Just over two years ago, Ian Power went to Leopardstown’s Christmas Festival with his father and brother. He hadn’t ridden in a race for more than seven years and though he was riding out for some small trainers around west Waterford, the Abbeyside man was happily working as a labourer in the building trade.
e hadn’t delivered on the early promise shown when winning some significant pots, primarily for boss Noel Meade, the highlight of which was the Grade 3 Golden Cygnet Hurdle on Watson Lake when, with Paul Carberry injured, Meade put him up as a conditional not allowed to use his claim.
Watching the action at Leopardstown and having been urged to get his licence back by some of the trainers he was helping out, he decided, at 38, to literally get back in the saddle. Twelve months later, Power was winning a competitive handicap hurdle at that meeting on Master McShee.
Next Sunday, the now 40-year-old will return to the Foxrock venue as a major contender in the Ladbrokes Novice Chase on Master McShee, having delivered a masterclass on Paddy Corkery’s eight-year-old son of Malinas to bag his first Grade 1 in the Faugheen Chase at Limerick on St Stephen’s Day. It’s a story that belongs on celluloid.
That Master McShee is the only horse in the care of Cappoquin-based tractor mechanic and dealer Corkery — he fixed ace jockey Davy Russell’s tractor the morning Master McShee blitzed a competitive field in that Leopardstown handicap 13 months ago — would be a very strong sub-plot.
Power is enjoying it second time around, grateful to the many who supported him and happily getting up at 5.0am to fit in riding work for them if needs be. “If I was at home, I’d be eating,” he joshes. The truth is, he can’t believe the way it has gone.
“I was still working on the buildings and I was happy with myself and with life, and Eddie O’Brien was very good to me there. I was still riding out, still schooling, and sure if I got two rides in a month, wouldn’t it be a few pound in my pocket, even if the horse had no chance?
“Next thing, all of a sudden, I’m getting busier and busier. So I said I might as well work my bollocks off at this as work my bollocks off on the buildings. And then as it started happening, the enjoyment of it was one thing, and to start to realise how much I missed it. And I didn’t know it till I went back doing it.
“Even back when I was racing before, I never appreciated it at all because I never appreciated myself . . . not content in who I am, and not trying to be putting up an appearance or a show, to make myself out to be something that I wasn’t. I just needed to be myself, but I never knew how to be. When I started doing that, the whole thing started falling into place.”
He doesn’t go into details about how these issues manifested themselves, but the point, he says, is that he never realised he was unhappy or that there was anything missing.
“Everything that I’m saying to you now about who I am, I didn’t know that’s what I was missing. I thought I was happy as Larry, I thought I was grand going around, but obviously, I was lost going around.
“And I wasn’t able to get away from it until I actually grew up . . . I got a bit more respect for myself rather than trying to put on a show for others. And that’s all it was. I was like a child, you see a child trying to act like the big fella, but you don’t need to be the big fella.”
It has dawned on him that the advice his parents had given him all his life was what he had needed to observe. Life lessons on “how to take things and leave it go”, to roll with the punches.
“It’s easy to see that now, but I couldn’t see around the corner then. I couldn’t even see the corner. You can only tell someone when they know how to listen. To change something in your life, you need to be able to feel it. It’s not all of a sudden it came to me, it gradually crept into me.
“The way I look at things, everything is an energy force. If you’re not going to give out the proper energy, you’re not going to get the energy back in. That was something they told me all my life. I was going, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ but it was going out the ear it was coming into.”
And so, he values what has unfolded for him, the work his agent Ken Whelan does, and derives most satisfaction for what any winner means to the many who encouraged him and gave him a leg back up — the likes of John Kiely, Michael Ronayne, Jayne Hearne, Paul Kiely, Roger McGrath, Pat Breen, the Kearns family, the Currans, Shane O’Brien, Margaret Flynn, Robert Murphy, Rodger Sweeney and Corkery, to name just a few.
“It was great to ride Shane O’Brien’s first winner on the track [with My Design at Fairyhouse a fortnight ago], but what was really special was that it was a first winner in 13 years for Fiona and Michael O’Connor, and I rode that one too, Roamanob [at Tralee in May 2008]. They’ve put a lot into the game.”
