By T. D. Thornton
Dr. Patrick F. Sheehy, a retired oncologist and hematologist who owned racehorses and is best known for campaigning the overachieving sprinter Kinsale King, a gelding who flourished into an unlikely Group 1 winner in Dubai in 2010 after starting his career as a California-based maiden-claimer, has died.
The trainer Carl O'Callaghan, who transformed the sore-footed Kinsale King into an international stakes winner, on Monday confirmed the passing of his boss and mentor to TDN. He said Sheehy, who was in his early 80s, had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
O'Callaghan said Sheehy died Dec. 21 at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, California, where he had practiced medicine for more than five decades.
“He was very much a father figure to me and one of my best friends,” O'Callaghan said. “I spoke to him every single day since 2009, sometimes three, four, five times a day, and it was not necessarily phone calls about horses all the time. But he loved the horses, and California racing, and the horses were in his blood.
“I flew out to California last Sunday to be with him,” O'Callaghan said. “I spent a day and a half with him in the hospital. He was a very, very good cancer doctor. I mean extremely good, one of the best, and everybody loved him at the clinic. They all knew who he was, but he was never cocky about it. He was just a normal person. He was a good man, and he'll be greatly missed.”
The bond between Sheehy and O'Callaghan–as chronicled through the ups and downs of Kinsale King's career–was featured in a 2016 documentary titled “Chasing the Win” that was co-directed by Sheehy's daughter, Laura Sheehy.
The film details how the two Irish immigrants from different generations forged a connection over their shared passion for Thoroughbreds, which started when Sheehy gave O'Callaghan–a former assistant and exercise rider for trainer Todd Pletcher who had at one time been so down on his luck that he was homeless–a chance to train his racing stable. Kinsale King had won only a maiden race at Santa Anita for Sheehy before he was turned over to O'Callaghan in 2009.
With special attention to the gelding's cracked hooves (and an Irish-themed diet that included four pints of Guinness a day for Kinsale King), the then-4-year-old won an allowance race, the GIII Vernon Underwood S. at Hollywood Park, and then the GII Palos Verdes H. at Santa Anita all in succession in 2009-10, establishing himself as a budding West Coast sprinter. But Kinsale King still seemed to be in over his head, competition-wise, before earning a trip overseas and running away with the G1 Dubai Golden Shaheen S.
Kinsale King later targeted other high-profile overseas stakes at Royal Ascot in England and back home in America in the GI Breeders' Cup Sprint, but could not sustain his mojo and winning ways in high-profile stakes. In 2013, Sheehy retired the gelding, who stayed on in O'Callaghan's stable as a pony before eventually giving show jumping a try in his second career, with O'Callaghan in the saddle.
“Dr. Sheehy gave me a chance when nobody did,” said O'Callaghan. “He was the very first person who put a horse in my barn, and once I got going for him, we came across Kinsale King when they were just about to retire him. And that horse took us on a journey. He brought my family together from back home [in Ireland] close to all of his family, and the bond got real close over the horse.”
When O'Callaghan transferred his racing stable from California to Pennsylvania in 2016, he said Sheehy sent a few horses along with his to compete in the mid-Atlantic region. After the 2020 pandemic, O'Callaghan said, Sheehy consolidated what was left of his California racing stock to Pennsylvania, but was down to owning just a single horse at the time of his death on Saturday.
O'Callaghan told TDN that Sheehy's family will have private funeral services, but that a celebration of Sheehy's life will be planned at a later date.
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