O'Toole Still Wild About The Game

You know you've made it when you are widely known simply by your first name. Say the name 'Mags' to most people in the bloodstock industry and they will know exactly to whom you are referring. For Margaret O'Toole, to use her given name, is as widely known as she is admired within that tightknit community, commanding a respect inversely proportionate to the level of publicity she receives.

The latter is deliberate. Not for O'Toole are the self-congratulatory social media accounts. If she did choose to publicise her achievements in this way, the bloodstock agent would have much to tweet about, especially during the cut and thrust of the National Hunt season. Among the big names with which she is associated are Tiger Roll (Ire) (Authorized {Ire}), who is about to bid for a third Grand National victory, and Notebook (Ger) (Samum {Ger}), who heads to the Cheltenham Festival on a Grade 1 hat-trick. But she almost actively shuns the limelight, which means that it has taken a number of years for TDN to persuade O'Toole to agree to an interview. In the afterglow of a well-deserved Wild Geese Award from the Irish Thoroughbred Breeders' Association at the end of January, she finally acquiesced.

Arguably the most popular award winner of the evening, O'Toole, the first female to have been recognised in this category which acknowledges the success of Irish people working abroad, admits to being a little overwhelmed at the response.

“Joe Foley promised me there would be no speeches but that was a lie,” she says with a laugh. “But it was fantastic and really quite emotional to be given such recognition from people within the industry. The reception was unbelievable and the messages I've had since then from people who I didn't even know had my number has been quite incredible.”

For someone so immersed in the Irish National Hunt scene through her most prominent role over recent years as the buyer, with Eddie O'Leary, of the powerful Gigginstown House Stud team of jumpers, it is perhaps a surprise that O'Toole has been a Newmarket resident for more than 30 years. However, like her late father, the legendary trainer Mick O'Toole, she has 'form' in both codes. She is a regular at foal and yearling sales in Europe and America, again primarily with O'Leary and his Lynn Lodge Stud operation, but O'Toole prefers the freedom that is to be found in buying at the National Hunt store sales.

“For me, the horse comes first, there's no doubt about it,” she says. “That's why it's very different with the Flat. Everything has to be in trend—the stallion especially. You can buy a jumper where the mare has had four runners and none of them has won but you can't buy a Flat foal where he is the fifth foal and she hasn't had a winner. You certainly can take those liberties with the jumpers as long as you're buying an athlete.”

That buyer's instinct has been honed throughout O'Toole's life, even before she was really aware of the lessons being learned.

“When I was going to the sales with dad, I didn't use to ask him what he liked about a horse but I was probably picking things up that I didn't even realise,” she reflects. “He didn't buy thousands of champion racehorses but he never had a bad-looking horse around the place. And I'm the same, I can't stand a plain head.”

O'Toole continues, “When I was younger I was around the yard at home all day every day. I absolutely loved it. I can never think of a moment when I thought I'd like to do something else. When dad was selling a horse, he never had to go and look up a pedigree, he used to call me and I had them memorised to the third dam, half-brothers and everything else. I was just very lucky that I had a good memory.”

That pedigree knowledge would come in handy for O'Toole when she arrived in Newmarket in her early twenties “without a plan” but with a determination bordering on stubbornness to forge a career for herself. Her early friendship with Di Haine, also the daughter of a trainer, in this case Harry Thomson Jones, and with a similarly good eye for a horse, led to O'Toole's long-term friendship with pedigree expert Alex Scrope.

“I went to a Keeneland January sale with Di Haine who was working for her father when Sheikh Hamdan was buying,” she recalls. “While I was out there Alex Scrope asked what I was doing for the September Sale. She had a very good job with Guy Harwood and she asked me if I would pull out and do a bit of veterinary stuff, and so it went on. Then she asked me what I was going to do when I got back from America. Of course Alex was so ahead of her time and when she asked me if I could work a computer I said, 'Yes of course', lying through my teeth.”

She adds, “I started doing some pedigree work for Alex and was there for a long time. Things evolved: if you're out and about people see you. I was leaving Goffs one day and Eddie O'Leary asked what I was doing for the foal sale. Again I started just pulling out for him but it went on from there. Then when his brother [Michael] got involved with the jumpers it was just a natural progression and I just kept going. Obviously now that's come to an end.”

The announcement by Michael O'Leary last May that he would gradually wind down mean that O'Toole turns away from her beloved jumpers.

