Kimmage and Bolger's corroboration comes from Stephen Mahon. Interesting.
Wonder how far Kimmage has to go into this before he realises it's not what he hopes it is.
Jim Bolger has always chosen his words carefully when it comes to the business of doping in racing, but when you wind back the tape to the moment it all began — an interview in The Irish Field on October 30, 2020 — it was all there. “I am concerned with the lack of policing in racing,” he told Daragh Ó Conchúir. “It’s not up to the mark, it’s not up to scratch.”
A day later he took a call from the Racing Post: “I have knowledge of problems and I would like to see the IHRB [Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board] stepping up to the plate,” he told David Jennings. “There needs to be more rigorous testing, but action has to happen after that testing has taken place. I’m inclined to think we have had instances in the past where action wasn’t taken when it should have been.”
The conclusion was obvious. He knew.
And he wasn’t the only one.
Some of the messages Bolger sent that week to a like-minded trainer on WhatsApp are enlightening. On the Thursday, it was a story from the Thoroughbred Daily News on some new anti-doping measures being implemented in the US. The headline read: ‘Mid-Atlantic States Move to Restrict Use of Clenbuterol’.
On the Sunday, it was the interviews in The Irish Field and the Racing Post and some comments Bolger had seen on Twitter:
“Wow! . . . For a man like JS Bolger, one of our most upstanding ambassadors to say this, it has to set alarm bells ringing . . . Wonder how many winners this year in Ireland would have passed the steroid hair test?. . . I am sure we will be hearing a lot more about this. This is intriguing stuff.”
“Ok. This is HUGE for our sport. A man of principle and integrity has basically called out trainers in Ireland that are abusing the law. If anyone is found guilty they should NEVER be allowed to train again. END OF!”
His colleague was impressed and replied with a note: “Well the fire is lit now anyway, just need to keep it lit.”
“We will,” Bolger said.
But within a year, Bolger had become the whipping boy of Irish racing, and the other trainer was being portrayed as one of the worst villains the sport had ever seen.
1
All the children in the classroom had their pencils out and were drawing horses, as the nun had instructed — all, that is, except one little boy who, having finished, was sitting idly behind his desk. “Well,” the nun said, looking down at his horse, “why not draw something else — a saddle or something?”
A few minutes later she returned to see what he had drawn. Suddenly, her face was scarlet. The horse now had a penis and was urinating in the pasture.
Wildly, with both hands, the nun began to flail the boy. Then other nuns rushed in, and they, too, flailed him, knocking him to the floor, and not listening as he sobbed, bewilderedly, “But, but . . . I was only drawing what I saw . . . only what I saw!”
Gay Talese
‘Peter O’Toole on the Ould Sod’
Stephen Mahon takes a drag from his cigarette and blows the smoke through an open window in the kitchen. It’s a Sunday morning in late January at his boyhood home in north Co Dublin and his mother has poured him tea and surrounded him with scented candles adorned with images of Padre Pio.
“She’s worried about me,” he laughs.
“It’s the smoke,” she protests.
Eight months have passed since that Thursday evening in Galway when they rushed into his yard and knocked him to the floor. First, an inspection from the IHRB; then a joint inspection with the Department of Agriculture; then a directive from Cliodhna Guy, the IHRB’s Head of Legal and Compliance:
“Having reviewed the information from the two inspections the IHRB is not satisfied that you are acting in a responsible manner with regard to the welfare of horses under your care and control as required under the Rules of Racing . . . On that basis the directors of the IHRB have decided to exercise their powers under rule 20 (ii) to suspend your licence with immediate effect. This matter is being referred to the Referrals Committee for a full disciplinary hearing.”
It was the first time a trainer had been suspended without a formal hearing and when the hearing convened Mahon was barred for four years — the longest suspension ever imposed on a trainer in Ireland.
Then the flailing started.
The Racing Post: “For the multitude who rely on horse racing for a living, last week’s findings in relation to Stephen Mahon were a slap in the face. It is the second time this year that the honest endeavours of a compassionate and conscientious majority have been undermined by a misrepresentative minority. This time, though, there was a tangible welfare issue at play, which was not the case when the image of Gordon Elliott sitting astride the deceased horse emerged.”
Sky’s At The Races: “. . . While the Elliott case was obviously very bad, this case was much, much worse. This case involved actual suffering of horses, with numerous thoroughbreds enduring unnecessary and prolonged pain whilst under the care of a licensed trainer. The details that were published by the IHRB are genuinely upsetting, particularly for those that spend their lives putting so much thought, effort and affection into caring for every need of the thoroughbreds they are responsible for.”
The Irish Times: “There were photographs taken by Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board officials during the course of two inspections at Mahon’s rented premises in Co Galway in April. Judged by details in the IHRB report released on Thursday they would make for grisly viewing if publicly available.
“During the course of two inspections it was found that one horse that had actually been entered for a race soon afterwards had in fact a ‘catastrophic injury’ to a fetlock joint so serious it had to be put down. Another horse was found with a chronic and obvious injury that left it in pain for much longer than should have been the case if proper standards were followed. Officials found another seven horses inadequately cared for in a field.”
Here’s what the columnists did not address.
These horses that had endured “unnecessary and prolonged pain” had owners. Had any of these owners sought compensation from Mahon? Expressed a grievance? Lodged a complaint? What if some had actually spoken for Mahon at the hearing? What if they were continuing to pay him training fees? What if the only complaint any of them had made was about Lynn Hillyer, the IHRB’s Chief Veterinary Officer and Head of Anti-doping?
What kind of column would that make?
*****
2
When he was ten years old, he was awoken one night by a man shouting at his mother in the kitchen. It happened most nights his father was drinking — which was pretty much every night — but this night the terror was amplified by the sound of breaking glass.
His mother had been washing their clothes by hand but had taken delivery that afternoon of a new washing machine. His father had arrived home drunk from the pub and put a steel-capped boot through its door. Then the shouting started.
“Where did that come from?”
