.” He pauses and shrugs. “Though the book is still quite negative, because it’s honest.”

Murphy is a likeable man, and a bundle of contradictions – at times so laid back it’s a wonder he can stand in the stirrups, at others so anxious and self-doubting he seems brittle. But he’s always dryly Eeyorish and eloquent. The literature fan and linguist in him (he speaks near-fluent German, very good French, mandatory Irish and a smattering of Japanese) means he’s incapable of a cliché.

He is also quite unlike any sportsman I’ve ever met. Many long-retired champions are ambivalent about their success; some will begrudgingly admit to being unfulfilled. Yet aside from perhaps Ronnie O’Sullivan, you rarely get such candour from active sportsmen at their peak these days. Murphy, though, is a throwback. For one thing, I’ve seldom interviewed an elite athlete who’s ceaselessly chain-smoked cigarillos. At 10am.

He’s been on them since 2021. “I’m fine on aeroplanes and stuff,” he says, as if to stress the addiction doesn’t completely control him. He was racing at Epsom the other day and couldn’t find anywhere to smoke that didn’t contain knowledgeable racing fans who wanted to chew his ear off. After a poor couple of races, he was gasping.

“So I had to sit in the sauna and close the door. I smoked three cigarillos in a row. You could hardly see, there was so much smoke. And then I calmed down, won and it was fine.” Got to wonder about the lungs, though. “Ah, I only have to push a horse for 30 seconds. Maybe at 50, if I’m still alive, people could reassess my lung capacity.”

Jockeys can be strange people, but they have a strange job, as Sacrifice makes clear. Murphy has therapy twice a week these days, and says the book helped him supplement those sessions, processing quite what an odd life he and his peers lead.

“We rarely get a day off, we spend our entire professional lives several stone below our natural weight, which is obviously incredibly unhealthy, we’re judged and presided over by people who cannot possibly comprehend or understand the events or situations they’re adjudicating as they’ve never been there,” he writes. “We’re followed by an ambulance while we race, and we are statistically more susceptible to drug abuse, alcoholism and depression than any other elite athlete. Yet here we all are.”

At the time of writing, Murphy has raced 565 times in Britain, winning 136, since the first weekend in May. That’s around 25 rides per week, while throughout the year he could feasibly race in places as disparate as Nashville, Wolverhampton, Dubai, Paris, Newbury, Hong Kong, Ayrshire, Tokyo, Adelaide, York and Cape Town.

“It’s pretty relentless, but if you want to be a champion jockey, you have to try and ride every day,” he says. As a result, he almost never feels fresh. “You can’t be. Adrenaline keeps you going a lot of the time. That’s the big difference with other sports, they just have to perform once or twice a week.”

The schedule can get to him. He looks with envy at Formula One, an ostensibly dull sport (in the eyes of many) which has become so successful in recent years by making stars of its drivers and creating gargantuan interest in one race every week or two. While that goes on, hundreds of jockeys are riding in far-flung towns on midweek afternoons for a fee of £167.67 a time.

“Who cares about me racing in five races yesterday and four tonight? Apart from me, and the people who own the horse, and maybe the people who bred it. No one cares. We have all this racing, and of course it earns lots of people a living, but the people who most benefit from it are the bookmakers, and the racecourses.”

Like all jockeys, the first thing Murphy does every morning is check his weight. Today? “8st 11lbs. And that’s fine.” The fluctuations are tiny but crucial – at 5ft 5in he “wouldn’t like to be waking up 9st 1lb, and wouldn’t like to see 8st 8lb either.”

A typical diet might be boiled eggs for breakfast, a small stir fry for lunch and chicken or fish with vegetables for dinner. But the daily calorie intake for a jockey is usually capped at 1,500 – about half what men are normally advised to eat.

Ahead of a race, that diet could become very simple indeed, and supplemented with gruesome “sweating” sessions in the hot tub or sauna. “Flipping” – induced vomiting before a race – is mercifully rare these days, but not unheard of entirely.

“It’s absolute torture, but guys get used to it. I have friends who sweat every day, and it can be hard going, especially if you’re trying to be in a good mood in the morning,” Murphy says. “That’s the most important time of the day to be a nice fella, those people [working in the stables] are getting up at silly o’clock in the morning in all weather to prepare the horses, and you get to rock up to the races and win on them.”

I wonder if he thinks jockeys all need to be wired a certain way. An Irish study once found that 61 per cent of jockeys met the threshold for adverse alcohol use, 35 per cent for depression and 27 per cent for anxiety, while nearly 80 per cent of jockeys have at least one common mental health disorder – yet only a third have sought professional help.

