Shamrocks in the Bluegrass: Brendan and Olive Gallagher of Frankfort Park

They pride themselves on their professionalism and were duly mortified when a yearling colt by Tapizar somehow ended up with a nail in a hoof. Worse still, shortly afterwards his full sister–sold at Keeneland the previous September for $100,000–made a winning debut at Horseshoe Indianapolis. The mare was coming good.

So Brendan and Oliver Gallagher sent him in to Hagyard, to have the foot cleaned and disinfected. Back then, in 2017, they didn't know Michael Spirito as well as they do now (“a god of a surgeon”); but nor did he know quite who he was dealing with.

Three weeks later, the colt still appeared lame. “He needs to go back in,” Spirito said. “We need to redo it.”

“You know, Doc,” said Brendan, “I think this horse is getting better.”

He remembers going for a beer with a friend one evening and his phone kept lighting up: the mare's co-owner Michael Hernon; then Spirito; then Olive. The October Sale was getting closer, the half-sister had followed up in a Churchill allowance, Hernon was getting jittery. Brendan ignored the calls, ordered another beer.

Okay, he thought, let's see what the blacksmith reckons. “But when he came we couldn't even catch the horse,” Brendan recalls.

He stuck to his guns, sent Hernon some video footage. After another couple of weeks, Spirito came to Frankfort Park with a posse of juniors and interns. Brendan led the way into the colt's stall.

“So what we do is,” he said, “we get the holy water; we throw three or four shots of it that way.” Then he went around the horse. “And then three or four this side. And the horse is perfect. Do you want to see him out?”

Spirito gave him a look.

“You're all right,” he said.

Brendan likes the vignette, as being instructive of what they stand for: Olive and Brendan in a nutshell.

“Because from that day he knew that if you ask a straight question, you'll get it straight,” Brendan recalls now. “It's taken us a long time to establish that, over here. But when you're really focused, you don't need all the bluster.”

Brendan Gallagher and Michael Hernon with Drumette, dam of Monomoy Girl at the 2018 Fasig-Tipton November Sale | Fasig-Tipton photo

The colt sold for $175,000. Four days later his sister won again, this time a stakes race. A few days after that, even so, they got no more than $60,000 for the mare's weanling colt by Palace Malice at the November Sale. Then things really started to happen. The filly became champion Monomoy Girl, and eventually the half-brother won the GII Risen Star as Mr. Monomoy. By then they had cashed out the mare, Drumette (Henny Hughes), for $1.85 million. She had cost just $75,000 four years previously.

No holy water, no bluster: just the seasoned judgement of two people born to the game, adding greatly to the enterprise and endeavor that unite so many of their compatriots in the “County Kentucky” diaspora.

For Drumette was no flash in the pan. Monomoy Girl was actually the second consecutive GI Kentucky Oaks winner to carry the Gallagher fingerprints: they had also bought the dam of Abel Tasman (Quality Road) for Eamon Cleary. For the first half of the race, moreover, Monomoy Girl was sharing the lead with another filly bred at Frankfort Park, GIII Forward Gal Stakes winner Take Charge Paula (Take Charge Indy). Two out of 14 starters in a Classic, out of just 19 foaled on the farm that crop.

There's no formula, of course. Most of it, in fact, is stuff you are born with: like nerve, belief.

Last year, Olive was leaving the Keeneland January Sale to get some supper ready.

“And I said to her, 'There's a mare here I'm half-thinking of buying,'” Brendan recalls. “'Oh yes,' she said. 'And how much would you be thinking for her?' And I said, 'I'd give 70 or 80.'”

Olive, listening to this story, interrupts derisively. “You did not! You said 35. I remember clearly.”

“So anyway, I come home…”

“And I'd been watching it [online],” Olive persists. “So I'm presuming you didn't buy her, right? But of course I knew.”

Brendan had signed for the mare at $175,000.

“Anyway, she was carrying a Complexity,” he continues. “And we couldn't sell the foal, it had a chip in the knee. So that didn't go too well. But the next foal we did sell, for $410,000. So then I could look at Olive and say, 'There you go.'”