“I had to get it, Patsy!”
“We don’t have the money!”
“I’ve been saving for it all year!”
He remembers jumping out of bed and racing to the kitchen with his older brother, Paul, and watching his mother lying distraught amid the broken glass on the floor. Their father had pushed her and was still ranting, so they wrestled him to the ground and threw him out of the house.
“We grew up defending my mother,” he says. “Everybody loved my father but he would come home at midnight drunk and shouting for his dinner — a street angel and a house devil. My mother would have kept something nice for him in the oven, it was never beans on toast, but he’d throw it at her. ‘That steak is like leather! I’m not eating that.’
“It was not a nice environment to grow up in — you couldn’t sleep at night. There’s no point in denying that my mother had it hard but she was great. She used to grow strawberries and sell them by the roadside and did everything for us to survive.”
His father, an only child, had been left three farms and squandered them on drink. Home was a three-bedroom bungalow in Doolagh, a small rural townland set in gently rolling hills between Naul and Stamullen, where the neighbours were mostly farmers and the beach was a five-minute drive, but the soundtrack of his childhood was conflict.
His abiding memory of school is a woman brandishing a pool cue at his head.
“What’s this, Mahon?”
“A horse, Miss.”
“I want you to spell it!”
“Emmm . . . I . . .”
“SPELL IT!”
“I hated school,” he says. “I used to walk down from the crossroads and my mother would be in the garden, weeding or doing the strawberries, and I’d fire my bag over the wall and tell her I was going to Casey’s. She’d go mad: ‘Get back here! What about your homework?’ But I did no homework, all I did in school was draw pictures of horses.”
The truest love he has ever known began on a summer’s day near Gormanstown on the old Dublin-Belfast road. He had gone to help his mother sell strawberries to motorists, but there was a pony in a nearby field and he spent the afternoon rubbing its nose and chatting about noise — they both hated noise.
But it really began at Casey’s.
Peter Casey was farming sheep at the time but would later make his name as a trainer with a horse called Flemenstar and a flamboyant interview at Leopardstown: “Jesus, it’s unreal! I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it! I’ll have f****n’ sex tonight and everything!”
The Mahons lived two fields from his yard. “That’s where I learned to ride,” Mahon says. “I was friends with Peter [junior] and used to watch him when he was riding ponies and copy what he did with his hands and his feet. Boss was breeding and only really got into training later, but I used to ride out a horse called Kings Sovereign there.
“Then I used to go to Stamullen where Timmy O’Regan was training horses for John and Paddy White. He’s dead now, Lord have mercy on him, but it was Timmy who primed me to go to the Curragh. ‘I could get you a job with Kevin Prendergast’ he said. But my mother was against it.”
Betty had brought five children into the world — two boys and three girls — but it was Stephen who kept her awake at night. He was 14 years old, mitching from school and could barely read or write, but he was obsessed with horses and that’s what swung it in the end. She packed a suitcase, drove with Patsy to the Curragh and delivered her son to Prendergast.
*****
3
You had to stand up for yourself, both in the yard and out of it. Tom Fitzgerald said to me soon after I arrived that I would not succeed as a jockey if I didn’t back myself. ‘It’s a rat race,’ Tom said, ‘and the biggest f**king rat wins.’
Kieren Fallon
‘Form’
Tom Fitzgerald was the head lad at Friarstown. He presented Mahon with a yard brush and a fork and arranged digs for him in Kildare with Mrs Burke. Kieran Fallon had arrived a month earlier and was staying with some other lads next door. A minibus arrived at 6.30 the following morning and they were driven to the yard.
It was cold and dark.
The first day of the rest of his life began with a sack and a set of instructions: 1. Place the sack like a sheet on the ground and load it with muck and straw. 2. Pull up the four corners and carry the sack to the muck heap. 3. Proceed to the next box and repeat.
Then there was a test.
“They weren’t going to send you out with a lot without knowing you could ride,” he says. “Robbie Gallagher was the head travelling lad. He put me on this buzzy filly, attached it with a strap and a chain to the quiet lad he was on, and we cantered around the field a couple of times. Then he gave the nod to Kevin: ‘That lad’s grand.’”
It wasn’t the only test.
“There was probably about 40 lads working there at the time and the bullying and abuse was unreal,” he says. “Every day you were picked on. They stubbed fags on the back of your hand or shoved the butts into your boots. They pulled off your trousers and covered you with oil and dust and hung you from the beams.
“They would grab you and throw you in a car, strip you in the middle of the Curragh, and leave you to walk back in with just your boots on. And you were always getting thumped. There were times when I thought, ‘I have to get out of here.’ It was tough.”
A year later, on June 2, 1984, his first race was the Unidare Electricare Handicap over a mile and two furlongs at the Phoenix Park. Kevin Manning won on Jazz Me Blues for Jim Bolger; Charlie Swan finished fifth on a horse called Roundout for Des McDonogh; and SJ Mahon got a bollocking from Kevin Prendergast for his 12th place finish on Jim Thorpe.
“Kevin had two runners in the race. I was supposed to ride Blessed Persian, a nice filly I was minding [in the yard], but he switched me onto Jim Thorpe. He was late into the parade ring and didn’t really give me any instructions. I was only 15 and hadn’t a clue. He probably wanted me to just let the horse run around behind them but I hit him two behind the saddle a furlong out and he went mad: ‘You won’t get any more rides!’ And I didn’t.”
He quit six months later. He loved horses but being a jockey was the dream and a decade later he was still chasing it: 18 months with Noel Meade in Navan, 18 months with Matty McCormack in Wantage, six months with Jeff Davies in Kent, a year on the Curragh with John Ox, a year with John Roberts in Devon, three years in Kilsallaghan with Jim Dreaper.
Then he went home.
His father had tackled his drinking and become a doting grandad — “I remember thinking ‘Jesus! He was never like that with us!’” — and for once Mahon was happy to stick around. He was working four nights a week as a doorman in Balbriggan; breaking horses and converting sheds into stables, and jazzing constantly with local heroes — ‘Boss’ Casey, Tommy McCourt, Joe Purfield, Paddy White — about the state of the game.
