Barbara Collins follows you into the room, filling you in on the two granddaughters you have just encountered. Kate and Anna, four and two, divils apparently. Cup of coffee and chocolate biscuits for you, cup of tea and a packet of Silk Cut Blue for her. She notices your attention being drawn to Mara McGregor’s painting of a horse and jockey that hangs on the far wall. “That’s Princess Pati,” she says proudly, confirming your suspicions. “She was a great filly.”
Princess Pati wasn’t an easy filly to train, a bit of a lady, but she had ability, which Con Collins managed to unlock and preserve. When she won the Irish Oaks in 1984, she provided the trainer with his first win in a Group One contest. Later that season, she would finish third to Sadler’s Wells in the Champion Stakes. Fillies as good as her don’t come around that often.
Tracey Collins, daughter and assistant trainer, remembers Princess Pati well, but at the time she probably didn’t fully appreciate how special it was to have such a good filly in the yard. Tracey hadn’t been around for all of the 32 years since her father had trained his first winner of a race, a hurdle race. Back then, of course, you didn’t specialise in Flat or jumps. You just got on and trained whatever horse came through the gate there. By the time Chelsea Rose won the Moyglare Stud Stakes, exactly 20 years after Princess Pati’s Irish Oaks, and brought home a second Group One prize, she had learnt to appreciate it all right.
On Thursday, Dandy Man will try to provide Con Collins with his third victory in a Group One race when he goes to York to contest the Nunthorpe Stakes. If there is any pressure associated with having the clear favourite for the Nunthorpe in your back yard, it isn’t felt around Conyngham Lodge. Not in the sitting room, not in the yard. Tracey says that they train all their horses the same way. No matter if you are a 45-rated handicapper or the Moyglare winner, or potentially the best sprinter to come out of Ireland in recent years, you get the same care and attention as everything else.
Dandy Man is standing with his tail in the water pot when you get to his box. That’s his thing. Some horses box-walk, some horses roll, Dandy Man sticks his tail in the water pot.
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“C’mon,” says Tracey as she pushes him around so you can have a look at him. Not over-big, but a sprinter’s backside, a strong shoulder, a powerball of muscle and everything in proportion. “There now.” Tracey is constantly talking, switching her target audience sporadically between the incumbent and the visitor. “He’s a real gentleman, a joy to train.” Dandy Man pricks his ears and sticks out his tongue. When he breathes in you can almost count his ribs. This horse is ready to run for his life.
Tracey noted the potential power when she saw the unnamed yearling by Mozart at the Tattersalls October Sale in Newmarket in 2004. She’s not sure if she paid particular attention to him because he was out of a mare, Lady Alexander, whom her dad had trained to win two Group Three races in 1997. She probably didn’t, she thinks. She and her sister Sheena would have gone to see most of the yearlings in that sale anyway.
They were actually there primarily to buy a couple of fillies, but this fellow caught their eye. Tracey phoned Con. “There’s this colt, Dad. I don’t think we should leave him behind us.” Con phoned Alfie McLean, a long-time owner at Conyngham Lodge, who, in turn, phoned Tracey at Newmarket. “Mr McLean told me to value him,” recalls Tracey. “So I told him what I thought. He said, ‘Go five grand more than that if you need to, or 10 if you really think he’s worth it, but if he goes any higher we’ll have to leave him there.’”
Tracey’s bid of 32,000 guineas was the successful one. You suggest that it was well within her budget. She shakes her head. It was within her budget all right, but not well within it. She was delighted, though. She thought he was value at that. He might have been a bit small for some of the other potential buyers, or it might have been that he was by Mozart, who was dead. (“It’s a pity that Mozart only ever produced one crop. He’s a big a loss.”) That didn’t matter.
“We always try to give people value for money,” she says thoughtfully. “It was so sad that Mr McLean died earlier this year. He had been with Dad for about 45 years and he would have got some thrill out of seeing Dandy Man go for the Nunthorpe. But his sons, Paul and Sam, are involved now and they’re great.”
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Dandy Man has won two Listed races in Ireland and a Group Three contest at Newmarket, all over five furlongs. He was desperately unlucky not to win the Group Two King’s Stand Stakes at Royal Ascot given that he was the best horse on the day on the far side. But the Nunthorpe has been his target since last winter. He embarks tomorrow on the 16-hour trip to York. Lucky he’s such a good traveller.
Back in the sitting room we are joined by Con Collins. Not as mobile since his femur was shattered by a horse’s hoof in the parade ring at The Curragh in March 2005. He had been standing by the bell, where he always stands, probably the safest place in the parade ring, when a horse fell over backwards on top of his jockey and another just spooked and lashed out. The horse’s hind legs could have connected with anybody and they could have connected with nobody. Con’s femur was just in the wrong place.
Three operations got his leg back to something approaching normality. Even then they were thinking of operating again. Essentially, Con had to learn to walk again three times. They said a young man would not have made the progress that he made. He walks now with the aid of a frame on wheels — a small supermarket trolley, for all the world — but he is mobile and he is as lucid as hell. Ask him if Dandy Man is as good a horse as he has ever trained, and he stops to think for a moment. “He has yet to prove to me that he isn’t good,” he says thoughtfully. “He reminds me a lot of Abergwaun, who won the King’s Stand Stakes and the Sprint Cup in the early 1970s. He’s that fast.”
On November 29, 2004, the day that Con was presented with the award for his contribution to the industry by Horseracing Ireland, a journalist went up to him and told him that he was so deserving of it, they shouldn’t have put anybody up against him. It is difficult to argue. A 54-year-long career, 900 winners and counting, and the man who is largely credited with setting up the first syndicate in Ireland.
He could have even more to contribute this week.