Life has not always played fair with Jonjo O’Neill. Cancer, for instance, gatecrashed his most glorious year as a jockey. Rumour, adversity and unreasonable expectations have haunted his decade of training at Jackdaws Castle. When, finally, he won the greatest of jump races, the masses knew it only as Tony McCoy’s Grand National.
The victory of Don’t Push It last April propelled McCoy to unprecedented fame and awards. O’Neill, who had prepared an unhinged horse so skilfully, subsequently suffered a fall in stable strength and a largely anonymous season. Yet, as he surveys the prospect of a follow-up on Saturday, he bears no scars of persecution.
Sipping coffee amid the leather and technology of an owners’ lounge that helps set his Cotswold yard apart, O’Neill was contentedly animated as he recalled the euphoria of a year ago. “I suppose it did more for A. P. than for us but that’s just the way of things,” he said. “The National never helps a trainer’s business.
“It’s strange, because you can win the Gold Cup and still walk down the street with nobody knowing you but you win the National and everyone stops to say well done. But it doesn’t bring you more horses — we have 20 fewer than last year. It disappoints me that I haven’t got enough good ones here but it’s not for lack of effort.”
For disappointment, do not read disillusionment. The fires of ambition still burn bright. Jonjo, one of those rare sportsmen identifiable by his first name, is far from sated by training and scornful of the recurring whispers about his ability, his future and even the ethics of his operation.
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A few seasons back, when the virus hit Jackdaws Castle, those whispers broadcast his impending departure. “There was no truth in any of that. I was never going to stop training. Oh, I heard it all but I’m so used to the gossip, I tend not to listen any more.”
But he did listen, appalled, when the running of Get Me Out Of Here was questioned this season. Now, he detailed the hair-tearing dismay as “one of the best we’ve trained” failed to deliver, then the attention and expense devoted to tests before a wind operation restored him and he was beaten only in a photograph in the County Hurdle at Cheltenham.
“I thought we’d got it. And we’d have got such a kick out of that. There was so much rubbish talked about him, spreading suspicion. I love the fascination of the challenges we had with the horse but I hate the way people crab us when they don’t know — or don’t want to know — the full story.”
Get Me Out Of Here reappears in the closing race at Aintree today and Albertas Run is a highlight tomorrow. If he wins the Melling Chase, it will complete a Cheltenham-Aintree double for a second successive year — another rare achievement for which the trainer will doubtless receive scant respect.
I asked if he had ever doubted himself. “No, I think I’m good at it. I believe that. I get such buzz from nicking a race with a bad horse. I never found it daunting coming here. I don’t say it’s rosy every day — the year of the virus was shocking. We had 90-odd winners by the middle of December and about another four to the end of the season. I didn’t think that was possible.”
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That the crisis did not faze him can be ascribed to gritty experience. “People often ask me how I’d cope with a situation and I say I wouldn’t know until I was in it. It’s like when I was told I had cancer. I blew a fuse.
“I sat there trying to take it in, asking the doctor questions he couldn’t answer. He was only being honest but I grabbed at his desk, lifted it up and tipped the whole thing back on the poor man. I’d never have imagined I would act like that but you just don’t know until it happens to you.”
Months earlier, O’Neill had been carried around the mobbed madness of the Cheltenham winner’s enclosure after victory on Dawn Run in an indelible Gold Cup. “I didn’t know I had cancer but I’d been very tired since Christmas. Going into Cheltenham, I knew it might be my last as a jockey.”
Twenty-five years on, he has yet to command the same admiration as a trainer. Perhaps he invites scepticism with that mischievous expression which suggests he knows more than he is telling. Maybe being a tenant of J. P. McManus, whose generosity extends to too many poor horses, has deterred other patrons.
But McManus is a patient man and his faith in the trainer was vividly vindicated at Aintree last year. Now that it can be told, though, O’Neill dispels some of the myths about his own belief in Don’t Push It.
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“I did tell A. P. that he was different class to our other horse but I also said it didn’t matter which one he rode because neither could win. I was sick when Don’t Push It pulled up at Cheltenham and we’d had so many National disappointments I just thought this race is not for me.
“Sometimes you have to accept a thing is not going to happen. You can’t win everything, do everything. You can’t be God. I rang Frank Berry [McManus’s racing manager] and said it was a waste of time taking him to Aintree. Luckily, he said we’d paid the money so we might as well go.
“I’m happier with him this year. The preparation has been brilliant, which probably means he’ll fall at the first.” He chuckled in that infectious way. “Once you win one, you want it again and again. But I’ve not given up on other things. If I could be champion trainer just once, I’d die a happy man.”