It was White who suggested he become a trainer. It still makes him laugh: “We were chatting one day about a problem with entering horses for point-to-points and he says, ‘Bedads, bedads, Stephen. Why don’t you get your own licence?’”
*****
4
Smart Project fulfilled the promise shown at Leopardstown for Jim Bolger when winning this impressively for his new trainer Steve Mahon. Patiently ridden, this promising performer responded for Philip Fenton to catch Fenagh Express which had attempted to make all the running.
Sunday Independent, August 2, 1998
For two years, Mahon’s career as a trainer mirrored his time as a jockey — plenty of guts but no glory. He had built a good facility with 30 stables and an all-weather gallop at Mooreside in Naul, and logged some decent performances for his owners, but had never had a win. “We just didn’t have money for good horses,” he says.
One of his owners, Gerry Casey, was a gregarious printer from Ballsbridge. In July of ’98 he decided to roll the dice — “Go and buy me a horse, fellah” — and sent Mahon a cheque for 30 grand.
Mahon made a few calls and was directed to a broker who had a proposal: “Gerry wouldn’t know the back end from the front end of a horse,” he said. “What if I got you a horse for six and we split the rest between us?”
“What!”
“Twelve grand each.”
Mahon wasn’t having it: “No, I want a good horse. I’m not going down that road.”
Then he made another call.
“Hi Mr Bolger, you won’t know me, but I was looking for a horse and wondered if you had anything for sale?”
“What type of horse?”
“A good one, obviously.”
“And what kind of money are you talking about?”
“I’ve 30 grand.”
“Well,” Bolger said, “I’ve a horse who was third last month in an amateur at Leopardstown, but he’s 40 grand. But come down anyway and see what you think.”
The next morning Mahon drove to Coolcullen and watched Smart Project flying up the gallop. Then he was invited to the house and into the conservatory for tea. The place was like a temple. He had never seen so many trophies and artifacts and gazed at the walls, rooted to the floor.
“You like photographs, do you?” Bolger observed.
“I’m flabbergasted.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t got one at home.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get some for you,” Bolger smiled. “What do you think of the horse?”
“Yeah, he’s lovely. He has some stride on him.”
“You’ll have no problem winning races with this lad.”
“I’ve just one problem, Jim.”
“What’s that?”
“I have a bank draft here for 30 thousand.”
“Sure that’s not a problem, is it?”
“But you’re looking for 40?”
“Well, seeing as you haven’t got one photograph, I’ll tell you what you’ll do,” Bolger said. “I’ll take the 30 thousand and when he wins his first race you’ll pay me five thousand. And when he wins his second race you’ll pay me the other five thousand.”
The tea was served in bone china. They sat for a while chatting about the game and arrangements were made to deliver Smart Project to Mooreside. Bolger phoned every other day: What did you do with him today? What are you doing tomorrow?
“That’s how the relationship started,” Mahon laughs. “He was teaching me how to train.”
The Galway Races were approaching. Mahon planned to run the horse early in the week but Bolger advised against it.
“Wait until Saturday.”
“Why?”
“The ground is too soft, but Galway dries very quick.”
“But that’s a much tougher race?”
“Don’t mind that. If the ground is good he’ll hammer them.”
Two months later, Mahon was in Mooreside one afternoon when a framed portrait of Smart Project was delivered to the yard. He brought it inside and put it on the wall.
He was on his way.
*****
5
Adrian Maguire dropped a bombshell on Thursday when revealing he expects to quit training at the end of the season due to a dwindling number of horses. Maguire’s loss to the ranks would constitute yet another high-profile departure as the middle and lower tiers continue to struggle to compete with the superpowers that prevail on the Irish jumps scene.
In announcing their retirements over the past two years, Charlie Swan, Joanna Morgan and Colm Murphy each cited an inability to maintain functioning business models in an environment in which the dominant forces exert an unprecedented degree of influence.
After saddling Knockraha Pylon to win a mares’ beginners’ chase at Thurles on Thursday, an emotional Maguire, 46, echoed such sentiments. “It’s come to the point that I’ve five paying horses — it is costing me money to train horses,” he said . . .
“I can’t see myself training next winter — I can’t. There’s no sign of improvement on the horizon, and I’m open to offers, obviously in the world of racing. It has been building for the last couple of seasons. I’m only the latest one to bite [the bullet]. It’s just not happening and is getting tougher.
Racing Post, March 9, 2017
In February of 2018, the IHRB published some worrying statistics on the demise of the small trainer. For the first time since 2008, there were fewer that 100 National Hunt trainers in Ireland (93); and the total number of trainers’ licences had fallen from 805 in 2007 to 578 in 2017.
Mahon had always been one of racing’s survivors, but his owners were dwindling and he was finding it harder every year. By the summer of 2020 he hadn’t had a winner since the summer before — Sizing Malbay in a handicap hurdle at Bellewstown.
“I couldn’t understand it,” he says. “I’d be going to the races saying ‘Have a few bob on this horse, he’s flying.’ And I’d be driving home saying ‘What the f**k was that all about! How did I get it so wrong?’”
Then he got a call from an old friend who had been a small-time trainer until the game got too tough For the purposes of this article, his name is ‘John Doe’.
“I’m 39 years in racing,” Mahon says, “and there’s probably no yard in the country — England or Ireland — that I wouldn’t know somebody in. I had known [this guy] for years. He had taken out a licence but the horses he had were shite, and I kept telling him: ‘They’re f*****g useless’.”
John Doe gave up his licence. He took a job in a prominent Irish yard run by Trainer X.
“He called me one night and now I’m struggling. ‘It’s not the horses,’ he said, ‘it’s what you’re running against.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘You want to see the **** the horses are getting in [Trainer X’s]. They come in the back gate as pigeons and they go out to the races as ostriches.’”