Okay, if you really want a formula, he likes the old saying about the head of a queen and the backside of a cook. “And they need to have a bit of presence,” he says. “But after that, I can't explain it.”

Well, whatever its role, that element of nerve has evidently been there a long time. True, Brendan essentially cut short his first stint in the Bluegrass because he was homesick. He had arrived in 1983 along a familiar route, out of an Irish National Stud class that also produced Garrett O'Rourke, Dermot Ryan and Des Dempsey. But despite working first under Joe Taylor and John Gaines, and dealing with horses as resonant as Lyphard, Irish River and Riverman, within a couple of years he had gone back to the old country.

Here he spent eight years working his way through the ranks at Coolmore, appointed assistant manager when they opened Kilsheelan. But then came a first sign of that spirit of adventure, when Brendan bought Alphabatim from Juddmonte USA to stand on the family farm in Cork. (He had lost his father at just seven, but a large family had inherited a strong work ethic and, between cattle and point-to-pointers, an innate stockmanship.) “If this doesn't work,” he said to himself, “it'll be Australia.”

Work it did: 112 mares started the horse off, and things snowballed from there. As indeed they did after he went to the sales at Doncaster one day, and found Olive Taaffe, daughter of Arkle's jockey Pat, among those sharing a taxi from Manchester airport. Olive was working in transport, and they duly included shipping (as well as trading and insurance) among the services offered by Emerald Bloodstock, established after their marriage in 1993.

They had no office; Olive just sat on the steps by the ring, but a few Irish pinhookers at the October Sale booked a passage home from Newmarket for their yearlings. Again, there was soon that vital boldness: they started taking a piece of horses, for instance, rather than charging commission. And the instincts that would later unearth mares like Drumette were already operative: in the purchase from Godolphin, for instance, of Rahaam (Secreto) for just Ir£20,000 in 1995. She became the dam of top-class runner and producer Cassandra Go (Ire) (Indian Ridge {Ire}).

By the 2006 September Sale, they were able to give $325,000 for a Grand Slam filly. Running for partners as Laureldean Gale, she won a Newmarket maiden before going close in a Group race at Deauville, prompting a lucrative transfer to Godolphin. (When Godolphin culled her, a few years later, the Gallaghers brought her home for $20,000!) They also found the dam of GI Preakness runner-up Everfast (Take Charge Indy).

“In the good days, it got so that I had a pain in my hand from signing the dockets,” Brendan recalls. “It's like anything, when you're going well and making money with people, you're a king. In the early 2000s we were spending millions. In Deauville one time I think we bought 13 of the first 20 lots into the ring. The guys thought it was never going to end. It was mad.”

Monomoy Girl wins the 2020 Breeders' Cup Distaff | Horsephotos

But they were going so fast that the rudder was coming loose: they were doing too much, with too little organization. When the market crashed, after 2008, there was quite a mess to sort out. They had to offload Emerald Bloodstock, for one thing, and in 2010 ended up switching their base from Ireland to Frankfort Park, just down the road from Keeneland on the Old Frankfort Pike, bought four years previously as a quarantine facility. “A stupid reason,” says Olive wryly, “to buy a 240-acre farm!” But since buying out their partners it has become central to both the recovery and the evolution of their business–above all, thanks to the sheer quality of the land.

Brendan gestures to the neighbouring farm, a Stonestreet division. “Good Magic was raised in that field,” he says. “And the same year we were raising Monomoy Girl over here. Now, I'm not taking away from Ireland and England. But it's a different system, raising horses, when you keep having to put out a bit of fertilizer or something. Over there, it's like driving a Ford Escort or Mini. When you put your leg down, you wait for it to happen. Here, it's driving a Ferrari. That's why you've a higher incidence of OCDs over: because if you push these horses, they'll grow too quick.”

Mind you, they still have a place back in Ireland. The polarities of their operation were well measured when Olive, as part of an Arkle posse, was invited to a special event at the Irish National Stud.

“So I'm down here in Barn Four,” recalls Brendan. “And Olive rings and says, 'Well, I've just met the Queen of England.' And I'm standing in the Commonwealth of Kentucky with a fork in my hand. Where did I go wrong?”

