Mar_151_View_From_Ireland_Owner Breeder 17/02/2017 15:54 Page 27
VIEW FROM IRELAND By JESSICA LAMB
Trainer’s goose not cooked after all It was a long time between drinks for Vincent Ward but at last he is back on track
CAROLINE NORRIS
A
mid the factory-like churn of powerhouse domination, trainer Vincent Ward shows that there is still romance in Irish jump racing. Ward, a sheep farmer, sprang to fame seven years ago when he took the ex-Dermot Weldtrained filly Fictional Account and saddled her to win Listed races at Ascot and the Curragh. So impressive was the daughter of Stravinsky that news spread to Australia and she was sold as a Melbourne Cup hope for €90,000 – Michael McHugh, Ward’s neighbour, had paid €11,500 three years previously. An inexplicable virus hit the County Meath yard shortly after she left, and at the end of January this year, the ten-year-old mare Western Goose became his first winner on the racecourse since 2012. “It was a stressful time,” said Ward. “We got a virus in the yard, a sickness that we couldn’t cure or diagnose. It had me demented. “We had the Irish Equine Centre in to test everything, we repainted all the barns, we imported this special disinfectant from Holland to power-hose the place, we replaced the rubber matting in the walker, we sent horses up to the veterinary college to undergo every test they could come up with. Nothing worked.” The water, hay, and bedding was all blamed at one point, but each proved not the cause. Ward was told he needed greater ventilation in his American barn, so he tried keeping horses out more, and even altogether. He tried working them less. He tried working them more. “I was changing things that shouldn’t be changed,” he said. “I was doing things for the sake of it.” The visible symptoms of the virus were coughing and an inability to train on; in steady work horses appeared healthy but when they stepped up a gear they fell flat. The way it presented meant that at one stage Ward thought they simply weren’t fit enough, and the trainer
accelerated the problem by working them harder. Ward did not get to the bottom of the issue, but believes it arrived aboard a “cheap horse brought in from the sales”, and he could see light at the end of the tunnel only when his own horse Golden Silence won a point-topoint last May. “I’m very lucky as my long-term owner Douglas Taylor stuck by me through all this, and so did my neighbour Michael McHugh,”
“We got a virus in
the yard, a sickness that we couldn’t cure or diagnose. It left me demented” he said. “Michael owned Fictional Account and has three horses with me now, including Western Goose. “When he asked me to take the mare first she was a 94-rated ten-year-old and I said, ‘What am I going to do with that?’ She had a history of bursting blood vessels and I have trained horses like that before, but she’s ten, I wasn’t sure it was worth it.” Ward took Western Goose on though, and made two changes to her training regime; he upped the volume of work she was doing and added a
powerful antioxidant supplement to her feed, Zosfor. “I’ve always found that the most important thing to get right with horses that burst is their head,” he said. “You have to train them to get over it mentally. I get them so fit that they only think about that. It gives them confidence. “Sometimes she’d be ridden out twice a day, not fast, just relentless swinging canters.” Western Goose was run off her feet over two miles in her first run for Ward, but followed up with victory in a Fairyhouse handicap hurdle. She won by five lengths on January 25, shooting up the handicap ratings to 93, though her win off 98 in 2015 shows that should be no anchor. The cost of the virus would have been fatal to the business of a full-time trainer. “I don’t plan on training for a living,” stressed Ward. “I treat it as a sport. You couldn’t train the numbers I do and make it pay. It’s not viable, not now. You wouldn’t get the owners.” He added: “We keep ewes, foal mares and pre-train. We foal Lorna Fowler’s mares – she could have 13 alone – and last year we foaled 38 in total. That gets going for us in March when the National Hunt mares come in, and of course we’re lambing at the same time.” Vincent Ward and Fictional Account in more successful times – the trainer is recovering from a virus in his stable