Crystal clear

Colin Keane is competitive anyway, but a new target is never any harm, and Ireland’s champion jockey already has one for 2025. This year’s riders’ title was Keane’s fifth in a row, and a sixth in all. It means he has a certain MJ Kinane in his sights.

Perhaps the finest Irish jockey of all was champion 12 times and completed a singular feat by winning the title six years in-a-row between 1984 and 1989.

By the end of that streak, ‘Mickey Joe’ had the broader racing world at his feet. At the age of 30, he landed the 1989 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe on Carroll House and began two decades of hoovering up the greatest international prizes the sport has to offer.

Keane was 30 in September. He cheerfully admits to targeting six titles in succession like Kinane – “It would be nice to be beside that man in history” – but opts for what in polo might be described as a cautious ‘check and turn’ when it comes to the international angle.

It can be great fun getting behind a cause but less so actually being that cause. Almost everyone within Irish racing is convinced Keane is as good a rider as there is anywhere. His own boss, Ger Lyons, made the point in the aftermath of Magnum Force’s superb triumph in November’s Breeders’ Cup Turf Juvenile Sprint.

Keane made light of the unfamiliar terrain to plot a copybook navigation around Del Mar’s turns and slalom Magnum Force through to success in the $1million contest. In the most frantic of environments, it was a notably unflappable performance.

“He’s probably the most underrated champion jockey in the world,” announced Lyons immediately afterwards.

“He’s a bit too much like his trainer sometimes, he likes to stay at home on the farm and walk his dogs. He’s had four rides at the Breeders’ Cup, and he’s won two. I know I can’t feed him with the ammunition he needs. I need the world to wake up to him,” the trainer added.

Certainly, if, as so many believe, Ryan Moore is the global benchmark, then the Meath jockey more than holds his own with him on a weekly basis in Ireland. But doubters haven’t been in short supply across the Irish Sea.

Trend wonks have thrown statistical darts at his strike rate in Britain, as well as the infrequency of his visits there compared to when Kinane and another Irish champion, Johnny Murtagh, were go-to men for big-race spares.

Those making the case for Keane argue passionately it’s a blunder leaving him in Ireland when inferior talents are strutting their stuff on Europe’s biggest stages. It’s well-meaning indignation, but Keane is the sort of low-key operator that’s just as likely to wince at the attention.

Nevertheless, it was a sweet moment when he got the call from David Menusier for Tamfana in Newmarket’s Sun Chariot Stakes in October. With others on duty in Paris for Arc weekend, the Irishman took full advantage of the opportunity to land his first British Group 1.

Rarely one for playing to the gallery, there was no ‘told-you-so’ attitude after. Keane’s equable nature doesn’t lend itself to that. But a sense of a monkey off his back would only naturally have mixed in with the satisfaction of another big-race success.

There were four Group 1 victories in all in 2024. As well as Magnum Force, Babouche topped an impressive bunch of Lyons two-year-old fillies by landing the Phoenix Stakes while something of a forgotten horse, White Birch, swept Auguste Rodin aside in May’s Tattersalls Gold Cup.

It added to a Group 1 tally that also includes the 2021 Grand Prix de Saint-Cloud as well as Breeders’ Cup glory on Tarnawa the year before. In 2017 there was top-flight success in Italy on board Laganore. There’s been Classic success at home in the Derby, Oaks and 2000 Guineas.

It’s easy to see then why Lyons points to Keane’s adaptability as assets that should put him at the top of any tree anywhere in the world. That Lyons’ own interests are best served by keeping such an asset to himself only makes it more noteworthy how ready he is to bang the drum for a rider he made his No 1 in 2014.

All of which makes it curiouser and curiouser for a lot of people that Ireland’s best hasn’t already embarked on the same sort of career trajectory as Kinane or Murtagh. If much of it is barstool stuff, the man himself is happy for it to stay in the pub.

“It’s something I don’t really pay too much attention to. England has been a hard place to win but usually it’s been for Ger, riding in good races and maybe the horses haven’t performed on the day, or maybe they’re stepping up a level when they leave Ireland to run in Group 1s, and maybe they’re just not good enough,” he says.

It’s a typical restrained, no-nonsense public position for Keane to take. But it comes with a straightforward addendum to not mistake it for a lack of ambition.

“The aim is to ride nice horses, wherever that takes us. But I’m very lucky the position I’m in with Ger and Juddmonte.”

It’s a position that underlines how astute the Irishman is out of the saddle as well as in it. Keeping owners and trainers happy may be an impossible task but making sure they’re not unhappy with you is a valuable skill. It also smacks of Keane’s sense of perspective.

Keane was at his brilliant best in securing a second Breeders’ Cup success on Magnum Force, after which his boss, trainer Ger Lyons insisted that his man should be used far more on the international stage (HR)

“It’s the most emotional I’ve felt about riding a winner” – With father Gerry, who trained Crystal Black to score in the Duke Of Edinburgh Stakes at Royal Ascot, and mother, Esther (HR)

Another century of winners at home, champion jockey again, the aforementioned quartet of Group/Grade 1s, and perhaps the most emotional success of all at Royal Ascot in June represents an impressive body of work by any standards in any year.

