Dwyer Reflects on Storied Career

[Wandering Eyes]

When Chris Dwyer saddled the final runner of his career last Thursday it was not exactly accompanied by hysteria or emotional outpouring.

That would hardly have been his style anyway, even if he was never the most fashionable of trainers or jockeys and was bowing out with an unplaced 10-1 chance in a low-key handicap early in the evening at Chelmsford.

Yet, when he assembles the net worth of more than half a century’s labour and the contribution made for some of the sport’s giants, there really is quite a lot to shout about. First and foremost in leaving solvent and unfailingly positive.

“One of my owners was a little bit sad I was calling it a day but it was a good decision really, especially because we’ve had a great year and it was nice to get out on your own terms,” he says. “We’ve had 26 winners and the prize-money has been much improved.”

Dwyer turns 71 later this month and, having competed professionally until 1996, continued to ride on the gallops until last year before what he describes as “a very bad fall” alongside his best filly, Rock On Baileys (GB) (Rock Of Gibraltar {Ire}). Even that verges on the side of understatement.

“Rock On Baileys got loose and sort of lashed out at the filly I was on and caught my ankle,” he explains. “My filly was scared, ran back and fell over, unfortunately on top of me. She lay there, she couldn’t move and I couldn’t move, so I had multiple rib fractures and the broken ankle.

Dwyer admits that putting his horses through their paces alongside wife Shelley was one of his greatest pleasures from training, and no longer being able to do so clearly played a part in his announcement.

“It seemed like minutes when the filly lay there but it was only probably a minute. Vicky De Sousa (wife of jockey Silvestre) actually took me into Bury St Edmunds hospital, they kept me in overnight but I was away the next day. The ribs were bad for a while and I got a chest infection which wasn’t very pleasant. It was a nightmare time but I’m sure people have had worse accidents.”

He adds, “I suppose Rock On Baileys owed me something, when she got into proper exercise she started winning and we’ve had a great time with her. She’s going to Amy Murphy and will hopefully go for the Bath listed race she was unlucky in last year. I think she’s a very good filly and could improve again.”

Murphy will be the recipient of a few others along with Charlie Wallis, a long-time family friend who is also taking on Irineu Goncalves, a Brazilian jockey who Dwyer goes out of his way to recommend. Several others are being consigned at Tattersalls next week.

“We own The Lacemaker (GB) (Dutch Art {GB}) (lot 2457), she won three and goes to the sales along with Annie Salts (GB) (Zebedee {GB}) (lot 2290), she’s in foal to Equiano (Fr). We’re not expecting a fortune because things are a little tricky at the moment, but if we got our nomination for Equiano back, we’d be delighted.”

Although now part of the furniture in Newmarket, Dwyer is of Irish extraction and experienced a culture shock aged 14 when the family moved to London. He was sent to a daunting-sounding secondary school in Bromley which hastened his exit from formal education in 1964.

“I worked after school and used to help a greengrocer, I’d go to Covent Garden market and they were always talking about racing. I was very small and they’d say to me ‘why don’t you become a jockey?’ I was always interested, riding ponies when I was a boy and I wrote to a few trainers and got a nice reply from Staff Ingham.

“I was picked up in Epsom on a motorbike, of course you didn’t have helmets in those days, I got the interview and started the next day.

“It was the year Santa Claus won the Derby. Scobie Breasley, he used to turn up to ride work for my boss in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. Unbelievable…times have changed.”

It should be emphasised that Dwyer does not wallow in the nostalgia, or pepper anecdotes with having (needless to say) had the last laugh. However, his memories feel like immaculately preserved artefacts from a bygone age, especially when describing master juvenile trainer Ingham.

“He was a very hard man, but very good. I rode winners at Goodwood and Ascot when I was a kid. Those days you only used to look after two horses but you’d tie them up every night and do the bedding, put twists in the door and that sort of thing, and there was a box of straw in the corner where you laid your tools out and your rug. Sir Mark (Prescott) does something similar these days but he’d probably be the only one.

“A gallop was probably more important than a race for him because the jockeys were weighed out before you put the saddles on the horses; the lead horse would be giving us a stone on the 2-year-olds. We used to gallop on Six Mile Hill, about four or five furlongs. He had a man at the start of the gallop and a man at the end. Your distance had to correspond correctly with him when you had to say how far you were beat or won by. You soon learned how far a length was.”

Seven years later he moved to Malton, initially for Jimmy Etherington and Frank Carr. He was there for a decade and a half, notably winning a race at Beverley on the top-class middle-distance horse Gunner B. Primarily, though, he was known for landing coups for handicap maestro Pat Rohan.

“We always sort of knew the time of day and what we were up against. If you knew you had a pound or two in hand, you’d be away,” he recalls. “I remember riding a winner for Peter O’Sullevan. When he sent a filly to Pat he said ‘I want Chris to ride it every time,’ so I did. We went for a gamble one day at Redcar. She’d run a blinder a week or 10 days before but on the day of it, Pat never told me, but she hadn’t been eating well or whatever. I managed to get up and win, but she didn’t feel the same filly as I rode before. I remember Peter sent me a lovely present and we exchanged Christmas cards every year until he died.”

Dwyer was not with Rohan at the same time as his protege, Sir Michael Stoute, but the pair came together in Newmarket in the early 90s. Dwyer also rode a pacemaker for Alec Stewart’s mighty Mtoto before he became assistant to Ian Matthews.

“It was through Greville Starkey who I was always very friendly with,” he explains. “I rode Michael the odd winner but plenty more at home; I rode Opera House, I thought Red Carnival was a very good filly, I rode Ezzoud when he was a young horse. There were some proper horses and it felt so good to ride them on the gallops. When I decided to train a few, Michael said if things didn’t go right, there was always a job there, no problem.”

Although he trained some useful animals over time, such as the durable handicapper Mia’s Boy (GB) (Pivotal {GB}), he never found one better than the horse who got him running, Cyrano’s Lad (Ire) (Cyrano De Bergerac {GB}).

“He was no proper specimen, he had bad old knees, but he was probably the quickest horse I’ve ever sat on,” Dwyer recalls. Two years later, reborn as a sprinter, Cyrano’s Lad was a close fourth in the G1 Nunthorpe S.

“He didn’t even win a bumper, he was pulled up, and came to me as a 6-year-old. We had instructions to enter him for this selling hurdle at Market Rasen and missed the entry because it was a bank holiday.

“I asked if I could pop him in a Flat race, they thought I was crazy, but he ran in a mile seller at Windsor, missed the break but flew through and didn’t quite stay. Then he was second at Redcar and put him in a decent conditions race at Lingfield for a third run thinking we’d get him handicapped, but he won as he liked. Richard Quinn was shaking his head pulling up on one of Paul Cole’s black-type fillies, wondering how I beat him.”

With the final horses being packed away at Brickfields Stud, Dwyer’s next move will be to drive to his house in southern Spain with Shelley and their two Scottie dogs. As Mrs. Dwyer will not be required for her day job as agent for champion jockey De Sousa until the spring, it is time for a well-earned break.

“We’ll be back for the Cheltenham Festival, we love going to that,” he says. “I’ve got my racing channels, I’m always watching.”

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