Padraig Beggy’s name is to sit alongside those of legendary jockeys Kieren Fallon and Frankie Dettori for the high of winning yesterday’s Epsom Derby in Surrey, England, and not solely because they served bans for taking cocaine.
Beggy’s ride to redemption came on 40-1 shot Wings of Eagles bringing him from third last 3 furlongs (600m) out to overhaul fellow Aidan O’Brien stablemate Cliffs of Moher in the final few yards.
Quite aside from the winner being O’Brien’s fifth string, what was even more remarkable was that it was Beggy’s first ride on the tough undulating camber track.
Photo: Reuters
“Happy days,” said Beggy, and with good reason, because there had been many dark days before Saturday’s glory.
While both Dettori and Fallon’s blips came after years of success, 31-year-old Beggy’s came in 2014 in Australia where he had decamped in a desperate move to try and light a fire under his career which had hit the buffers.
BANNED
Both Fallon and Dettori — diametrically opposed characters, the former an introverted Irishman and the latter an exuberant larger than life Italian — went off the rails not because of the extreme pressures of constantly keeping their weight in check, nor of their tiny physiques trying to control highly-strung thoroughbreds day in day out.
Fallon’s was due to the pressure of a court case over alleged race-fixing — which saw him exonerated — and Dettori’s for seeing his massively successful 18 year association with Sheikh Mohammed bin al-Maktoum’s Godolphin Operation come to an acrimonious end.
“Things were going bad, I was depressed and I guess [in] a moment of weakness I fell for it and I’ve only got myself to blame,” Dettori told Channel Four News in 2013.
Fallon, who is now retired, came back from his 18 month ban driven even more determined to succeed.
“I feel satisfaction when I win even more so now,” he told the Daily Mirror in 2010. “I need it more than ever. I’ve something to prove.”
For Beggy his lapse of judgement came after the move to Australia — following an unsuccessful spell in England — had not worked out either receiving a year’s suspension for both a failed drug test and on two occasions for giving a false explanation for drugs being in his system.
“I got into a bit of trouble in Australia, a bad mistake and something that I’ve put behind me,” he said in the wake of his Derby victory.
RETURN
Fortunately, like Fallon finding succor on his return from the wilderness with the likes of Luca Cumani giving him rides, and Dettori finding another training powerhouse, John Gosden — a faithful friend — so Beggy found a new home at the Ballydoyle Stables in Ireland’s County Tipperary, made famous first by late legend Vincent O’Brien, and now by his namesake and equally talented but no relation, Aidan O’Brien.
“Aidan had a chat with me and said, ‘Padraig, you keep working, some day we’ll repay you.’ I don’t think he meant the Derby,” he said.
“So I got into Ballydoyle and I worked hard. He was good to me. I owe him a lot,” he added.
The winners have not flowed since he was given his second chance in 2015 — four to be precise — but he has won “the blue riband” of English flat racing that some more successful jockeys never succeeded in landing, in as dramatic a fashion as how his career has panned out.
“I had to pick myself up and I’ve come back out fighting and today I think I’ve proved that,” he said.
Few would argue with him.
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