Roche on the rise as young pilot starts to shine on track

FRANK FARRAGHER

LEIGH Roche remembers vividly his first morning at David Ryan’s racing stables on the road from Tuam to Gill’s Pub in Corofin. He was 12 years old and his friend Declan Collins had a part time job, helping out with David Ryan. Leigh had already ridden a good few ponies and was looking forward to ‘the start’.

Things didn’t go according to plan though that Saturday morning. His first horse was a bit more temperamental than he expected, and shortly after mounting, Leigh found himself taking one almighty tumble.

To make matters worse, his mount decided to ‘walk all over him’, but Leigh Roche picked himself up, and within minutes was up on the saddle again.

Later that day, when David Ryan was talking to Leigh’s father — well known Galway GAA personality Francis Roche — he remarked that ‘his young lad’ certainly wasn’t lacking in courage. He put it a bit more bluntly than that: “He has balls. It didn’t knock a bother out of him. He just hopped up again after falling off.”

In its own way, as the last four years have panned out, that bit of cutting or courage, was to come to the fore. By the first week in July this summer, Leigh Roche had clocked up 28 career winners, 11 of them in 2011. Not bad going for a 19-year-old who left St. Jarlath’s College after doing his Junior Cert to try his luck at getting into the 10 month RACE ‘apprenticeship’ course at the Curragh.

There was no guarantee that he would secure one of the 32 places on offer with over 100 applying, but he wanted to chase his dream. Even though there was no tradition of racing in the family, horses had entered his bloodstream, taken up residence and refused to leave.

He got selected for the RACE course and thoroughly enjoyed its contents particularly the practical side, although there was also a touch of the academic stuff thrown in as well, such as English and Maths, which ‘kept the mother happy’.

Again only a small number of the 32 who graduate from RACE end up with a trainer. The students ‘make their play’ for placement at an open day for trainers who get the opportunity to ‘throw their eye’ over the prospective jockeys.

Some days later, after having met with Dermot Weld’s head lad, word came through that he was on his way to the stables of one of the world’s most famous trainers. A fair transition from that first day at David Ryan’s yard.

“I suppose all I can say that it was brilliant. There I was, in the heart of the Curragh, in the stables of Dermot Weld with over 100 top class horses. Later in 2008, I had my first winner — Fairy Flow in Navan — I felt like Lester Piggott,” said Roche.

The introduction to horses had all started a few years before his time at David Ryan’s, when Francis Roche took Leigh out to his native Abbeyknockmoy, where there were a few Shetland ponies at Jim McWalter’s farm in Newtown.

While the Shetlands might look small and docile, they can be a particularly ‘weasly’ strain of the equine family, and as a nine-year-old, Leigh got an early grinding on the dodgy temperament of the ponies. He was as often on the ground as in the saddle, but was always up again like a shot.

All a long way removed from the Tuesday of the Galway Races last year when Roche rode Weld’s Easy Mate to a thrilling victory in a two mile flat race at Ballybrit. It was the win that gave him his greatest thrill yet as a jockey.

Winning in Galway is always very special, but on your home turf with your friends from Tuam and Abbeyknockmoy cheering you on, this was ecstasy. He had to use all of his battling qualities to guide Easy Mate over the line first but the feeling afterwards was brilliant.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.