5th June 2009 - Michael Kinane - Brough Scott

Interviewers, and this week there will be many, will find something strange happening when they talk to Michael Kinane: that while in reality they are looking down at him they actually seem to be looking up. The rider of Guineas winner Sea The Stars may only log five foot four inches on the measuring board but in stature he has long been one of the tallest talents on the planet.

It’s an illusion enhanced by understatement and struck me hardest when he came before the Channel 4 cameras after winning the Derby on the supposed Cecil second string Commander in Chief back in 1993. There was sweat on his face and delight fairly danced beneath the curled ginger eyebrows but with the Two Thousand Guineas, The King George, The Arc, The Abbaye, The Belmont and at least 4 Irish Classics from 18 years on the track, there were no whoops of triumph. Asked if it was a surprise that his horse had so comprehensively outrun his odds-on stablemate Tenby he looked up very directly and said – “not to me it wasn’t.”

That is very Michael Kinane – he can say a little and suggest a lot. He does not scream and shout but is very proud of his achievements and gets wry amusement from those who do not appreciate quite what they are dealing with. One day last summer he was mowing the grass verge in front of his splendid property near Punchestown with a wooly hat and old track suit over his sweat jacket when he was hailed by a middle aged Ronan Keating fan. Would the magnificent neo-Georgian mansion, asked the lady, with its sweeping lamp lit drive and ornamental lake be where the great songsmith resides ? “No”, answered Mick, it was he who lived there. “Be off with you,” said the ageing groupie, “you’re just the little heathen that cuts the grass.”

In fact the house with its 80 acres and a small broodmare band which includes the dam of Authorized with a Galileo colt foal at foot is a living tribute to the enormity of the journey along which Michael Joseph Kinane has journeyed since scoring at the first time of asking at Leopardstown where only on Thursday night Aidan O’Brien’s teenage son Joseph opened his own career as a winning jockey. Back in March 1995 Mick might have been recognized as the 15 year old son of a racing player, his father was jump jockey Tommy Kinane, but his mount was not this week’s front running “armchair” from Ballydoyle but a one eyed dodgepot called Muscari who tried to buck him off on the way to the start and the diminutive victor was already under no illusion as to how tough life would have to be.

How could he be when his grandmother Annie raised no less than 14 children and milked herds of both cows and goats in Tipperary where her stonemason husband built the wall round the Rock of Cashel ? Or when the thrill in 1976 of winning a race at Navan on Monksfield one month after the then 43 year old Tommy had taken the Triumph Hurdle on the little colt at Cheltenham was severely sobered a year later when a terrible fall in the Irish National grounded Tommy for four months only weeks after his crowning moment on Monksfield in the Champion Hurdle itself ?

Tommy’s other boys all had a run at the jockey game but then, as now, Michael was always a man apart lit by drive from deep within. In the current Irish weighing room young star Declan McDonagh relates at the competitiveness which the 13 times title holder still takes to the starting gate. At Epsom on Thursday retired champion Kevin Darley says “with some jockeys there comes a time before a big race when you don’t want to go near them, Mick was one of those.” Up in Yorkshire, ex jockey and highly successful bloodstock dealer Mark Dwyer recalls the single mindedness, and the temper, of his fiery little fellow apprentice at the near “boot camp” that was Liam Browne’s exacting training establishment on the Curragh.

But, as so often with the Kinane clan, the most revealing comment comes from within the family. “He is like a little ball of fire in the saddle,” says younger brother Jayo. “Determination is too light a word for it. But he has always had that in him. I remember when he was small he had a row with Dad and he ended up saying ‘I am going to be better than Lester Piggott’ and by god he meant it.”

Those blazing fires first found success in the boxing ring. “Oh he was such a brilliant little boxer,” enthuses Kinane senior, “so quick and determined. And he took those qualities to riding ponies and then racehorses too. Over the years he has calmed his temper but he still takes no prisoners when things really matter.” They will matter on Saturday all right and as Michael canters the Derby favourite past the gleaming new Epsom grandstand the commitment will positively beam from him.