Everybody talks in racing. It was John Doe who talked to Mahon about everything he had seen. It was Mahon who talked to Bolger about everything he’d been told about Trainer X. It was Bolger who talked to Mahon about the best way to proceed. And it was Mahon who picked up the baton and talked to Lynn Hillyer.
“She wanted to know it all,” he says. “She felt like my best friend.”
*****
6
July 8, 2021: Lynn Hillyer questioned by Sinn Féin TD Matt Carthy at an Oireachtas Committee hearing.
Q: If somebody made an allegation of an illegal activity or a doping allegation, perhaps outlining it in great detail or perhaps not, what is the process in terms of what happens next in the IHRB?
A: The process is very simple. In broad terms, information will come to any one of us, whether it be one of my team on the racecourse today, Mr [Denis] Egan [the IRHB’s chief exececutive until his early retirement last September], somebody in HRI [Horse Racing Ireland], stable staff and so on. The information can come via a number of routes. Once it lands on someone’s desk in our organisation it will come in to either me or to the head of legal licencing and compliance, Dr Cliodhna Guy. Dr Guy manages the confidential hotline. The matter is dealt with unequivocally. I need to be clear about this. Sometimes information can be scribbled on the back of an envelope, it can be a recorded taped conversation and sometimes I will receive envelopes in the post with leaflets of products . . . A piece of information could come in today which, on its own, would not seem to make much sense but it might make sense in two months’ time when it is put together with another piece of information. This is how we work.
Stephen Mahon is hopelessly imprecise when it comes to times and dates, but he can pinpoint exactly when he started engaging with Lynn Hillyer: July 17, 2020. It’s on his phone: a text message at 12:50 with the brands of injectable testosterone — Sustavirol 250 and Propovirol 100 — being pumped into Trainer X’s horses; and a snatched conversation at 13:48 that ended after 51 seconds.
“She wasn’t happy I’d called her mobile,” he says. “She said she didn’t trust it and would call me back on WhatsApp.”
He’s pretty sure they met that evening at the races in Kilbeggan, and is certain they spoke in Galway, two weeks later, because he sent her a message later that night (July 29) about some unusual traffic at a yard in Kildare: “The [owner] horses goes there as well . . . X trains a lot of them . . . they [are] all tying together.”
There was a lot happening.
A week earlier he’d taken a call from John Doe about another doping product. ‘The powder’ — Equisolon — was a powerful corticosteroid designed to treat horses with respiratory problems. But not at Trainer X’s.
“It’s used like salt here!” he said. “They’re so f*****g cute they have everything covered.”
“How?”
“They ship the horse down to me in the pre-training yard. I feed him with this, and inject him with that, and Lynn Hillyer arrives: ‘Where’s the horse?’ He’s in the pre-training yard. ‘Why is he down there?’ Oh, he has a lung infection. She goes to the medical book. The vet has logged him as being on medication. Book closed. They juice him for three weeks, leave him a week for the stuff to clear, and he goes back to the training yard.”
“F**k!”
“I’m telling you Mahon, it’s f*****g unreal! But he’s sailing close to the wind.”
“What do you mean?”
“He had a winner last week . . . He didn’t want to run him, he was on the powder and hadn’t come down, but he was under pressure from the owner and didn’t think he’d win . . . he pissed in!”
Now Bolger was interested. How had the horse passed the mandatory dope test for winners?
Mahon relayed the details to Hillyer and they spoke regularly in the months that followed: “I didn’t tell her who was giving me the information but she knew it was good,” he says.
A WhatsApp message from Hillyer on August 22: “Thanks for that and the call.”
A WhatsApp message to Hillyer on September 28: “Whatever I can do to help you I will.”
Then something extraordinary happened.
It was a Friday afternoon, and John Doe had just finished lunch at Trainer X’s when an order came down to move some horses from the yard.
“Where do you want them moved?”
“To ---------.”
“Why do you want them moved?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
A list was drawn up. The horses on it were shipped out.
Twenty minutes later there was a second order: all medications were to be removed from the barns to be collected by an assistant trainer. The following morning, two inspectors from the IHRB arrived. They were expected.
It was a day later when Mahon spoke to John Doe, and almost midnight when he delivered the news in a WhatsApp exchange with Hillyer:
Mahon: “. . . They are a step ahead of you.”
Hillyer: “Thx. Speak tomorrow if you have time.”
Mahon: “That’s no problem Lynn.”
The Sunday Independent made several unsuccessful efforts to contact Lynn Hillyer last week. On Friday, IHRB communications manager Niall Cronin sent a written response to questions emailed directly to Hillyer, in which he referred to “a pre-arranged inspection relating to a change of training premises which is standard procedure.”
In October 2020, Bolger decided to go public with his concerns about “the lack of policing in racing”.
A week later he met Hillyer.
*****
7
July 8, 2021: Lynn Hillyer questioned by Fine Gael TD Paul Kehoe at an Oirechtas Committee hearing.
Q: Prior to arrangements being made for the IHRB to visit non-licensed yards, was it aware that some trainers — this information was given to me anonymously — were moving horses to non-licensed yards where they may have been getting drug treatment? Was the IHRB aware of this abuse and does it concentrate its efforts on trainers engaged in this practice?
A: I will be brief. The IHRB is aware of horse movement and we have done something about it in pursuing our authorised officer status.
Q: I ask Dr Hillyer to confirm what has been done in that regard.
A: We have authorised officers status, which means we are now tracking horses. Over the past month, if we arrived at a yard and were unable to find a horse that was supposed to be there we searched for it and found it.
Q: Have horses been moved?
A: Horses are moved all the time.
Q: Has the IHRB found anything improper?
A: No. Horses are moved all of the time for perfectly good reasons, but we are now able to follow them.
The IHRB has always been consistent in its approach to tackling doping. It was all about “taking the right sample from the right horse at the right time”.
Hillyer has always been clear on what doping means. “Cheating in sport takes many forms,” she said. “To me, somebody who tries to gain an advantage by using a medication inappropriately is cheating as much as someone who uses more traditional performance-enhancing type drugs such as EPO.”
