By Paul Hayward
On a bright autumn afternoon at Ascot, Oisin Murphy raised and then kissed a silver trophy that symbolised the arc of his redemption.
Banned for 14 months for twice failing breath tests and misleading the British Horseracing Authority over a trip to Mykonos during Covid, Murphy stood on Champions Day as the embodiment of a fall-and-rise narrative. There are lots of those in sport, and they sure as hell beat the opposite, which is fall-and-stay-fallen.
The 2024 Champion Jockey was given a guard of honour by his fellow jockeys and crammed onto the podium with 20 family members, among them, his uncle Jim Culloty, who later called him, in a complimentary way, “a kind of flawed genius”. The gifted star with demons elicits a special fascination. We watch them up there on their tightrope, struggling in public with 'issues' that most folk face in private.
Salvation, recovery, are seldom linear. Murphy had counselling on the morning he looked ahead, in a media conference, to winning a fourth jockeys' championship. On Champions Day itself he went on Radio 4's flagship Today programme and talked with superb fluency and insight about the meeting, racing's whip rules and his fondness for the poetry of Sylvia Plath (he speaks Irish, English, French and German and displays the measured eloquence of a bookish man.)
“I had a love for Sylvia Plath [in his schooldays],” Murphy told Today. “It's a little bit deep, and some would say dark, and it's certainly that, but it offers a fresh perspective, particularly when you've been hurtling around on the back of a horse. It can resonate with the majority of people.”
In elite sport, a line of Plath's jumps out: “I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.” Talent is compulsion, success an addiction, and the pressure unrelenting. In return–yes, the money is good.
Murphy spoke candidly in interviews about his old life of being out of control on vodka and champagne. He knows there is no switch you can flick to turn chaos into order but has ridden his guts out this year to win the jockeys' championship easily, and to prove a point–mostly to himself.
He has been in counselling since October 2021 and become something of a beacon to people struggling with alcoholism. No other jockey can make that claim. The trials of Walter Swinburn and Pat Eddery for example were hidden from public view. Frankie Dettori had a lapse with cocaine in 2012 but presented it more as an aberration than a warning to others. Fair enough, not everyone wants to be a cautionary tale. Murphy on the other hand has chosen the route of openness in the hope that it might add to our understanding of addiction.
“Daily I receive messages from people wanting me to do well,” he said in the winners' enclosure at Ascot. In The Mirror a few days previously he admitted, “I drank more in eight years than a normal man drinks in a lifetime. But it's been phenomenal the amount of messages I've had off normal people on Instagram and Twitter. They tell me how much they can relate to my story. They tell me that they've been sober for six months or whatever. And they thank me for sharing.”
There are piercing recollections in that interview of him being collected by a driver after the last race and drinking all the way home. “Regularly I'd never remember going to bed,” he said. “So that is a blackout. That was regular.”
This was in the “Belvedere Vodka and champagne” years from 2019-2021. Anyone reading those lines would have been struck by how content, how focused, he looked on the Ascot podium after winning the title by more than 50. “There are some incredible riders in Britain: William Buick, Tom Marquand, Rossa Ryan, Hollie Doyle,” he said on Today. “I've had a good few more rides than the rest of them, but I have a healthy strike rate so I'm glad the hard work's paid off.”
His hard work is undeniable. When Murphy was back in the weighing room to prepare for his ride on Tamfana in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes, I asked Culloty, who rode Best Mate and won the Cheltenham Gold Cup as a trainer too, how Murphy had turned it round.
“Like anybody who has had issues, they help themselves. You can get all the advice and this and that, it's down to yourself,” Culloty said. “Oisin is ambitious and hungry. The time off he had has done him the power of good because since he left school he never had the chance to stand back and take stock of his life, what he actually wants, his true values.
“You have to educate yourself and write down, 'Where do you want to be in 20 years? What do you want from life?'. He did that. And he's standing by it.”
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