But force of will, however strong was never going to be enough to develop the technical expertise and strategic judgment which has seen Kinane become the only jockey whose global haul encompasses the Breeders Cup, The Japan Cup, The Hong Kong Cup, and The Melbourne Cup along with all the great prizes in Europe. Two contrasting mentors have made him the man he is today. The first Liam Browne whose uncompromising discipline furnace the fires as well as providing first Classic and Royal Ascot success with Dara Monarch in 1982 and a first Derby ride on Carlingford Castle who was second to the Lester Piggott steered Teenoso a year later. The second was Dermot Weld with whom Michael formed a 15 year partnership which only ended when the lure of Ballydoyle finally became too strong.

If Liam Browne’s yard was the most demanding of colleges, Dermot Weld’s Rosewall Stables was a University headed by a professor set on nothing less than distinction at every turn. As a committed veterinary student during his amateur riding days Weld had to use superior strategy to compensate for lack of fitness and the detail of his Sunday debriefing sessions was so severe that his young jockey used to call them “the torture chamber.” But the pair were a match. In Weld Kinane could see someone who would keep raising the bar, and in Kinane Weld had found a pilot bright enough to his wisdom. “Michael Kinane is not just a jockey who is intelligent,” said Dermot in Michael Clower’s biography, “but a highly intelligent man who happens to be a jockey.”

With Weld Kinane was not just allowed but encouraged to go global. His own ambitions would never sit comfortably with the standard arrangement where Irish jockeys were thought good only for Irish courses which is why riding Weld’s Committed to win the Abbaye in 1985, his first Group One in Europe, remains particularly sweet in the memory. Yet the real trick in assessing what Kinane brings to the table is to appreciate how keen he was that Europe should not be enough.

He first spent a couple of winters in India but it was in Hong Kong that Mick became truly international. His six month stints with trainer David Oughton was so successful that he and Catherine would actually put their two daughters to school in Hong Kong for the winter and meant that when Sheikh Mohammed came calling at the start of the annus mirabilis of 1993, he was finally turned down for the novel reason that the money was insufficient.

But there was more than riches to be gained abroad. In Hong Kong Kinane had to get used to very special pressure off as well as on the track. At the races he would be competing with top international riders in the tightest of disciplines, away from the course the owners’ insatiable wish for discussion demands diplomacy of the highest order. The first pressure has meant that Kinane is unphased when the trumpets sound for the big occasion, the second has given him the independence to make his own decisions when big battalion politics looked to be swirling against him. Who else could have switched seamlessly from Ballydoyle to the Aga Khan and, to misquote Kipling “not breathe a word about any potential loss” ?

“What would be gained from talking about it?” was his quiet answer this week. He had a brilliant run and, with Galileo, another Derby winner with Ballydoyle. As with all jockeys some things, most famously Giant’s Causeway’s reins in the Breeders Cup, came unstuck but the masterpiece that was his Irish Champion Stakes victory on Azamour in 1984 (his first season with John Oxx) showed that all his big race talent was intact.

So too did Sea The Stars Two Thousand Guineas last month, calmly in a good position and ruthlessly enforcing his superiority up the hill. Like Commander in Chief, but rather more so, it was not a surprise. “I have always liked him,” said Mick when we talked this week. “Forget his wonderful pedigree he is a lovely big horse who always showed lots of class. I have been riding him in all his work and I can tell you it means you don’t need an alarm clock in the morning..” John Oxx, in his professorial way, has avoided hostages to fortune by pointing out possible stamina flaws in the question. For a moment Michael Kinane goes to break the habit of a lifetime with a “of course he will” statement but then relishes the control by saying purposefully “if he stays, he wins.”

Before then his jockey will go into his own preparation. This winter in Dubai he took particular trouble about his own physical fitness and one day that as well as the mind may go. But while at this stage of his career Michael Kinane might no longer the first man you want to book for a rotten night at Roscommon there is still no one who get up better for a big race. “I won’t be nervous on the day,” he says, “but I am always very nervous three or four days in advance. Catherine will tell you I get very difficult but I try and get lost at home to find clarity of thought. I like to weigh the race up in my mind and fit the pieces of the jigsaw together. It takes time but I get to the track, I am ready.”

The man who likes to guard his thoughts has opened up as if in the psychiatrist’s chair. Has he perhaps been on the couch himself? A glint up of the ginger eyebrows. “What me?” he says getting back his own counsel, “they would see I was insane.”