So how did they explain Trainer X?
Mahon had delivered in spades and they hadn’t laid a glove on the trainer. And in the eight months that followed, they did not return to his yard.
Perhaps Bolger was the problem. The ink barely dried on his interview with the Racing Post when the regulators hit back.
The Irish Times on November 2: “Irish racing’s regulatory body has said up to 60 drug tests on hair samples taken from horses since the summer have been negative for prohibited substances. The IHRB, formerly the Turf Club, has confirmed that a policy of taking hair samples from animals on race-day has been in place for some months.
“The advantage of such samples in comparison to blood or urine is that they can provide a detailed historical record of drug use in a horse — including anabolic steroids — in some cases up to years after medication has been administered.
“On Sunday an IHRB spokesman said it was the first racing regulator anywhere in the world to introduce such testing and that it has been carried out across a wide range of trainers in Ireland. ‘None of the hair samples has returned results of any concern,’ he said.
“It comes on the back of weekend comments by one of the country’s top trainers, Jim Bolger, who suggested that not enough is being done to catch trainers using banned substances.”
Five days later, the numbers had gone up in The Irish Field: “The Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board has defended its drug testing procedures in the wake of comments made by trainer Jim Bolger . . . This week the IHRB told The Irish Field that it has tested approximately 80 hair samples taken from race-day winners since this year’s Galway Summer Festival.”
Two days later, on November 9, Bolger met Hillyer in Rathvilly and explained his concerns. He came away from the meeting thinking that Hillyer was “keen to do something”, but he was unsure as to whether she had “the back-up”.
All the while when Mahon was having his back and forth with Hillyer in phonecalls and WhatsApp messages, Bolger’s stock was falling among many of his fellow trainers. He was dragging the sport through the mud, they said. He was pointing the finger without producing any facts, they said.
When Bolger doubled down on his comments in a Sunday Independent interview in June 2021, he was effectively disowned by the body representing his peers. The Irish Racehorse Trainers Association (IRTA) said it was “not aware” of the concerns he had raised.
Bolger would have seen that coming. He would have understood that the default reaction for those upset by the unwelcome claims of a whistleblower is to shoot the messenger.
The problem for those upset with Bolger, however, was that he had too much respect in the sport to be shot down, or silenced. His credentials were unimpeachable — one of the greatest Irish trainers in history. Far easier to attack the credibility of a lesser training mortal, preferably one with some convenient stains on his character — a man like Stephen Mahon, say.
Lynn Hillyer, though, was grateful for Mahon’s co-operation. She said as much when questioned during the hearing that followed the inspection of his yard in Galway. “We had dealings with Mr Mahon last summer, and Mr Mahon was helpful in providing some information — I say we, [I mean] I personally. He had given us information about some anti-doping matters and bits and pieces.”
Like Bolger, Mahon had the sense that Hillyer was “keen to do something”. And he was keen to do whatever he could to help her.
He points to some of the calls and messages they exchanged in the months that followed their initial contact, such as an exchange of texts on February 21, 2021:
Mahon: “Well done. Well spoken. You have them on the run now. There is a lot of horses running bad. They are afraid to give them anything.”
Hillyer: “Good morning — well — just have to keep going!”
Mahon: “You’re doing a great job. Thank God the field is starting to level out.”
Hillyer: “The next bit of testing will take it on a level again. Thanks for your help to date.”
Mahon: “That’s good. Keep up the good work.”
Seven weeks later, IHRB inspectors rushed into his yard and Mahon’s world came crashing down around him.
Wonder how far Kimmage has to go into this before he realises it's not what he hopes it is.
Jim Bolger has always chosen his words carefully when it comes to the business of doping in racing, but when you wind back the tape to the moment it all began — an interview in The Irish Field on October 30, 2020 — it was all there. “I am concerned with the lack of policing in racing,” he told Daragh Ó Conchúir. “It’s not up to the mark, it’s not up to scratch.”
A day later he took a call from the Racing Post: “I have knowledge of problems and I would like to see the IHRB [Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board] stepping up to the plate,” he told David Jennings. “There needs to be more rigorous testing, but action has to happen after that testing has taken place. I’m inclined to think we have had instances in the past where action wasn’t taken when it should have been.”
The conclusion was obvious. He knew.
And he wasn’t the only one.
Some of the messages Bolger sent that week to a like-minded trainer on WhatsApp are enlightening. On the Thursday, it was a story from the Thoroughbred Daily News on some new anti-doping measures being implemented in the US. The headline read: ‘Mid-Atlantic States Move to Restrict Use of Clenbuterol’.
On the Sunday, it was the interviews in The Irish Field and the Racing Post and some comments Bolger had seen on Twitter:
“Wow! . . . For a man like JS Bolger, one of our most upstanding ambassadors to say this, it has to set alarm bells ringing . . . Wonder how many winners this year in Ireland would have passed the steroid hair test?. . . I am sure we will be hearing a lot more about this. This is intriguing stuff.”
“Ok. This is HUGE for our sport. A man of principle and integrity has basically called out trainers in Ireland that are abusing the law. If anyone is found guilty they should NEVER be allowed to train again. END OF!”
His colleague was impressed and replied with a note: “Well the fire is lit now anyway, just need to keep it lit.”
“We will,” Bolger said.
But within a year, Bolger had become the whipping boy of Irish racing, and the other trainer was being portrayed as one of the worst villains the sport had ever seen.
1
All the children in the classroom had their pencils out and were drawing horses, as the nun had instructed — all, that is, except one little boy who, having finished, was sitting idly behind his desk. “Well,” the nun said, looking down at his horse, “why not draw something else — a saddle or something?”
A few minutes later she returned to see what he had drawn. Suddenly, her face was scarlet. The horse now had a penis and was urinating in the pasture.
