John Ingles recalls some of the many jockeys who have had success in the J. P. McManus colours over the years.
Days after being named as retained jockey to J. P. McManus with effect from next season, what better way could there have been for Harry Cobden to celebrate the ‘engagement’, if not quite the ‘marriage’ just yet, by riding a Grade 1 winner in the green and gold hoops? Fate, of course, had other ideas at Ascot last weekend when Cobden was injured in a fall two races earlier, meaning that Jonbon was ridden to victory in the Clarence House Chase by James Bowen instead, with his regular partner Nico de Boinville up at Haydock.
There will be plenty of opportunities on both sides of the Irish Sea for Cobden in the seasons ahead but his forthcoming association with McManus is not a completely new one. Far from it, in fact, as Cobden was a teenager and still claiming 3 lb when he rode his first winner in the McManus colours; that was Brelan d’As at Wincanton in November 2016 for his current boss Paul Nicholls. Cobden has ridden 13 winners in all for McManus to date, though the most important of those wins wasn’t in the green and gold. His win on Kapcorse in the Sir Peter O’Sullevan Memorial Handicap Chase at Newbury in November 2021 actually came in the black, yellow cross-belts of the BBC commentator which O’Sullevan had bequeathed to McManus and were carried by all three McManus runners in the race in tribute to his late friend.
Cobden is therefore one of the dozens of jockeys to have ridden winners for McManus over the last fifty years or so, more than thirty different riders having contributed to McManus’s record total of 84 Festival winners alone, so by no means all of them can be mentioned here.
A good place to start is with Tommy Ryan, who got McManus off the mark at the Cheltenham Festival when Mister Donovan landed a gamble in the 1982 Sun Alliance Hurdle. A year later, the same jockey provided the owner with the first of his four Irish Grand National winners, Bit of A Skite, who had been his owner’s second Festival winner on his previous start, landing the National Hunt Chase for amateurs under Frank Codd.
The first of McManus’s jockeys to really make his mark at the Festival, though, was multiple Irish champion Charlie Swan, successful seven times in all for McManus at Cheltenham. His first two winners at the Festival for McManus came in 1994 with Mucklemeg in the Festival Bumper and Time For A Run in the Coral Cup. Swan’s final Festival winner came in the 2002 Supreme Novices’ Hurdle on Like-A-Butterfly, trained by Christy Roche, who had been another of McManus’s early jockeys of note as he won the Irish Cesarewitch in 1977 on the mare Cill Dara who had been McManus’s very first winner on the Flat earlier that year.
But Swan will always be best remembered for his association with the best horse McManus has owned, outstanding hurdler Istabraq. First successful at the Festival in the Royal & SunAlliance Novices’ Hurdle in 1997, Istabraq went on to win the next three Champion Hurdles with ease. Swan partnered Istabraq in all his races over hurdles, yielding 23 wins from 26 completed starts. Swan’s final winner as a jockey also came in the McManus colours aboard Patriot Games at Aintree in 2003, saddling the winner too as by then his training career was already well under way.
The following year, McManus appointed the first of his retained jockeys, availing himself of the services of the record-breaking Tony McCoy. Previously with Martin Pipe, McCoy had already established himself as the leading jump jockey of all time and at the end of the 2003/04 season became champion for the ninth time. Many of the winners in McCoy’s eleven subsequent championship-winning seasons therefore came in the McManus colours, totalling well over 700 victories in the green and gold in Britain and Ireland combined before his retirement in 2015.
McCoy’s nine Festival winners for McManus included another Champion Hurdle for his owner on Binocular in 2010 and a first Gold Cup for McManus two years later with Synchronised, previously successful with McCoy in the Welsh National and Lexus Chase.
McManus won his second Irish Grand National in 2007 with the McCoy-ridden Butler’s Cabin, while both owner and jockey celebrated a first Grand National win in 2010 with Don’t Push It. Success in the big one at Aintree had been a long time coming for both men. McManus had been trying to win the Grand National since 1982, when his runner Deep Gale fell at the first, while McCoy had had 14 unsuccessful rides in the race previously. ‘He is the best supporter this game has ever had and will ever have,’ said McCoy, referring to Don’t Push It’s owner afterwards. ‘I am very privileged that I rode a Grand National winner in these colours.’
For all the big-race winners such as these though, it was McCoy’s consistency and relentless pursuit of winners on a daily basis that marked his career. It was in the McManus colours that McCoy reached the milestone of 4,000 winners when Mountain Tunes won a novice hurdle at Towcester in November 2013 and it was when returning to the winner’s enclosure on Mr Mole in the same silks after the 2015 Game Spirit Chase that McCoy announced his decision live on television to retire at the end of that season.