“I don’t know, because it’s never discussed,” Murphy says. The weighing room, where rival jockeys gather and interact more than anywhere else, is all about baiting and badinage (as a cocky youngster, Murphy was lamped quite a lot in there). What about if they’re having a drink, would they ever ask how the other is feeling?

At this he literally laughs. “Jesus, no. The reason that makes me snigger is that I’d never ask anyone how they’re feeling. I don’t want to know they’re having a bad time. A therapist is paid to listen to me, but I’d feel like I was pushing my problems on someone else.”

It feels unsurprising that jockeys might fall prey to substance abuse. “Absolutely. It’s escapism. Certainly alcohol is used as a coping mechanism. And if mine wasn’t out of control, if I could drink like a normal gentleman, that’d be lovely. But unfortunately I kind of enjoy the escapism those first few drinks bring, and I enjoy the next five or 10, and then I forget to stop. And then I would wake up the next morning with the sudden realisation that I have to ride today, and I’m not sober yet.”

He shakes his head and looks down, speaking as much to himself as anyone else. “It’s just that lack of discipline and control. I tried so hard to be what is normal, but I failed. I had to give in. I had to decide that wasn’t achievable.”

When was that? “The last time? April 26.” The day of the crash. He was sober for three and a half years until he relapsed last winter. What caused that? “Confidence, maybe. And then, if one does manage to have a few drinks and have a nice evening, your confidence builds. Pain has no memory, and you forget all the times you’ve tried before and lost control.”

Alcoholism is a disease that runs like a seam down the male line in Murphy’s family. His father has been sober for 35 years. His grandfather for 40 years. As a teenager, his drinking was normal. “Although I was manically driven, I wasn’t using alcohol as a form of escape. I lived and breathed horses and trying to be a jockey.” When he eventually needed an escape, the bottle was there.

He is now in Alcoholics’ Anonymous – and enjoying it. He first attended a meeting in 2019, but initially felt he wasn’t in nearly as bad a position as others present. “Of course, it turned out I was.” He attends meetings wherever he’s racing – all over the country, and all over the world.

The feeling in racing is one of sadness, as much as anger or disappointment in Murphy. All these chances… “And then I throw them away, again! F—-d up again…” he says, forlornly.

While he has me, he’d like to set the record straight about being “a party guy”. In reality, “I would sit at home and get pissed a lot of the time.” Not the sport’s miniature answer to George Best, then? “Yeah, I wish. It sounds quite exciting and fun, what he got up to. I would just be watching Braveheart or Gladiator on repeat, with my bottle of Belvedere [vodka], forgetting to go to bed. That’s really what it was like.”

There, his drinking was relatively safe. Being behind the wheel of a car is a different matter. “Of course. It wasn’t something that I practised in my drinking years, because I never needed to drink and drive. And, you know, there are guys and girls who don’t get so many chances, they kill themselves or someone else. That is still stuck in my mind.”

The thing most people cannot understand is how this perpetually hungover jockey could also be quite so good. “It’s a good question. Remember, if you wake up pissed, the only thing you worry about is being sober. You drink as much water as you can, but if the first race is at 12pm, I might have been in a bit of bother.

“So [getting sober] would be a constant concern, I’d never really be thinking about the task at hand at the races.” Now sober again, he’s noticed his memory is vastly improved, but that has its downsides: “You can’t delete the bad days.”

He repeats his gratitude to the British Horseracing Authority, and the ever-supportive Baldings, who’ve all placed their trust in him, again. He now plans to race for another few years, before trying his hand at something else – business, probably, and likely in the sport.

He doesn’t fancy being like Dettori, still racing in his 50s. “I always said if I win the Arc I’ll stop.” That means his final race could be as soon as tomorrow. So, will he? He smiles. “No. There are so many races I haven’t won.”

We need to get outside. A little fresh air. But there’s one obvious question left. Coming to the end of Murphy’s book, after reading about all the torment, angst and exhaustion involved in being a jockey – in being him – you can’t help but wonder what he likes about it.

“Mmm.” He racks his brains, then brightens. “I’ll tell you. The rare day, where just for a couple of hours, I basically feel untouchable. Making all the right decisions, believing in my opinion on the horse. That huge, huge high.” He nods. “It’s self-gratification.”

Sacrifice: A Year in the Life of a Champion Jockey by Oisin Murphy (Bantam, £22) is published on October 9

Source link