Beef Or Salmon’s sire, Cajetano, was a stallion about whom Hourigan knew very little. No more than the majority of people at the sale. He shakes his head and smiles. He doesn’t buy according to the sire, he tells you. He wouldn’t be able to afford the progeny of the sires that he would want. He goes by the individual and the dam. If you can buy a nice horse whose dam has a bit of a page, then you’re giving yourself a chance.
Hourigan reckons that he thought he had sold Beef Or Salmon four times. Kay says that he was shown so often to prospective owners that he could have got up, put the head collar on himself, and walked up the front of the yard on his own. He was the horse that nobody wanted. Then Seamus McCloy made his annual visit to the yard.
McCloy is the man whose wife’s red and white silks have been carried by Hi Cloy and Moss Bawn, among others. Every year McCloy comes down to the yard to have a look at his horses and pay his bill. In January 2001, he had two friends with him, Joe Craig and Dan McLarnon. Annaghmore Gale had raced in Craig’s colours for Hourigan without much luck, but the owner was still keen to have a horse at Lisaleen Stables, probably in partnership with McLarnon. They were standing outside Beef Or Salmon’s box when he told Hourigan as much. Well, you’d better have this fellow behind me then.
Hourigan suspected that Beef Or Salmon might be good even before he raced. Dorans Pride was the shining light at Lisaleen at the time, and indeed one of the beacons of Irish National Hunt racing. In the November after Beef Or Salmon’s arrival in the yard, Dorans Pride won the November Handicap on the Flat at Leopardstown, finished second to Looks Like Trouble in the James Nicholson Chase at Down Royal, and won the Morris Oil Chase at Clonmel. He may have been 11 years old, but he still retained immense ability. At home, Beef Or Salmon was the only one who could go up the gallop with him.
Wins at Clonmel in a point-to-point and a bumper merely bolstered the trainer’s confidence in Beef Or Salmon. But when he dug deep to beat the well-regarded Boneyarrow in a hurdle race at Gowran Park in January 2002, Hourigan took a deep breath. This could be something special.
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“We knew that Willie Mullins thought a lot of Boneyarrow,” confides the trainer. “We beat him well, and the two of them pulled a distance clear. We thought that our fellow would be even better on better ground, and we knew that we wouldn’t see the very best of him until he jumped a fence.”
Many eyebrows were raised when Hourigan pitched him into the Grade 2 Morris Oil Chase on his chasing bow in 2002. A debutant against experienced chasers? It didn’t make sense. He should be competing in novice events against fellow novices. To Hourigan, however, it made complete sense. “I thought that he was too good to run in a big field of novice chasers,” he says. Straight bat. “I thought before the race, if he gets beaten we’ve lost nothing. But if he goes and wins, then he is as good as I think he is, and we can continue dreaming.”
Beef Or Salmon did win the Morris Oil. They questioned the form and they said that he had a decent novice campaign ahead of him, possibly culminating in the Arkle at Cheltenham. But Hourigan had other ideas. After the Morris Oil, Beef Or Salmon won the Hilly Way and the Ericsson and the Hennessy. When you win those three races, you have to go for the Gold Cup at Cheltenham. It would almost be rude not to.
Alas, it wasn’t to be. Beef Or Salmon crashed out at the third fence. A real pearler. Hourigan remembers watching from the stands as his horse lay on the ground with Timmy Murphy lying beside him. He saw the horse kicking out as he lay there and feared the worst. They don’t kick out for no reason. He watched as he got up and waited to see him carrying a leg. But Beef Or Salmon stood sound and Murphy got up to extricate him from the reins in which he was all caught up. Hence the kicking. Exhale.
Beef Or Salmon was back home in his paddock that evening. All well. So well, in fact, that he won a two-mile Flat race up The Curragh three weeks later under Mick Kinane. Not until he started jumping fences the following season did the connections realise that something was amiss.
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“The muscle that runs along his back on either side of his spine,” says the trainer. “It should have been as thick as that. (He points to his finger.) It was like that. (He grabs his arm.)” “It was just in spasm. All that had to be broken down. That was when we got Liz Kent to have a look at him.”
Kent is a chartered physiotherapist who works mainly for John Oxx. When Alamshar won the Irish Derby in 2003, she was one of the people to whom Oxx paid tribute. In January 2004, she was recruited to the Beef Or Salmon team.
“He had a lot of pain and spasm in his lumbar region,” says Kent of her equine patient. “He had a lot of wastage. He had a sore neck and a groin strain, and he had changed the way that he moved.
“He was compensating for the pain until he just couldn’t do it any more. That caused further problems. We had to undo all that and get him moving properly again.”
Tissue heals naturally in about 18 months. Kent’s job was to facilitate and expedite the healing process.
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“He is such a wonderful horse,” she says. “I still see him, but he doesn’t have the problems that he had. All horses of his age and with the miles on the clock that he has should have regular treatment. He is no different to a human athlete of equivalent years.”
You try to think of a comparable human athlete as you look at Beef Or Salmon standing in front of you. Taller than he looks on a racecourse when you stand into him. Ears pricked, head outstretched, ribs visible when he breathes in, a ball of muscle. A cross between Roger Federer and Prince Naseem Hamed.
Hourigan thinks that the horse is well. What he says and how he says it tells you as much. As well as he has ever been. His round of jumping in the Lexus Chase was probably the best of his career.
“He only made one mistake in the Lexus, and that was my fault,” admits Paul Carberry, now his regular jockey. “I had asked him at every fence until the fifth last, where I just sat. In fairness to the horse, he got over it okay, but I should have asked him to jump it. Apart from that, he was brilliant. He felt as well as he has ever felt for me.”
While Hourigan is not taking anything for granted in the Hennessy Cognac Gold Cup at Leopardstown this afternoon, he wouldn’t be human if he was not thinking Cheltenham Gold Cup thoughts. Beef Or Salmon has never got Cheltenham right. Not in three attempts. There are those who say that he never will. That the track just doesn’t suit him, and that he should not be favourite for this year’s Gold Cup. Hourigan isn’t one of them.
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There were extenuating circumstances all three times. He fell in 2003. In 2004, he was a fast-finishing fourth, three and a half lengths behind Best Mate, after a rushed preparation. Kent had only begun to work on him that January. Murphy got off him that day and said that the race would be the making of him.
Last year, however, he was a sick horse. Hourigan had a stable full of them. Between February and June 2005, the trainer sent out a mere four winners. Beef Or Salmon had been well beaten by Rule Supreme in the Hennessy and he just wasn’t right going to Cheltenham. Carberry says that he could have pulled him up after two fences. This year so far, touch wood, it has been a different story.
“I know I have the best horse in the race,” says the trainer candidly. “We just need a bit of luck. The best horse doesn’t always win the Gold Cup but, all things being equal, we will go there with a real chance.”
The next chapter begins at Leopardstown this afternoon. After that, it’s tails up and heads turned to Cheltenham.