Wildly, with both hands, the nun began to flail the boy. Then other nuns rushed in, and they, too, flailed him, knocking him to the floor, and not listening as he sobbed, bewilderedly, “But, but . . . I was only drawing what I saw . . . only what I saw!”
Gay Talese
‘Peter O’Toole on the Ould Sod’
Stephen Mahon takes a drag from his cigarette and blows the smoke through an open window in the kitchen. It’s a Sunday morning in late January at his boyhood home in north Co Dublin and his mother has poured him tea and surrounded him with scented candles adorned with images of Padre Pio.
“She’s worried about me,” he laughs.
“It’s the smoke,” she protests.
Eight months have passed since that Thursday evening in Galway when they rushed into his yard and knocked him to the floor. First, an inspection from the IHRB; then a joint inspection with the Department of Agriculture; then a directive from Cliodhna Guy, the IHRB’s Head of Legal and Compliance:
“Having reviewed the information from the two inspections the IHRB is not satisfied that you are acting in a responsible manner with regard to the welfare of horses under your care and control as required under the Rules of Racing . . . On that basis the directors of the IHRB have decided to exercise their powers under rule 20 (ii) to suspend your licence with immediate effect. This matter is being referred to the Referrals Committee for a full disciplinary hearing.”
It was the first time a trainer had been suspended without a formal hearing and when the hearing convened Mahon was barred for four years — the longest suspension ever imposed on a trainer in Ireland.
Then the flailing started.
The Racing Post: “For the multitude who rely on horse racing for a living, last week’s findings in relation to Stephen Mahon were a slap in the face. It is the second time this year that the honest endeavours of a compassionate and conscientious majority have been undermined by a misrepresentative minority. This time, though, there was a tangible welfare issue at play, which was not the case when the image of Gordon Elliott sitting astride the deceased horse emerged.”
Sky’s At The Races: “. . . While the Elliott case was obviously very bad, this case was much, much worse. This case involved actual suffering of horses, with numerous thoroughbreds enduring unnecessary and prolonged pain whilst under the care of a licensed trainer. The details that were published by the IHRB are genuinely upsetting, particularly for those that spend their lives putting so much thought, effort and affection into caring for every need of the thoroughbreds they are responsible for.”
The Irish Times: “There were photographs taken by Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board officials during the course of two inspections at Mahon’s rented premises in Co Galway in April. Judged by details in the IHRB report released on Thursday they would make for grisly viewing if publicly available.
“During the course of two inspections it was found that one horse that had actually been entered for a race soon afterwards had in fact a ‘catastrophic injury’ to a fetlock joint so serious it had to be put down. Another horse was found with a chronic and obvious injury that left it in pain for much longer than should have been the case if proper standards were followed. Officials found another seven horses inadequately cared for in a field.”
Here’s what the columnists did not address.
These horses that had endured “unnecessary and prolonged pain” had owners. Had any of these owners sought compensation from Mahon? Expressed a grievance? Lodged a complaint? What if some had actually spoken for Mahon at the hearing? What if they were continuing to pay him training fees? What if the only complaint any of them had made was about Lynn Hillyer, the IHRB’s Chief Veterinary Officer and Head of Anti-doping?
What kind of column would that make?
*****
2
When he was ten years old, he was awoken one night by a man shouting at his mother in the kitchen. It happened most nights his father was drinking — which was pretty much every night — but this night the terror was amplified by the sound of breaking glass.
His mother had been washing their clothes by hand but had taken delivery that afternoon of a new washing machine. His father had arrived home drunk from the pub and put a steel-capped boot through its door. Then the shouting started.
“Where did that come from?”
“I had to get it, Patsy!”
“We don’t have the money!”
“I’ve been saving for it all year!”
He remembers jumping out of bed and racing to the kitchen with his older brother, Paul, and watching his mother lying distraught amid the broken glass on the floor. Their father had pushed her and was still ranting, so they wrestled him to the ground and threw him out of the house.
“We grew up defending my mother,” he says. “Everybody loved my father but he would come home at midnight drunk and shouting for his dinner — a street angel and a house devil. My mother would have kept something nice for him in the oven, it was never beans on toast, but he’d throw it at her. ‘That steak is like leather! I’m not eating that.’
“It was not a nice environment to grow up in — you couldn’t sleep at night. There’s no point in denying that my mother had it hard but she was great. She used to grow strawberries and sell them by the roadside and did everything for us to survive.”
His father, an only child, had been left three farms and squandered them on drink. Home was a three-bedroom bungalow in Doolagh, a small rural townland set in gently rolling hills between Naul and Stamullen, where the neighbours were mostly farmers and the beach was a five-minute drive, but the soundtrack of his childhood was conflict.
His abiding memory of school is a woman brandishing a pool cue at his head.
“What’s this, Mahon?”
“A horse, Miss.”
“I want you to spell it!”
“Emmm . . . I . . .”
“SPELL IT!”
“I hated school,” he says. “I used to walk down from the crossroads and my mother would be in the garden, weeding or doing the strawberries, and I’d fire my bag over the wall and tell her I was going to Casey’s. She’d go mad: ‘Get back here! What about your homework?’ But I did no homework, all I did in school was draw pictures of horses.”
The truest love he has ever known began on a summer’s day near Gormanstown on the old Dublin-Belfast road. He had gone to help his mother sell strawberries to motorists, but there was a pony in a nearby field and he spent the afternoon rubbing its nose and chatting about noise — they both hated noise.
But it really began at Casey’s.
Peter Casey was farming sheep at the time but would later make his name as a trainer with a horse called Flemenstar and a flamboyant interview at Leopardstown: “Jesus, it’s unreal! I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it! I’ll have f****n’ sex tonight and everything!”
The Mahons lived two fields from his yard. “That’s where I learned to ride,” Mahon says. “I was friends with Peter [junior] and used to watch him when he was riding ponies and copy what he did with his hands and his feet. Boss was breeding and only really got into training later, but I used to ride out a horse called Kings Sovereign there.