But all their ups and downs were placed in due perspective, in 2020, when Olive was diagnosed with leukemia. She spent five and a half months in a Houston hospital, receiving a marrow transplant from brother Tom. The Gallaghers marveled at how their community rallied round, even at the height of Covid.

“The camaraderie, the support, is amazing,” Olive says. “Not that it isn't at home, but everybody there would have their whole family around them. Here it's the industry we're in that becomes one big family for you. We're all 'Irish', if you know what I mean?”

When Monomoy Girl won her second GI Breeders' Cup Distaff, Hernon and Olive's other brother Peter were interviewed on NBC and spoke directly to the camera. “This is for you, Olive!” It was all too much for Brendan, after months of stress and with a draft of horses to prepare for sale over the road. He found a quiet corner on the sales grounds and let it all out.

One way or another, it's been quite a journey. The great thing is that the moments and months of turmoil–from the rebuilding of the business, to these more personal traumas–left unimpaired the most priceless asset of all: Brendan's eye, above all for a mare. Recently, for instance, from one bought privately for just $17,000, they bred the top Canadian juvenile of last year, Carson's Run. (Not coincidentally, he's by Cupid–like Tapizar, a son of Tapit–while the mare, like Drumette, is by Henny Hughes.)

From the next crop, moreover, they foaled, raised and sold Shareholder (Not This Time), whose dam was promptly cashed out for $430,000 in a Fasig-Tipton flash sale after he won the GII Norfolk Stakes at Royal Ascot.

“I feel that history we have–the 15 years in Emerald Bloodstock, and buying and selling as many horses as we have–has given us a fair idea what the market requires,” Brendan says. “Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. It takes a lot to rattle us in this thing. In fact, I function better when I'm under a bit of pressure! I'm not really focused unless I have that.”

He remembers many times of being stretched, financially, yet always remaining comfortable about kicking on. In fact, the only time they were ever nervous bidding at an auction was when buying a dining room table. That day, they felt like they didn't really know what they were doing. But with horses, they can always feel confident.

“I believe that Nature–the land, the environment–wants to give you its best all the time,” Brendan says. “And I think we humans do a great job in trying to mess that up. Horses have to be happy. If they're treated right, if they're looked after and loved, they know it. Treat them as a bit of meat, it will manifest someplace. I will go in and rub every one of those mares in the foaling barn, because I believe that when they're calm, things go better.

“I am very passionate about what I do. And this is the only area where we have a chance of competing at the top level. Nowadays we're able to keep some of the better mares. None of us are getting any younger, and Olive and I could retire tomorrow. But we've had seven horses in the last nine Breeders' Cups, and it's great dealing with nice horses. The way the market has gone now, so polarized, you've a choice: either go up or get out.

“If you're not totally committed to this business, it will break you. Our spend is significant now. It's probably gone up 300 percent on what it was. But we've always thrown it out there. Because unless we have a shot of competing at the top level, we would question the whole point in doing it.”

Brendan humbly stresses his debt to great horsemen, from mentors to friends to traders: from Paddy Burns to James Delahooke to John Magnier. “These people are icons,” he says. “And you meet people like that every day, in this industry and around this town. To me, just to be in the same room as some of them is a privilege.

“Everybody in this game is an expert. But when you sit back and analyze, there are certain people that it tends to happen to. When we were shipping horses to Newmarket, we could tell you before we shipped–without even looking at a yearling–who would make money, who'd break even, who'd struggle. Someone like Seamus Burns would get the top price nearly every year, just because of the way they carry themselves, and their approach to business.”

At the same time, Brendan has always been his own man, discovering seeds of new success in lessons learned the hard way.

“This is a tough business and, to survive in it, you have to know more than just about the horses,” he says. “You have to know how to read the people involved, their strengths and the weaknesses, their mannerisms. We've been very lucky. But whatever else we are, we're independent. There were times I was probably a bit too independent for my own good. But I'm delighted that we are that way, because Olive and I are sitting here today and it's taken us a long time to get here.”