“I love the people involved with [jump racing],” she says. “Doing all those store sales for the last 10 or 12 years with Eddie on behalf of Gigginstown was fantastic. And it wasn't just always going in and firing at the top ten lots, we were buying them from €30,000 to €300,000. Everyday was a learning day. It was fantastic and of course they had huge success—all down to Eddie—and with those horses, too, you get to follow them for four or five years. Tiger Roll is ten now and we bought him when he was three, and I know they don't all stay around but you can have more of an interest in them because they are around for that much longer.”

She continues, “When Michael decided he was going to stop buying any more jumpers I thought that would be the end of going to the store sales, but then a few other people came forward with huge interest and here we go again.”

Such has been the success of the Gordon Elliott-trained Tiger Roll—a dual Grand National winner and four-time Cheltenham Festival winner—that he has almost transcended his O'Leary ownership to become a people's horse. O'Toole admits to a huge soft spot for the little gelding, even if he didn't really fit the bill when he was bought from the Brightwells Cheltenham Sale following one juvenile hurdles victory for his initial trainer, Nigel Hawke.

She says, “Tiger Roll is unbelievable. I'd marry him tomorrow if he'd have me. I said the other night that we bought him for the Triumph Hurdle but then Eddie corrected me and said, 'no that was way too ambitious, we bought him for the Fred Winter'. And look what he's done, it's just incredible. Every race with him has meant so much.”

She continues, “Gigginstown's remit was always three-mile chasers, nothing else. It's probably just as well that Michael wasn't in Gordon's yard the day Tiger Roll came back from the sale because he's not really the type of horse that they like to buy. But it just happened that it was a year that they had no juveniles, we got nothing bought at the horses-in-training sales, and Eddie said he would do. We bought him on the reserve and had very nearly stopped bidding.”

For Michael O'Leary, a huge investor in National Hunt racing and major sponsor, particularly via the G1 Ryanair Chase, the four days of the Cheltenham Festival have always been paramount, and success at Prestbury Park is every bit as important to those around him.

O'Toole says, “Cheltenham is hugely important. When you're buying that 3-year old store you're hoping that in three years' time he might line up in one of those novice hurdles—in fact when you buy him you know that's where he's going even though maybe one in 100 gets there. But it's everything, Cheltenham, it's very intense, and you only realise that later when you go to Aintree or Punchestown and everyone is smiling and laughing. But at Cheltenham, until you've had a winner it's as bad as going to the dentist. It's such a relief if you get a winner on the first day because it means you can enjoy the rest of the week.”

The big hope for a first-day winner at this year's Festival will be the aforementioned G1 Racing Post Arkle Chase favourite Notebook. Like Tiger Roll, he was a relatively inexpensive purchase in O'Toole's name, bought for £70,000 at the Tattersalls Ireland Cheltenham May Sale two years ago. Since graduating to chasing, the 7-year-old has not been beaten in four starts this season for Henry de Bromhead.

He and Tiger Roll are but two of a host of top-class horses with whom O'Toole has been involved over the years, though she quickly deflects credit to Eddie O'Leary and is happy to be considered “one of the lads”. Her modest approach is doubtless another attribute gleaned from her greatest mentor.

She says, “Everybody for years now has been saying, 'your father's so proud of you', but he had a funny way of not letting you know. So if I rang him after a meeting and one of the Gigginstown horses had run well he would always say something like 'I'd say that one of Noel Meade's would have won if he'd jumped the last better'. I rang him after Tiger Roll's first National, like I used to do every evening, and I said, 'Well what about that?', and he said, 'Willie's horse was up in another stride, do you know that?'. But he didn't mean it, he was always just keeping you level.”

With the Wild Geese Award safely in her clutches, O'Toole jokes that perhaps she is now allowed to return home to Ireland.

“I've waited 30-something years,” she says with a smile. But the peripatetic life of a modern-day bloodstock agent means that O'Toole spends little time in her adopted home anyway, and she admits that she's pretty happy with her lot.

“This is probably how I would have liked things to go had I thought about it, but I had no idea what I was going to do when I arrived in Newmarket. The faith people have had in me, I've been so lucky. The other day I had to describe what I do to someone who is completely outside racing and I said 'I spend an unbelievable amount of other people's money on things that I like'. It's a girl's dream job.”