“Then I used to go to Stamullen where Timmy O’Regan was training horses for John and Paddy White. He’s dead now, Lord have mercy on him, but it was Timmy who primed me to go to the Curragh. ‘I could get you a job with Kevin Prendergast’ he said. But my mother was against it.”
Betty had brought five children into the world — two boys and three girls — but it was Stephen who kept her awake at night. He was 14 years old, mitching from school and could barely read or write, but he was obsessed with horses and that’s what swung it in the end. She packed a suitcase, drove with Patsy to the Curragh and delivered her son to Prendergast.
*****
3
You had to stand up for yourself, both in the yard and out of it. Tom Fitzgerald said to me soon after I arrived that I would not succeed as a jockey if I didn’t back myself. ‘It’s a rat race,’ Tom said, ‘and the biggest f**king rat wins.’
Kieren Fallon
‘Form’
Tom Fitzgerald was the head lad at Friarstown. He presented Mahon with a yard brush and a fork and arranged digs for him in Kildare with Mrs Burke. Kieran Fallon had arrived a month earlier and was staying with some other lads next door. A minibus arrived at 6.30 the following morning and they were driven to the yard.
It was cold and dark.
The first day of the rest of his life began with a sack and a set of instructions: 1. Place the sack like a sheet on the ground and load it with muck and straw. 2. Pull up the four corners and carry the sack to the muck heap. 3. Proceed to the next box and repeat.
Then there was a test.
“They weren’t going to send you out with a lot without knowing you could ride,” he says. “Robbie Gallagher was the head travelling lad. He put me on this buzzy filly, attached it with a strap and a chain to the quiet lad he was on, and we cantered around the field a couple of times. Then he gave the nod to Kevin: ‘That lad’s grand.’”
It wasn’t the only test.
“There was probably about 40 lads working there at the time and the bullying and abuse was unreal,” he says. “Every day you were picked on. They stubbed fags on the back of your hand or shoved the butts into your boots. They pulled off your trousers and covered you with oil and dust and hung you from the beams.
“They would grab you and throw you in a car, strip you in the middle of the Curragh, and leave you to walk back in with just your boots on. And you were always getting thumped. There were times when I thought, ‘I have to get out of here.’ It was tough.”
A year later, on June 2, 1984, his first race was the Unidare Electricare Handicap over a mile and two furlongs at the Phoenix Park. Kevin Manning won on Jazz Me Blues for Jim Bolger; Charlie Swan finished fifth on a horse called Roundout for Des McDonogh; and SJ Mahon got a bollocking from Kevin Prendergast for his 12th place finish on Jim Thorpe.
“Kevin had two runners in the race. I was supposed to ride Blessed Persian, a nice filly I was minding [in the yard], but he switched me onto Jim Thorpe. He was late into the parade ring and didn’t really give me any instructions. I was only 15 and hadn’t a clue. He probably wanted me to just let the horse run around behind them but I hit him two behind the saddle a furlong out and he went mad: ‘You won’t get any more rides!’ And I didn’t.”
He quit six months later. He loved horses but being a jockey was the dream and a decade later he was still chasing it: 18 months with Noel Meade in Navan, 18 months with Matty McCormack in Wantage, six months with Jeff Davies in Kent, a year on the Curragh with John Ox, a year with John Roberts in Devon, three years in Kilsallaghan with Jim Dreaper.
Then he went home.
His father had tackled his drinking and become a doting grandad — “I remember thinking ‘Jesus! He was never like that with us!’” — and for once Mahon was happy to stick around. He was working four nights a week as a doorman in Balbriggan; breaking horses and converting sheds into stables, and jazzing constantly with local heroes — ‘Boss’ Casey, Tommy McCourt, Joe Purfield, Paddy White — about the state of the game.
It was White who suggested he become a trainer. It still makes him laugh: “We were chatting one day about a problem with entering horses for point-to-points and he says, ‘Bedads, bedads, Stephen. Why don’t you get your own licence?’”
*****
4
Smart Project fulfilled the promise shown at Leopardstown for Jim Bolger when winning this impressively for his new trainer Steve Mahon. Patiently ridden, this promising performer responded for Philip Fenton to catch Fenagh Express which had attempted to make all the running.
Sunday Independent, August 2, 1998
For two years, Mahon’s career as a trainer mirrored his time as a jockey — plenty of guts but no glory. He had built a good facility with 30 stables and an all-weather gallop at Mooreside in Naul, and logged some decent performances for his owners, but had never had a win. “We just didn’t have money for good horses,” he says.
One of his owners, Gerry Casey, was a gregarious printer from Ballsbridge. In July of ’98 he decided to roll the dice — “Go and buy me a horse, fellah” — and sent Mahon a cheque for 30 grand.
Mahon made a few calls and was directed to a broker who had a proposal: “Gerry wouldn’t know the back end from the front end of a horse,” he said. “What if I got you a horse for six and we split the rest between us?”
“What!”
“Twelve grand each.”
Mahon wasn’t having it: “No, I want a good horse. I’m not going down that road.”
Then he made another call.
“Hi Mr Bolger, you won’t know me, but I was looking for a horse and wondered if you had anything for sale?”
“What type of horse?”
“A good one, obviously.”
“And what kind of money are you talking about?”
“I’ve 30 grand.”
“Well,” Bolger said, “I’ve a horse who was third last month in an amateur at Leopardstown, but he’s 40 grand. But come down anyway and see what you think.”
The next morning Mahon drove to Coolcullen and watched Smart Project flying up the gallop. Then he was invited to the house and into the conservatory for tea. The place was like a temple. He had never seen so many trophies and artifacts and gazed at the walls, rooted to the floor.
“You like photographs, do you?” Bolger observed.
“I’m flabbergasted.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t got one at home.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll get some for you,” Bolger smiled. “What do you think of the horse?”
“Yeah, he’s lovely. He has some stride on him.”
“You’ll have no problem winning races with this lad.”
“I’ve just one problem, Jim.”
“What’s that?”
“I have a bank draft here for 30 thousand.”
