OISIN MURPHY is a jockey with the world at his fingertips. While horse racing and the wider British public wondered what it would do without the legendary, lovable, headline-grabbing Frankie Dettori, 29-year-old winning machine Murphy is providing the answer.
The Irishman (whose name is pronounced ‘Ush-een’) will be crowned the leading flat jockey for a fourth time in six years, on star-studded Champions Day at Ascot on Saturday.
Born premature at just 2lb 14oz, Murphy is also an inspiration inside and outside racing, having fought alcoholism throughout his first three title wins. He finally achieved sobriety in October 2021.
“I drank more in eight years than a normal man drinks in a lifetime,” he told the Daily Mirror. “But it’s been phenomenal the amount of messages I’ve had off normal people on instagram and Twitter.
“They tell me how much they can relate to my story. They tell me that they’ve been sober for a month or six months or whatever. And they thank me for sharing. I made a BBC documentary about racing and you could see in my face how bloated I was.
“I mean, I have aged, I know that!!” He joked. “But I knew that if I sobered up and enjoyed riding again, it would be enough to make people proud. It would be enough [to make amends].”
Skilled, multi-lingual and dripping with self-belief, Murphy is more than 50 winners ahead of his nearest rival as the curtain comes down on the 2024 season.
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He rode his 200th winner of this calendar year last Sunday and, less than an hour after his chat with me, steered home another three from just five evening rides at Kempton Park racecourse in Surrey.
Now he is the man the casual punters trust, just as they did with Dettori. And yet he is fascinated by his popularity. “I was surprised by all the support and congratulations at Goodwood racecourse last weekend, for example, when I rode my 200th winner,” he said.
“So many of the elderly people who live locally to Kempton enjoy the interaction with me. They’ll ask me if I can win for them and I’ll try and find them a winner!
“But it’s nice that the likes of you want to write about what I’ve been working so hard to achieve. I’ve also realised that one day, when you stop – no matter what sport you are in – it all stops. So I am enjoying it while it is all going well.
“I have so much respect for Frankie. The fact that he is still doing it in his fifties, now winning big races in the United States. He has always been so nice and supportive to me.”
To understand the scale of Murphy’s achievements, it is important to go back to September 1995 when, as a baby, he fought for his life.
“I was lucky to survive,” he said. “I was 11 weeks premature. Severely underdeveloped. I spent my early years in primary school, feeling – knowing, realising I was behind the other kids in terms of being able to read and write and colour.
“It was tough. There was a teacher who took me out of class for the last hour of school every day. I think there was only one other kid and we each had an hour of one on one.
“I didn’t speak properly either and I remember going to the hospital for operations on my ears and nose. There were all these issues. I just remember spending a lot of time in the car going over to the local children’s hospital. And thank God I managed to catch up.”
While Murphy is now a master of his craft, he actually wanted to become a builder as a child. “I was so premature and so backward that in the first few years it really took an awful lot of help from various teachers to get me to an okay level of education,” he added.
“So I was fascinated by tools and I remember I saved up for a toolbox. I was fascinated by farming as well. I always wanted to be on the tractor. And also ponies. As I got older I started getting riding lessons from age four to seven and I had my first pony, Rusty, around then.
“He was one of the most badly behaved animals I’ve ever ridden! But that didn’t diminish my love for it. My Auntie Rosie paid for my first riding lesson when I was four. For my birthday. At that time you could get insurance for children to go to riding schools aged four.
“But I don’t remember my family being too overprotective. I think they thought: ‘If he wants to do it, what can we do?’ When I was a teenager My uncle Jim started training and he was next door neighbours with my dad. So I spent a lot of time with him riding out.”
‘Uncle Jim’ was superstar jockey Jim Culloty, winner of the Grand National once and another of the biggest jumps races, the Cheltenham Gold Cup three times.
The class ran in the family to such an extent that Murphy’s talent saw him leave Ireland for England. Not all of the experienced jockeys here, however, welcomed his self-belief.
Murphy admits to being punched early on in the jockey’s equivalent of the dressing room, the weighing room. “I probably put on a facade of being full of confidence,” he said. “Yes, I had some belief in myself but I was very worried that I wasn’t going to be good enough. That I wasn’t going to make it.
“I had run-ins with a good few guys. I remember being picked up by my shoulder blades once and told: ‘If you don’t cop on and stop making silly manoeuvres in races, you’re going to hurt yourself or somebody else!’
“Now I laugh about it but at the time I didn’t really understand their point of view. I thought back then: ‘Nobody really wants me to make it.’ I just had that drive that I was going to do my best on every single horse.
“But I would say the British weighing room is a very close-knit group. There are a lot of nice boys and girls in there. “Also a lot of talented young jockeys like Saffie Osborne and Kaiya Fraser and so many others. When they are winning two and three out of the eight races at a time at the same meeting you just know there is something special about them.”
Explaining his descent into alcoholism. Murphy opened up on an issue which has affected many a young, talent across a variety of sports over the years, loneliness.
“I’d seen it happen before it happened to me, to one of my close jockey friends,” he said. “I thought I was fine, that I didn’t need to compare myself to him. I didn’t think I was as bad. But I was. It just took longer to admit it and to see it. A lot longer.”
