Ben Curtis: Going the Extra Mile

From managing to tie with Joseph O'Brien and Gary Carroll for the Irish apprentice title without a major backer to conducting exhaustive tours of the stables of Britain in search of his latest opportunity, Ben Curtis always seems to be a man in a hurry. Even this interview is carried out from the golf course, issued in rat-a-tat fashion between shots.

“I've always been the same,” he says. “I don't really come from a racing background, so I've kind of had to work a bit, not harder than everyone else, but to get established I've probably always had to put in that bit of extra effort. I've always ridden out everywhere possible, and it paid off after a while.”

He very much bucks the trend in a family of white collar workers originating from Kinsale, the salubrious seaside town near Cork. A late starter, he rather fell into the sport aged 14.

“With racing you don't plan it, you're either good at it or not, and I suppose I got into it at the right time,” Curtis explains. “I couldn't sit behind a desk, people were saying I could ride and to give it a shot. Dad's a property investor, mum's an accountant, my brother works in law and my sister works in marketing, they'd be as far detached from racing as possible. But through my racing, Mum and Dad started riding. They love it now too.”

Even in his freshman season in 2006, Curtis collected rides from nine different trainers. His father Dane and the locally-based trainer and agent Ruaidhri Tierney went halves on the cheaply-bought mare Always On Top (Ire) (Desert Story {Ire}) in an attempt to get him started, and she provided the aspiring teenager's first winner at Galway that August. Four years on, he reached that junior championship from 482 rides sourced from a hotchpotch of avenues, but operating at a modest strike-rate of 8%.

“Winning jointly with Joseph was a big achievement,” he says. “He had had a lot of ammunition behind him, obviously, and for me it was something out of the blue. I was riding 20-1, 33-1 shot winners for smaller trainers, that's what got me through. But sometimes you need a bit of luck behind you and that year everything seemed to go my way.”

Such a passage was not always going to be so charmed. Whilst Curtis managed to mine his extensive network ever deeper and remained in demand, more formal associations with the likes of John Oxx failed to materialise into first-choice positions. By 2013 he was making successful flying visits for the late Yorkshire trainer Alan Swinbank and the following season his transfer across the Irish Sea became permanent.

“I was very comfortable in Ireland, had lots of very good friends and a house and a girlfriend there,” he recalls. “She didn't really want to move to England, so I put a lot of that in jeopardy as well. Sometimes you've got to go where the work is, go where you can improve yourself and that was the deciding factor.

“Luckily the girlfriend came over, she became my wife and we've got a kid now. It turned out to be the best decision ever, but was it a hard decision? My God, I wouldn't want to make it every day, put it that way.”

He had nearly 500 rides again that season and steadily built up his totals through the 50s and 70s. This year has shown a marked improvement again as he reached a maiden 113, largely through the help of two other significant Yorkshire operations.

“I'm in at Karl Burke's once a week, David Barron's one a week, then try to get round as many yards as possible after that,” Curtis explains. “I might try to go and ride out for Hugo Palmer or William Haggas. Wherever I'm staying, I'll ride out down there.

“Thankfully my family has been very understanding for always being away and my agents, Ruaidhri and Simon Dodds, have been a massive help and influence. I think the key is to spread yourself around and ride for as many trainers as possible. That way you get as many rides as possible. When I'm at it, I'm flat out at it and could be in seven days a week in seven different yards.”

There is further method to this restless approach. The 29-year-old has few prestigious victories to his name and is keen for a taste of more after taking this year's G3 Chipchase S. at Newcastle aboard the Barron-trained Above The Rest (Ire) (Excellent Art {GB}).

“The best way to get noticed is to get a good horse, so I've got to do that. If you can win a Group 1, people will put you on better ones. You might be like Silvestre de Sousa, who rides hundreds of winners on bad horses, he goes round the country riding winners for everyone, on every different track, but he still doesn't get the quality that he deserves. That's racing though–if he got the better horses, he'd win on them.

“A lot of the big names that they throw up on the bigger days, they have the experience and they deserve it, so you need that one big horse to put you into that elite group. I've found it a massive frustration but you've just got to keep plugging away and hope it all comes together at some stage.”

Plugging away is rather understating it for a jockey who once bolted a six-week busman's holiday in Perth onto the end of his honeymoon in Langkawi. He also went close to defying physical possibilities late last summer.

“I rode a treble at Carlisle one day which took me up to the hundred,” he recalls. “My wife Shona came up with my little lad (Brodi) for some reason, I thought I'd have no chance of doing it then, but it was a nice little touch to do that with them there. Then I rode a winner at Newcastle the next day and got a fall, and it was a stupid fall as well, the horse jinked after the line and I popped my shoulder out.

“Four weeks was kind of the best-case scenario but luckily I was back on the track in 11 days, which was fairly unexpected. I worked hard at it in Jack Berry House–I wanted to be back in a week, but it was probably right to wait.”

His latest mission has taken him to Dubai with a winter stint for Musabah Al Muhairi. Although Dane O'Neill has the pick of the yard's Sheikh Hamdan Al Maktoum horses, there should be spares through the Carnival and Curtis has already converted a few winners for the trainer in the early season. With fewer weekly meetings in the UAE, a slightly slower pace of life is somewhat forced upon him and Shona and eight-month-old Brodi have been out to visit.

“It's actually nice to have a bit of downtime. You're still working out here but you have a bit more time to yourself to spend with the family.”

Nonetheless, he still has half an eye on a potential Carnival challenge from Above The Rest in the new year.

“When everything goes right for him he's a very good horse, he's rated 111 now, and he's rated that for a reason,” he says. “I imagine he'll be on the turf first up but he won the Chipchase on the all-weather and was fourth on his comeback at Lingfield so there's no reason not to try him on the dirt later. If he takes to it, he could easily thrive as there's a lot right for him there.”

He continues, “I'm playing it by ear but hopefully I'll see out the Carnival. There are a few other horses coming out that we'll be trying our hardest to get on, then hopefully get the foot back in the door fresh and fit to build on what was a great year.”

Few, one imagines, will be trying harder than Ben Curtis to do so.