Former Trainer O’Toole Dies

[Wandering Eyes]

Sympathy extended from across the bloodstock community to agent Mags O’Toole, following the death of her father, will be all the more meaningful simply on account of its faith in pedigrees. For she could have had no more cherished sire than Mick O’Toole, whose horsemanship was rivalled only by his ability to lift the spirits of his countless friends on the Irish Turf. These will be as united in their gratitude for the joviality and animation he brought to their lives as in their grief for his loss on Thursday, after a period of declining health, at 86.

O’Toole, who started out as a trainer of greyhounds, saddled the winners of many big races under both codes; but was scarcely less gratified by successful gambles landed by lesser animals at a lower level.

Ideally, of course, he would try to dovetail those twin satisfactions–as when putting £500 on Davy Lad at 50-1 to win the 1977 Cheltenham Gold Cup, the pinnacle of his eight winners at the National Hunt Festival. His best Flat horse was Dickens Hill, who won the G1 Irish 2000 Guineas two years later, while he also saddled two Royal Ascot winners.

From modest beginnings, training in the Phoenix Park in Dublin, “Micko” moved to Maddenstown on The Curragh. He made his first headlines in such notoriously competitive handicaps as the 1969 Irish Cesarewitch and the 1970 Irish Cambridgeshire.

Dickens Hill, bought for 34,000 gns as a yearling at the Houghton Sale, won the Anglesey S. at two before finishing second in the National S. and the Grand Criterium at Longchamp. His four-length Classic success prompted a crack at the Derby, but he finished second to Troy both at Epsom and in the Irish equivalent. He shook off his Curragh defeat to win the Eclipse only a week later.

Over jumps O’Toole forged a formidable partnership with another hugely admired figure in the late Dessie Hughes. Though he never retrieved the heights they shared in the 1970s, O’Toole brought things full circle in the next decade by again winning races like the Irish Cesarewitch and Cambridgeshire–

notably landing the latter in 1989 with Smoggy Spray, ridden by the teenage Richard Hughes, Dessie’s son. But he wound down his training operation thereafter, saddling his last winner in 1996.

With his wife Una, Micko raised two children who will seek no finer credit than to do justice to his memory: Mags, whose inherited acuity serves her so well at the sales, and jockeys’ agent Ciaran.

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