In fact, come the end of his career, that Royal Ascot success might still rank top in terms of enjoyment too.

The images of Gerry Keane embracing his son after Crystal Black’s success in the Duke of Edinburgh Handicap, and the riotous Cheltenham-like scenes in Ascot’s very proper winner’s enclosure, were among the most memorable of the year.

“It’s the most emotional I’ve felt about riding a winner,” Keane admitted. It’s not hard to see why. An apparently nondescript fall while riding out in 2021 had left Gerry Keane with bruising to his spinal cord. Only for the now 68-year-old being so physically fit, he could easily have been left paralysed.

“I still walk with a limp but I’m lucky not to be in a wheelchair from it. It was one of those stupid falls, where a horse ducked off the gallop, but I landed on my back and ended up bruising my spinal cord. If I had fractured it, I was gone,” Keane Snr later admitted.

It meant all hands to the pumps for his family, who kept running a yard that mainly concentrates on breaking and pre-training. In 2022, though, an unexpected morale booster came when the 35,000gns purchase out of a horses-in-training sale, Crystal Black, arrived at the stables. Formerly trained by Dermot Weld, he had won one of nine starts for his Moyglare breeders. He hadn’t been ridden by the champion jockey, whose brief link-up with Weld at that time did however mean he had partnered him on a couple of occasions in workouts.

“He was in the yard when I was riding for Dermot. He was a fine, big horse but seemed to lose his way. If you ever see him in the flesh, he’s massive. For one reason or another it just didn’t work out for him,” Keane recalls.

He recommended Crystal Black to the Wear A Pink Ribbon Syndicate, for whom he’d previously ridden the smart mare, True Self. Bought to go jumping, Crystal Black instead became a transformed proposition on the flat.

Ending up 2023 with success in the Northfields Handicap at Irish Champions Festival, he won two more Curragh handicaps this spring before scoring at Ascot and then graduating to Group 3 success in Leopardstown’s Ballyroan Stakes.

In the latter he made no less than The Euphrates, subsequent winner of the Irish Cesarewitch, look ordinary. Ambitious plans for a tilt at the Melbourne Cup had to be abandoned after a setback but the world could still be his oyster in 2025.

“When you’re trying to source these horses for syndicates and small yards, win a premier handicap at the Curragh and you’d say, ‘Box ticked, well done.’ But to go on and win two or three premiers in a row, go to Royal Ascot, win a Group 3, it was fairytale stuff,” Keane considers.

At one point of the season, it was pretty fantasy stuff for the Lyons-Keane team as a succession of talented two-year-old fillies emerged. Babouche was the headline act but another Juddmonte juvenile, Red Letter, was described by Lyons as his idea of the best of them. That bold shout followed Chantez’s impressive success in the Ingabelle Stakes.

So, does Keane go along with his boss’ verdict on Red Letter?

“I wouldn’t disagree with him!” is a typically sure-footed response. “In a normal year if you had one of those fillies, you’d be pinching yourself. But this year, one seemed to be better than the other. If you thought you had a nice one, another would pop her head up.”

If there was one frustration in 2024 it was that after White Birch beat Auguste Rodin to the tune of three lengths in May, various reasons meant he wasn’t seen again.

Setbacks prevented John Murphy’s star from proving himself abroad and Keane was hardly alone in watching the rain-sodden Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe wondering what might have been, especially since he’d ridden the winner, Bluestocking, into second in the 2023 Irish Oaks.

“The way it turned out you’d love to have seen him take his chance. The way the ground turned up you’d like to think the horse that turned up for the Tattersalls Gold Cup would have run a massive race.

“Not to take away from the filly, she’s very smart. I was probably a little unlucky on her in the Oaks. Looking back, I didn’t know enough about her. But he’d have been a great ride to have in it all the same,” Keane says ruefully.

There’s still no bigger international shop window though than the Breeders’ Cup, and no better statistical record in it than Keane’s. And this time he got to fully enjoy Magnum Force’s success.

“When I won my first Breeders’ Cup it was during Covid,” he details. “The crowd and the atmosphere here was a different level to anything I’ve experienced, just like nothing else.” Something perhaps that might encourage a home bird to try and spread his wings further afield. Not many can say they have a boss actively encouraging others to use his prize asset. And there is the history of how both Kinane and Murtagh honed their talents domestically until aged 30, they started to hit their peak years.

Increasingly, Keane’s task may be to balance overseas ambitions and opportunities with a pull for home. Magnum Force’s Breeders’ Cup success underlined his capacity for steeping onto the biggest stage. But continuing his reign as Ireland’s champion jockey is no mean ambition either. And as balancing acts go, it an enviable one to have.