Father & Son

What they remember, four months on, is how eerily calm they felt the morning of the race. Cercene, their star three-year-old filly, had travelled to Royal Ascot for the Coronation Stakes and, true to her nature, had taken the hustle and bustle of the royal meeting in her stride. The filly set the mood.

Joseph Murphy knew she had improved since her gallant third in the Irish 1000 Guineas. He felt no nerves or pressure, just giddy expectation. If all went well, he thought, she might finish in the first three.

The rest unfolded like a beautifully choreographed dream. Cercene tracked the generous early pace in third, poised to strike and make her bid for glory when they turned for home. Then she was second. Then she led.

Then the big guns came bearing down: Karigana, the warm favourite in the Aga Khan silks, and the Coolmore filly, January, looking purposeful and menacing. A furlong out, Karigana poked her nose in front and the outcome looked settled. And then, the impossible happened.

Having been passed, Cercene put her head down and, under Gary Carroll’s vigorous urgings, renewed her push for the line. The French filly, faced with her rival’s grit and tenacity, lifted her head and cried no mas.

Again, Cercene stuck her nose in front. Now a head. Now half a length and the post looming. Gloriously, she had prevailed and fulfilled a lifelong dream for Joseph’s father, Joe. A little more than 90 seconds on Ascot’s verdant green turf. Fifty hard years in the making. Truth be told, the aftermath of the race only exists now as a delicious, delirious blur. “It doesn’t really sink in for an hour afterwards,” Joe says. “You’re pulled around here and there. You do what you’re told.”

“A lot of protocols to be observed,” Joseph agrees. “I’ll always remember those few seconds before the line, when you know she’s going to win. It’s an amazing feeling, indescribable really.”

You want to know about the celebrations, dizzying tales of Ascot bars drank dry, Sliabh na mBan croaked hoarsely into the night.

“A sushi bar in Heathrow Airport,” Joseph laughs. “We’d a runner in Down Royal the next day so we had to be home for that. The world didn’t stop because we’d had a Group 1 winner at Royal Ascot.”

“We’d a runner in Down Royal the next day so we had to be home for that. The world didn’t stop because we’d had a Group 1 winner at Royal Ascot”

As it happened, Vorfreude would win the Ulster Derby, which would give Joe particular satisfaction because he remembered how his colt, Northgate, a €5,000 purchase at the Doncaster sales, had been narrowly edged out by a Kevin Prendergast-trained Celtic Dane 15 years previously. Another old war wound salved. Another little box dutifully ticked.

At Ascot, the biggest one of all. How to quantify the achievement?

“It’s an impossibility,” reasons Joe, “or a near impossibility.”

That isn’t outlandishly overstating the case. In racing terms, Royal Ascot is the flat’s equivalent of the Cheltenham Festival, only with vastly greater multiples of wealth and stiffer foreign competition. And if it is getting tougher, the small man is still regarded as at least having a squeak at Cheltenham. At Royal Ascot, 33/1 winners of Group 1 races are simply not meant to happen.

Discount the names of O’Brien, Weld, Bolger and Oxx, the dominant forces in Irish flat racing over the lats 50 years, and only nine Irish trainers have tasted Group 1 success at the royal meeting in that period. Take this century and, before this year, that number reduces to two: Edward Lynam and Jessica Harrington.

And now it includes the Murphy clan from the village of Fethard, Co Tipperary, too. That was the magnitude of their achievement.

Joe Murphy hadn’t always just willed or dreamed it. He’d believed it too. Even at his lowest ebb, when winners were scarce, or when a virus struck the stable, as happened in 2018, that conviction never failed him. Every horse he bought, regardless of price, had the potential to be a Group 1 winner. That was the abiding philosophy.

“If you didn’t believe it,” he’d say, “you might as well go play golf.”

And when you dig down into it, how improbable was it anyway? He talks about another filly he once trained called Ardbrae Lady. She was by Overbury and people told Joe that Overbury progeny couldn’t have success on the flat. But Ardbrae Lady finished second in the Moyglare and again filled the runner-up spot in the Irish 1000 Guineas. On those occasions, she had been sent off 100/1 and 50/1. Common to all Joe’s horses, they never knew their starting odds.

Before Cercene, the classiest horse he’d trained was a colt called Vert De Grece. At two, he had finished second to subsequent 2000 Guineas hero, Gleneagles, and, briefly, Joe allowed himself to dream of an ambitious three-year-old campaign.

But an “offer we couldn’t refuse” arrived soon after and the horse was sold to a Hong Kong owner. Two weeks later, Vert de Grece won the Group 1 Criterium International at Saint-Cloud. So it went.

“You sold to make a living,” Joe says philosophically. “You sold to keep your family and the yard going. That’s what everybody depends on, from the breeders to the breeze-ups and the small trainers. You do what’s necessary to keep the show on the road. That’s how it is for every small stable the length and breadth of the country.”

Joe is a dreamer and a believer in a world moored by harsh economics and fiscal realities. Not unlike his father, also Joe, before him. Joe Murphy had built a hugely successful agricultural machinery business in Graiguenamanagh, Co Kilkenny, and had a habit of naming his horses after his factories or the products they made. Vicon was the first, trained by his great friend, Willie O’Grady, near Fethard. Years of success and great fun followed.

Joe imagines he was around five when his father first took him to O’Grady’s yard and the consummation with racing was instant and irreversible. After a modest spell as an amateur rider, he took two of his father’s horses that had both suffered serious injuries – Vibrax and Haybob –and nursed them back to health and the winners’ enclosure. With winnings earned from Haybob, he bought the land where he continues to train today.