AFTER the first at Exeter on Tuesday Noel Fehily was stopped by a racegoer on the short walk from the parade ring to the weigh room. The punter flexed his knees, angled his smart phone into the portrait position and without a word being exchanged Fehily paused and smiled, practised now in the drill. Smart phone paparazzi in every walk of life discriminate against anonymous subjects. For years, Fehily reached the weigh room without interruptions. He was a name, not a face.
In the late autumn of his career, though, opportunity and acknowledgement arrived together, equal parts of the same compliment. At the turn of the decade, in his mid-30s, he was suddenly in demand: trainers sought him out for their plum Saturday horses; Paul Nicholls, the champion trainer, engaged him for his stars. Every public act of trust fathered another. It wasn’t that he had changed: they saw him differently.
On a week like this everyone notices. The Cheltenham Festival clarifies your status, brutally. For years, Fehily was stuck in the chorus line. Before 2008 he didn’t have a Festival winner to his name. A year earlier he had ridden four horses to be second but all of them were double-figure odds and none was expected to win. He fancied a couple in 2008 but they were turned over, too.
The weather played havoc with the meeting that year so that nine races were squeezed into the final day. Fehily was idle until the last race when, out of the blue, he rode a 50/1 shot to win the County Hurdle. A victory like that, though, doesn’t have reputational spin-offs: wrong race, wrong price, wrong time of the week.
In Fehily’s career bad timing has been a destructive pattern. In the autumn of the 2010-11 season, when Ruby Walsh was sidelined by a serious injury, Nicholls turned to Fehily. The champion trainer is an exacting judge and at the time he had a stunning hand of picture cards in his yard, from Kauto Star to Master Minded. There were higher-profile alternatives available but Nicholls was convinced about Fehily. He bore the scrutiny and the responsibility and blossomed in the limelight.
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Then, injury slaughtered him. He dislocated his wrist at the Hennessy meeting in November and within a couple of hours he was on the operating table. First they said he would be sidelined for months; then they suggested it might only be weeks. So, he came back: fell again, dislocated it again. This time the ligaments were ruptured.
“They told me I’d be out for six to eight months and I ended up being out for nine months. The pain from that injury was horrendous. Horrendous. I broke my shin bone in four places [later in his career] and it was nowhere as painful as my wrist.
“It was tough. I’d injured my shoulder in January of the same year. I was told I’d be out for six months and I was thinking, ‘How can anything take six months to heal?’ Anyway, I was. With that injury I thought it was the end of the world. Then you learn to deal with it and grow up a little bit.”
The wrist injury, though, was serious. They inserted wires to stabilise the joint but the surgeon warned him that he might never ride again. For nine months he was stalked by that possibility.
“Did I have alternatives in my mind? I didn’t. I was just sulking. Natasha [his wife] was good at the time. She was giving me no sympathy. She was giving me a kick up the ass and telling me to get on with it. That probably helped.”
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The extraordinary thing was that he still hadn’t exhausted his bad luck. Within months of returning to fitness he shattered his right leg. By the time he recovered he had spent about 20 months out of 33 in rehab.
There was too much time to think. He worried about being forgotten. Who would want him? In this game loyalties dissolve. The carousel keeps turning.
By the spring of 2012 he needed something to happen. For the first time in his career the Festival smiled on him. Ruby Walsh chose Hurricane Fly in the Champion Hurdle; Daryl Jacob had first pick of Walsh’s leftovers in Nicholls’ yard and he chose Zarkander. Which left Rock On Ruby. Fehily had ridden him just once in his 10 career starts but Nicholls hadn’t resigned from his original judgment on Fehily as a big race jockey.
“Winning the Champion Hurdle with Rock On Ruby was probably as much a turning point as any in my career. I suppose I proved to people, ‘He can still ride a bit, he can win a good race.’”
To reach that stage in his career had been a gruelling test of his perseverance, going way back. As a youngster he spent a summer with David Nicholson at Jackdaws Castle when the Duke was at the height of his formidable powers. Nicholson’s roster of jockeys, though, included Adrian Maguire, Andrew ‘Choc’ Thornton and Richard Johnson and there was no sense in picking that fight. So Fehily retreated to Ireland and established himself on the point-to-point circuit.
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He was 22 before he committed to Charlie Mann as his stable amateur and for a while Fehily’s weekends were a whirlwind of commutes: he would ride for Mann in England on a Saturday, grab the overnight ferry to ride Sunday point-to-points at home and travel through the night to make work in Lambourn on Monday morning. He was young and hungry and made light of the lunacy.
Fehily was champion conditional in Britain in 2001, and became first jockey to Mann when Richard Dunwoody retired. A few years later Jonjo O’Neill recruited him as his second jockey: it was a much bigger yard with greater opportunities and there was a certain degree of recognition in the appointment. But, on the jockeys table, it still left him in the crowded second tier. By 2010 he had ridden just one Grade One winner. He was better than that. He needed to make people see.
Fehily needed to find an edge from somewhere so he hired a personal trainer, Frankie Naylor. On his first run under her watch his heart rate was “off the scale” and he was too dehydrated to sweat. She stopped him. Naylor re-wrote his fitness plan from top to bottom. In his first full season working with her Fehily had more rides and more winners than ever before. When his shoulder went in January 2010 he was fourth in the jockeys’ table, the highest position he had ever achieved in the heart of the season. Before the injuries struck that was the trajectory of his career.
To overcome those setbacks and come back stronger has been a triumph for Fehily’s endurance. Last season he rode more than a hundred winners for the first time, exceeding his previous best total by 38. All that was missing was a Festival winner. Silviniaco Conti in the Gold Cup was the one that got away.
“He winged the last and I thought he was going to go and win. Halfway up the run-in I could feel my worst nightmare happening. He started wandering. People are saying he didn’t get up the hill in Cheltenham but he went to Liverpool [Aintree] and didn’t finish his race either, even though he won. That’s what prompted Paul [Nicholls] to get him checked out and they found there was a problem [stomach ulcers].
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“The last thing we expected was for him to tie-up. We’ve always thought all he does is stay. Be in front after the last,that was the plan. To kick on and win the race. I still haven’t watched the Gold Cup back. Just can’t. Couldn’t bring myself.”
No fault was laid at Fehily’s feet. The owners of Silviniaco Conti, Chris Giles and Portensis Bloodstock, command a substantial presence in Nicholls’ yard and at the beginning of this season they asked Fehily to ride all their horses. Conti has already delivered two Grade Ones for the partnership this season and is clear favourite for redemption in the Gold Cup on Friday; a day earlier Fehily will wear the same silks on Zarkander in the World Hurdle and even with his understated demeanour Fehily can’t disguise his confidence.
He has a couple of nice rides for Harry Fry and Charlie Longsdon and others. Then, on Wednesday, JP McManus’ people got in touch: would he ride Kitten Rock, their second string, in the Champion Hurdle? With Tony McCoy’s imminent retirement McManus is in the market for a new retained rider and on Thursday a flood of money was wagered on Fehily. Really? He will be 40 in December, only 18 months younger than McCoy.
The punt was fanciful but what it said was true: he would be good enough. At long last, that is plain to see.