MOONESHINE

JESSICA OWERS

It’s pushing midday when Kate Harrington, phone in hand and dogs at foot, follows the fifth lot into the school. She’s bustling, a July morning spent with a slew of American clients and more than a hundred working horses, and this is the last lot for the day. Single file, walking, they snort past Harrington one by one. A long look, a few words and off they go to the gallops. Harrington is assistant trainer to her mother, Jessica Harrington. She is young at 30, dusty blonde, high ponytail and broad smile. As horses breeze, she listens for rhythms and foibles, cues she has learned from the ground and the saddle, and when the horses are done, her mind moves quickly on. Phone calls, press agendas. She rarely stops. The Harringtons train from Commonstown Stud in the pretty hamlet of Moone, County Kildare. In July it is bursting, thick hedgerows of hawthorn and ash that line the gallops and stretch away to the Wicklow Mountains. Sizing John is here, and Supasundae looking big. Alpha Centauri was here, along with Moscow Flyer, Jezki and Our Duke. Their names are dotted around the barns.

Harrington began her training role in 2014, shortly after her father passed away. Before that, in her twenties, she’d gone to university and planned to travel. She recalls a moment when her mother told her it was time to grow up, and she headed into Ballydoyle for three years under Aidan O’Brien. “I loved it there,” she says. “He’s just the loveliest man.” In those years she was also an amateur-licensed jockey, riding with the boys on the Irish national hunt scene. She rode her mother’s horses, but she also rode for Nicky Henderson and remains the last rider to be beaten aboard Altior. She treats it like a badge of honour. That was in April 2015, in a season where she rode into £142,060 in prizemoney. A dislocated shoulder and trapped nerve in her neck spelled the end of competitive racing, but at Commonstown, when she’s not on the ground with her mother, she is riding out with the lads. “I came into training with Mum around the time my dad died,” Harrington recalls. “It was a bit of a shaky time for my mum, and I was still working at Ballydoyle at that time. I moved back home at the end of that season, and we all just put our heads down and worked really hard, and that was when things started to get really exciting. We had a great 2015 with the jumpers and we started to get some nicer flat horses. It just started snowballing.”

At Cheltenham in 2017, the Harringtons had three winners, including Sizing John’s Gold Cup victory on St. Patrick’s Day. It was their first attempt at the race, followed a month later by Our Duke’s win in the Irish Grand National. Then came Alpha Centauri, the four-time Gr1-winning filly by Mastercraftsman who won in Ireland, England and France between May and August 2018. For dual-code Commonstown Stud, it was barnstorming.

Harrington is playful about her relationship with her mother, a woman that has led Ireland’s training ranks for 30 years. “I wouldn’t say we always got along well,” she admits. “When I evented during my teenage years I used to think my mum knew absolutely nothing, even though she had evented at the highest level. She used to have to send me off to other trainers. Nowadays we’ll have little arguments, mostly along the lines of this horse running here and that horse running there, but they’re good arguments. They’re just us knocking off each other.” Harrington’s training assistance at Commonstown is broader than getting horses fit and winning. She says racing is now a global sport and “you won’t get new owners sitting at home”. While her brother-inlaw, Punchestown racing manager Richie Galway, has wide connections to US racing, in January 2019 Harrington visited Australia with similar ambitions.

“It was an opportunity to go and meet new people because essentially we are selling a product here,” she says. “We have to back that up by training winners, but by meeting new people I can essentially say, why don’t you come and have the Irish experience with us. We also had a new syndicate called Alpha Racing that we had set up, and I had a couple of shares left that I was trying to sell. And we had those connections to the It’s All About The Girls syndicate. At Magic Millions in January, everyone was going to be in the same place, so it was an opportunity for me to meet everyone involved in that.” It’s All About The Girls was set up in 2015 to compete for the Magic Millions Racing Women’s Bonus, a jackpot of $500,000 distributed among all-womenowned horses in the Magic Millions 2YO Classic each January. The syndicate comprised 40 women from seven countries around the world, and included Eimear Mulhern and Elaine ‘Legs’ Lawlor, both from Goffs, Anna Seitz from Fasig-Tipton, Francesca Cumani, Sophie Sangster and Sophie Magnier, along with Susie Montague and Su-Ann Khaw. Their first toe in the water was Global Glamour, a $65,000 ringside purchase by James Bester on behalf of the girls, a filly that won two Gr1s, over $1.5million, and fetched the same figure at the Magic Millions National Broodmare Sale in May.