There was still one last Festival winner to come for McCoy in the McManus colours, on Uxizandre in the Ryanair Chase, and a final Grade 1 winner for arguably jumping’s greatest owner/jockey partnership when Jezki won the Aintree Hurdle. McCoy may have retired from the saddle more than ten years ago, but he’s still very much part of team McManus and was in the winner’s enclosure with Jonbon at Ascot last weekend.
For all his success, McCoy hasn’t ridden the most Festival winners for McManus. The first jockey to overtake him with a final total of 13 was his successor as McManus’s retained rider, Barry Geraghty. Geraghty had actually beaten McCoy to riding a winner for McManus at the Festival, having won the National Hunt Handicap Chase (nowadays the Ultima) in 2003 on Youlneverwalkalone. Geraghty’s greatest successes for McManus at the Festival came when providing him with three more Champion Hurdle victories, with Jezki in 2014, Buveur d’Air in 2018 and Epatante in 2020.
Jezki gained his Champion Hurdle win by a neck from the shorter-priced McManus runner My Tent Or Yours, ridden by McCoy, while Geraghty’s win on Buveur d’Air made up for his missing the Festival through injury the year before when Buveur d’Air won his first Champion Hurdle under Noel Fehily. The 2020 Cheltenham Festival was Geraghty’s last before his retirement that summer, and he went out on a high, with the Champion Hurdle being one of his five winners for McManus that week along with the RSA Insurance Novices’ Chase, Coral Cup, Pertemps Final and County Hurdle. Quite apart from the massive fields, Geraghty found himself on the right McManus horse among the owner’s multiple entries in each of those last three handicaps!
Geraghty rode nearly as many as winners for McManus in Ireland as he did in Britain – he was on another McManus Irish Grand National winner, Shutthefrontdoor, in 2014 – and is the only jockey to have ridden more than a hundred winners for McManus in both Britain and Ireland.
But in Ireland, nobody can come close to Mark Walsh who has racked up well over 600 wins for McManus, becoming the owner’s main rider in Ireland following Geraghty’s retirement. Their partnership dates back longer than that, however, with Walsh’s first Grade 1 winner coming in the McManus colours when Defy Logic won the Racing Post Novice Chase at Leopardstown in 2013. Among plenty more Grade 1 wins in Ireland since was an Irish Gold Cup victory on Carlingford Lough three years later.
Walsh has become a familiar name at Cheltenham and Aintree in recent seasons too, with McManus not having a retained rider in Britain of late. His first Festival winner was Bleu Berry in the 2018 Coral Cup, followed a year later by winning the Champion Hurdle on the owner’s apparent second string Espoir d’Allen after the Geraghty-ridden Buveur d’Air had fallen in his bid to win the race for the third time. Another four winners at last year’s Festival, the standout being Inothewayurthinkin in the Gold Cup, brought Walsh’s Cheltenham total to 14, all of them for McManus, making him the owner’s most successful Festival jockey one ahead of Geraghty.
Amateur riders have also played an important part for McManus at the Festival over the years, with Nina Carberry being the most successful of them for McManus with six wins. Carberry won two Foxhunter Chases with On The Fringe, as well as four Cross Country Chases, two of them on Garde Champetre. All of Carberry’s winners were trained by Enda Bolger who was a Festival-winning jockey himself in the McManus silks, winning the 1996 Foxhunters on Elegant Lord whom he also trained. Bolger also trained McManus’s prolific cross-country chaser Spot Thedifference who provided J. T. McNamara with one of his three Festival winners and won eleven races with McNamara in the saddle, including seven in all at Cheltenham, as well as two editions of the La Touche Cup at Punchestown.
Two famous names who do not figure among McManus’s Festival-winning jockeys are Rachael Blackmore and Paul Townend but have ridden the owner’s two more recent Grand National winners. Blackmore’s historic win on Minella Times in 2021 was followed three years later by Townend winning on I Am Maximus, a year after that partnership had secured a fourth Irish Grand National for McManus.
Other stalwarts to have had plenty of success in the green and gold are Alan Crowe and Conor O’Dwyer who clocked up more than a hundred winners each for the owner in Ireland, while only McCoy has ridden more winners over jumps for McManus in Britain than Richie McLernon who now has more than two hundred to his name.
Be it Festival winners, Grand National winners, or simply riding winners day in day out, Cobden therefore has plenty to live up to in his new role, though with the pick of the extensive McManus string in both Britain and Ireland at his disposal, the former champion certainly won’t lack the ammunition to make a success of it.
