Meade sits down on the bench by the weighing room and begins to reveal just what a burden has been lifted from his shoulders. “I was trying to keep my best side out all the time but, Jesus, I was going round with a knot in my stomach,” he says. “It’s not so bad not having runners, and it’s not so bad them running badly when you know why, but when you can’t fathom it out that’s a different matter. You begin to doubt yourself.” The words peter out as, deep in troubled thought, he gazes into the distance.
He is normally a cheerful individual. His conversation is packed with off-the-cuff quips that have him bursting into peals of laughter. For a man accustomed to looking on the bright side, the virus hit him hard. It also made him even more superstitious than before.
Many people in racing go to great lengths not to tempt the fates but few refuse to allow pictures of their horses at home. Meade also bars the press from his gallops and, if he sees a member of his staff putting on a saddle from the offside of a horse, he will take it off and start again from the other side. His partner, Gillian O’Brien, having been the stable’s representative when the horses were winning in England, has to keep travelling over there with them while the trainer goes to the Irish race meetings.
Channel 4’s request for former jockey John Francome to ride the Champion Hurdle favourite, Harchibald, in front of the cameras was turned down flat and Cheltenham has been forced to make alternative arrangements for tomorrow’s UK press visit. “I’ve always been superstitious and I seem to be getting worse,” Meade admits. “I get a lot of slagging about Gillian and the English runners, and now she’s slagging me as well, but the photography comes from my head lad, Paul Cullen, who is even more superstitious. He told me one day that every time one of our horses was in the paper something happened to him, and we should stop that sort of thing.”
Meade’s name has been at the top of the National Hunt trainers’ lists for the past six seasons and, despite his recent barren spell, he is still in pole position. He trains 90 horses in the Co Meath village of Castletown where he grew up, the son of a farmer. He was hooked even before he started pony racing at the age of 12. He graduated to the racecourse proper in 1969 when he was 18 and had ideas of becoming a jockey, “but only in the way a kid says he is going to be a train driver. At 6ft 1in I was too tall and I was a very moderate rider.”
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He and a friend clubbed together to buy a horse called Tu Va for £100. Meade took out a permit and did the training. He rode the gelding to win in Wexford and named his yard after the horse. After a couple of seasons other people asked him to train for them and in 1972 he set up in business as a licensed trainer with four horses on his father’s land. They won four races between them that year. The numbers and the trainer’s reputation expanded rapidly. As each new horse arrived Meade would build another box, doing all the construction work himself, but his riding ambitions were quickly abandoned. “People kept telling me I should give up.” More laughter.
He was almost as successful on the Flat as he was over jumps. In 1978 he had a winner at Royal Ascot and the following year a second in the Irish 1,000 Guineas but 10 years ago he took a change of direction that was to transform his career. Doing his entries for The Curragh one day, it struck him that the only races in which he could enter his horses were handicaps. “I realised that I was never going to get anywhere on the Flat because I couldn’t compete. The Aga Khan and Sheikh Mohammed had both come into Ireland in force and I could see what was going to happen at Ballydoyle. I decided I should concentrate on the jumpers.”
He still trains a dozen Flat horses and he admits that Sunshine Street’s fourth in the 1998 Derby, after making most of the running, gave him one of the biggest thrills of his life. That was just as well, because the race caused him to miss a Meath championship match for the first time for many years. This passionate supporter of his county football team has hardly missed a game since.
The one thing that always used to rile him, viruses apart, was when journalists highlighted his lack of success at Cheltenham. He suffered the cruellest of bad luck year after year, with horses getting beaten short heads and even being brought down on the level when they looked sure to win. It’s still a touchy subject. “I don’t want to dwell on that any more,” he says sharply. “I suppose I did think the place had a jinx on me but having a winner there has broken that.”
That winner was Sausalito Bay, who beat Best Mate in the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle five years ago. His trainer celebrated the occasion by kneeling down in the winners’ enclosure and kissing the hallowed turf like the Pope when he stepped off a plane. This time he has high hopes of not only a second Festival winner but maybe more with a string of fancied candidates including Watson Lake, Wild Passion, Rocket Ship and Harchibald.
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Meade leans forward as he talks about them, the excitement clear. “I know they are going to be taking on good horses but they are very good. I believe there is not an awful lot between the leading contenders in the Champion Hurdle and one mistake by the horse, jockey or trainer could change everything. Our lad is favourite because everybody else thinks he has the best chance and he has climbed a mountain to get where he is at the moment.”
The final hill at Cheltenham can be as tough on a horse as any mountain and many shrewd observers have openly doubted Harchibald’s ability to cope with it. His trainer is not one of them. “If I can get him there as well as he was when he won in Newcastle and Kempton and the ground is okay, I am sure he will get up the hill. What impressed me most in Kempton was not that he beat Rooster Booster but the distance he put between himself and the horses behind when Paul Carberry said go. Paul is never one to fill you with false hope but he rang me after the race and said, ‘I’m telling you, Noel, he was like an aeroplane and I’ve never sat on anything like him.’ ”
No wonder Meade is excited. If Carberry is right, the trainer could be kissing the Cheltenham grass again next month.