In 2017, Lawlor brought the syndicate to Ireland with two purchases at Goffs. Both were fillies and both were winners – Chicas Amigas, who ran at Royal Ascot, and Sparkle’n’joy by Sepoy, who won the listed Ingabelle Stakes at Leopardstown. The girls have since gone back to the well, and from day dot sent all their Irish horses to Commonstown. Currently, the Harringtons have three fillies in the name of the syndicate. “Choosing Jessica Harrington to train for us was an easy decision,” says Lawlor. “It’s all about the horse at Commonstown, but Jessie makes having a horse with her so much fun. Members in my syndicate are scattered around the globe, and Jessie’s frequent and detailed communications make my job very easy. She gave us a very exciting day out at Royal Ascot last year with Chicas Amigas.”

On the scout in Australia, Kate Harrington’s networking opened her eyes to how differently things can be done. “I was blown away by the Magic Millions experience,” she says. “The welcome drinks the first night on the beach. Even the way the sales are set up with tables in front of the sale ring. I just think there is so much that can be learned, and it was good to see the way things are done on a different continent. I’ll also head over to the Magic Millions Gatcombe Horse Trials in August. I’m looking forward to that.” Harrington’s connection to Australia isn’t new. Her father, Johnny, bought and sold horses for the Curragh Bloodstock Agency and spent plenty of time in Australia. Harrington will tell you her father was ‘Major’ Mitchell’s first guest at Yarraman Park, and in his long absences, wife Jessica stepped up at home. “Mum began training the year I was born,” Harrington recalls, “and initially it was to train spare horses that had gone unsold. It’s absolutely amazing what she went on to do.” Family succession in horse racing is common. Think Ted and Ruby Walsh, or Bart, Anthony and James Cummings. While Harrington’s involvement in Commonstown came a little earlier than she expected, she continued to blaze her own path. In early 2019, she began a broadcasting role for RacingTV, presenting mounting-yard analysis alongside Gary O’Brien and Kevin O’Ryan, the channel’s chief anchors in Ireland.

“The TV work has really broadened my horizons because now I try to keep up on the form for almost all horses, whereas before I would have just looked at ours,” she says. “Working for television, the big days of racing are the easiest to cover because you know all about the good horses. It’s the midweek meetings with their 40 to 80 handicaps over six furlongs, and there’s two divisions of them and you’re like, god, what am I going to say here?” Harrington is rarely stuck for something to say. Her warmth makes her approachable, her pedigree makes her knowledgeable and her enthusiasm does the rest. It’s the reason television came calling, and what made her ‘one of the boys’ among jockeys. Also, the common assumptions don’t bother her, the ones that come with being Jessica Harrington’s daughter. “I buy young horses at the national hunt sales as unbroken three-year-olds, and go point-topointing with them,” she says. “If you can get a horse to win a point-to-point, there’s a really good market to turn them over. I’ve sold three now, and a lot of people were thinking, oh, Jessie’s daughter, Jessie’s obviously training them. But they’re realising now that my mum has nothing at all to do with them.” At 30, this youngest Harrington is a cocktail of private ambition and her mother’s ways. She is full of ideas but is also grounded, knowing her true north is here at Commonstown Stud. With the horses all in, and the yards settled down into early afternoon, it’s not a bad spot in an Irish July.