Alice and Stephen Curran’s Jacksons Gold was among the key horses that helped build momentum with three wins, and Power rides the gelding in a novice handicap chase at Naas this afternoon.
It is remarkable how the jigsaw pieces fell into place because the Currans, like Paddy Corkery, have always sold their stock. But as Power came along, they just happened to hold onto probably the best two horses they ever had. The Faugheen Chase was the cherry on top.
“I got emotional going up in the car that day. I don’t know what song came on. Whatever way I was taking it with the rush of blood, and the tune came on, there were a few tears all of a sudden . . . and I wasn’t even thinking about the race.”
On his best form, Master McShee had a chance, his debut run over fences, a staying-on third albeit never threatening Bob Olinger really, encouraging given the issues that had blighted the latter half of his novice hurdling career. After all, he gave subsequent runaway Supreme Novices’ Hurdle winner Appreciate It the hardest race of his career to date in their maiden at Cork.
“Paddy said, ‘Ian, this horse is working absolutely savage. I know we’re up against Appreciate It, but I’ll give this horse a shout.’ I said, ‘Jesus, are you sure?’ He quickened three times on heavy ground before Appreciate It got to him going to the last. Paul Townend pulled up and he said, ‘What the hell is that?’ He thought he’d be having a pop around.”
The maiden triumph followed soon after, back at Mallow, and then the Leopardstown romp. But Master McShee bled when resuming rivalries with Appreciate It in the Chanelle Pharma Novice Hurdle at the Dublin Racing Festival last year and wasn’t right until resuming over the larger obstacles this term.
It has been kid-glove treatment since and what Corkery has achieved to get him to the level that he can win a Grade 1 is quite remarkable.
“After Leopardstown [last year], he wasn’t eating great and Paddy was going out to him in dribs and drabs, even during the night, and getting him to eat, getting him back into the way he was. In all fairness to him, he does some job.
“He has a horse there and if you trained him too hard, you’d have nothing. In Limerick, we knew he was a little bit short, but when I turned in behind your man [the Gordon Elliott-trained favourite Farouk D’Alene], I was absolutely cantering and he had a good blow!”
It is a testament to the horse’s class and guts that he could win without being 100pc fit after a month off with a leg infection. But Power’s horsemanship was in evidence, too, as he gave his partner time to fill up his lungs, even at such a crucial juncture. That decision, rather than going after him to keep tabs on the leader, won him the race.
His father, brother Kenneth, who was home from America, close friend Gary Dunford and girlfriend Tanya Wall were there to greet him into the winner’s enclosure. That was wonderful.
But in racing, you can’t stand still and the Dublin Racing Festival looms large on the horizon, but there is no pressure. He is happy enough in his own skin now to be satisfied once he knows he has done his best and to know that getting over-anxious would only inhibit his performance.
There is so much to be excited about for the man who fell in love with horses when his aunt, Barbara McHugh, first sat him up on one of her hunters when he was about 12.
Power’s first job out of RACE (Racing Academy and Centre of Education) was with John Oxx, and he recalls the buzz at Currabeg when Ebadiyla won the Irish Oaks that first year in 1997. Oxx was a diamond to work for, and so too Meade, but Power charted his own path to obscurity. And now he has navigated his way to being a headline act. They do say it’s about the journey rather than the destination.
“I had no self-worth and felt I had no purpose in life, but now, no matter what mistakes I made in my life, I don’t regret them because if I didn’t make them, I wouldn’t know what I know, and I wouldn’t be where I am and I had come to that realisation before I came back racing. I grew up.
“I’ve let so many people down throughout my life and it most definitely looked that way. But really, all I was doing was letting myself down. I’ve finally realised in the past few years that the reason all this was happening is because I spent my whole life running away from myself and until I learned to fix that, I’d always be running and hiding from things. Now I feel like I have all this pressure lifted from my shoulders and it feels great just to be me in a way I never was.
“Everything I get up and do in the morning and at the races is what gives me everything I have. If I disrespect what I do, it will take away from everything I have.”
And at last, he has all he needs.