“I lived with my Auntie Gemma as a young apprentice jockey for a while. She was great. I never drank in the house there.
“But around March 2016 when I bought my first house, I’d get back from the races in the evening and have a drink or two watching race replays or that evening meeting.
“It probably wasn’t a big problem at the time because I was only having one or two.
“But then it escalated. I’d invite people round for drinks and it became a very social house. My friends, the other jockeys, would stay with me for a while because I wanted to be around people.
“I didn’t want to go through the loneliness I went through as an apprentice or when I lived with my Auntie Gemma. So all of sudden I’m a professional and I go from Belvedere Vodka and then wine to any sort of champagne. Then, for the last couple of years, 2019 to 2021 it was mostly vodka and champagne.”
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Remarkably those years, from 2019 to 2021, were when Murphy clinched his previous three jockey titles in a row. He takes a sharp intake of breath when it is put to him how much more he could have achieved had he not been drinking.
“As soon as the last race was done, I’d be getting in the car,” he went on. “I’d have my own driver. So I’d drink on the way home from the races. Regularly I’d never remember going to bed. So that is a blackout. That was regular.”
Murphy admits he’d drink to excess “when I was sad and when I was happy, it didn’t matter”. Explaining why, he continued: “Habit and reliance. Escapism. “It was the best way of escaping my fears of not winning the following day. My fears of choosing the wrong horse in a big race, my disappointment with not riding well that day.
“It was the perfect escapism. Also, the alcohol that I drank – I didn’t drink beers. I wanted a quick fix. Belvedere Vodka was my favourite because it gave me an almost instant fix. Within ten or 20 minutes I could notice a difference.”
Even the threat of suspension, or losing his riding licence after a string of rule breaches, could not arrest his spiral. “To be honest, I wasn’t worried,” he said. “Because I’d wake up and hopefully be sober up at an early stage of the morning.
“I didn’t want to get sober. For all that time, between 2019 and 2022, I thought I was coping just fine. I didn’t know how good my life could be without alcohol.”
Things came to a head after a race meeting at Newmarket when the racecourse authorities suspected he’d been riding while under the influence and had him breath tested. “I blew, I think, 32 or 34 which is about the drink-drive limit. I think it was slightly under,” Murphy said.
“I was just full of embarrassment. People had tried to tell me that I’d had a drink problem and that they were there to help. But I didn’t want to hear it.
“But finally I thought to myself: ‘What is my career if I can’t step away from it one day and feel like I have some level of self respect?’
“I couldn’t walk away in 2020-whatever, surrounded with the image of not being able to come to terms with my alcoholism.
“So I went on the journey of getting sober – and then being sober, and then realising that I was a happy fella without alcohol.”
Murphy was suspended from riding in December 2021 for 14 months, returning in March 2023.
“I missed so much about the sport,” he said. “Including other jockeys taking the p*** out of me. I missed the childish banter which you don’t get if you go for a coffee with your girlfriend.”
Recovery involved counselling which Murphy undergoes to this day, along with AA meetings – the first of which he entered with trepidation.
“It was in Cheltenham,” he went on. “I won’t say who brought me along but I couldn’t believe the array of people there. From professionals in suits to mothers – it was extraordinary.
“I didn’t say anything. I just listened in that meeting and I almost walked out buzzing because I realised everyone was there for the same reason I was. Maybe alcohol had had more or less extreme consequences on their lives. But it was a reminder that I really wasn’t alone.
“It’s a difficult situation young people find themselves in right now because they might have days when they think they have a problem but they are worried about recognising it.
“Then they worry about how they will deal with it if they do admit it to themselves. So it was almost comforting to know that at that meeting they were people I didn’t know at all – but they knew I had to be there.”
Was he worried he’d be recognised?
“Oh, people recognised me all right! But no-one said anything. “It was fine. And actually I then went to much smaller meetings after that. It’s also a chance for the alcoholic to socialise but in a safe environment with teas and coffees and biscuits instead.”
Life for the most talented jockey in the country now comes one day at a time. “I don’t think you can think any further than that,” he went on. “My father has been sober for, I think, 35 years. “My grandfather has been sober for 40 years – and they never looked past one day at a time.”
Murphy is also fortunate to be part of a racing fraternity within which other inspirational figures have walked a similar path before him. “There is another top jockey, Richard Hughes, who is a great example. He was a stable jockey to a top trainer, Richard Hannon.
“He struggled with the drink. He didn’t want to get sober. He had some top assignments and he achieved good things, great things.
“But when he stopped drinking he did great things, incredible things. He won his first jockey’s championship. He’s my neighbour and he’s another guy I have huge admiration for.”
Away from the sport he is Chelsea fan and a huge admirer of England star Cole Palmer (“I’ve never met him but he’s done great things,”) and the blood-soaked Sky TV series Gangs Of London (“I have no idea how they make it so realistic!”).
But the business of racing is what continues to drive Oisin Murphy. He will be the first name punters look for on the race card at Ascot on Saturday – and for some time to come.
• Oisin Murphy will be crowned Champion Jockey October 19 at British Champions Day, Ascot. To find out more visit greatbritishracing.com