“Sure that’s not a problem, is it?”
“But you’re looking for 40?”
“Well, seeing as you haven’t got one photograph, I’ll tell you what you’ll do,” Bolger said. “I’ll take the 30 thousand and when he wins his first race you’ll pay me five thousand. And when he wins his second race you’ll pay me the other five thousand.”
The tea was served in bone china. They sat for a while chatting about the game and arrangements were made to deliver Smart Project to Mooreside. Bolger phoned every other day: What did you do with him today? What are you doing tomorrow?
“That’s how the relationship started,” Mahon laughs. “He was teaching me how to train.”
The Galway Races were approaching. Mahon planned to run the horse early in the week but Bolger advised against it.
“Wait until Saturday.”
“Why?”
“The ground is too soft, but Galway dries very quick.”
“But that’s a much tougher race?”
“Don’t mind that. If the ground is good he’ll hammer them.”
Two months later, Mahon was in Mooreside one afternoon when a framed portrait of Smart Project was delivered to the yard. He brought it inside and put it on the wall.
He was on his way.
*****
5
Adrian Maguire dropped a bombshell on Thursday when revealing he expects to quit training at the end of the season due to a dwindling number of horses. Maguire’s loss to the ranks would constitute yet another high-profile departure as the middle and lower tiers continue to struggle to compete with the superpowers that prevail on the Irish jumps scene.
In announcing their retirements over the past two years, Charlie Swan, Joanna Morgan and Colm Murphy each cited an inability to maintain functioning business models in an environment in which the dominant forces exert an unprecedented degree of influence.
After saddling Knockraha Pylon to win a mares’ beginners’ chase at Thurles on Thursday, an emotional Maguire, 46, echoed such sentiments. “It’s come to the point that I’ve five paying horses — it is costing me money to train horses,” he said . . .
“I can’t see myself training next winter — I can’t. There’s no sign of improvement on the horizon, and I’m open to offers, obviously in the world of racing. It has been building for the last couple of seasons. I’m only the latest one to bite [the bullet]. It’s just not happening and is getting tougher.
Racing Post, March 9, 2017
In February of 2018, the IHRB published some worrying statistics on the demise of the small trainer. For the first time since 2008, there were fewer that 100 National Hunt trainers in Ireland (93); and the total number of trainers’ licences had fallen from 805 in 2007 to 578 in 2017.
Mahon had always been one of racing’s survivors, but his owners were dwindling and he was finding it harder every year. By the summer of 2020 he hadn’t had a winner since the summer before — Sizing Malbay in a handicap hurdle at Bellewstown.
“I couldn’t understand it,” he says. “I’d be going to the races saying ‘Have a few bob on this horse, he’s flying.’ And I’d be driving home saying ‘What the f**k was that all about! How did I get it so wrong?’”
Then he got a call from an old friend who had been a small-time trainer until the game got too tough For the purposes of this article, his name is ‘John Doe’.
“I’m 39 years in racing,” Mahon says, “and there’s probably no yard in the country — England or Ireland — that I wouldn’t know somebody in. I had known [this guy] for years. He had taken out a licence but the horses he had were shite, and I kept telling him: ‘They’re f*****g useless’.”
John Doe gave up his licence. He took a job in a prominent Irish yard run by Trainer X.
“He called me one night and now I’m struggling. ‘It’s not the horses,’ he said, ‘it’s what you’re running against.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘You want to see the **** the horses are getting in [Trainer X’s]. They come in the back gate as pigeons and they go out to the races as ostriches.’”
Everybody talks in racing. It was John Doe who talked to Mahon about everything he had seen. It was Mahon who talked to Bolger about everything he’d been told about Trainer X. It was Bolger who talked to Mahon about the best way to proceed. And it was Mahon who picked up the baton and talked to Lynn Hillyer.
“She wanted to know it all,” he says. “She felt like my best friend.”
*****
6
July 8, 2021: Lynn Hillyer questioned by Sinn Féin TD Matt Carthy at an Oireachtas Committee hearing.
Q: If somebody made an allegation of an illegal activity or a doping allegation, perhaps outlining it in great detail or perhaps not, what is the process in terms of what happens next in the IHRB?
A: The process is very simple. In broad terms, information will come to any one of us, whether it be one of my team on the racecourse today, Mr [Denis] Egan [the IRHB’s chief exececutive until his early retirement last September], somebody in HRI [Horse Racing Ireland], stable staff and so on. The information can come via a number of routes. Once it lands on someone’s desk in our organisation it will come in to either me or to the head of legal licencing and compliance, Dr Cliodhna Guy. Dr Guy manages the confidential hotline. The matter is dealt with unequivocally. I need to be clear about this. Sometimes information can be scribbled on the back of an envelope, it can be a recorded taped conversation and sometimes I will receive envelopes in the post with leaflets of products . . . A piece of information could come in today which, on its own, would not seem to make much sense but it might make sense in two months’ time when it is put together with another piece of information. This is how we work.
Stephen Mahon is hopelessly imprecise when it comes to times and dates, but he can pinpoint exactly when he started engaging with Lynn Hillyer: July 17, 2020. It’s on his phone: a text message at 12:50 with the brands of injectable testosterone — Sustavirol 250 and Propovirol 100 — being pumped into Trainer X’s horses; and a snatched conversation at 13:48 that ended after 51 seconds.
“She wasn’t happy I’d called her mobile,” he says. “She said she didn’t trust it and would call me back on WhatsApp.”
He’s pretty sure they met that evening at the races in Kilbeggan, and is certain they spoke in Galway, two weeks later, because he sent her a message later that night (July 29) about some unusual traffic at a yard in Kildare: “The [owner] horses goes there as well . . . X trains a lot of them . . . they [are] all tying together.”
There was a lot happening.
A week earlier he’d taken a call from John Doe about another doping product. ‘The powder’ — Equisolon — was a powerful corticosteroid designed to treat horses with respiratory problems. But not at Trainer X’s.
“It’s used like salt here!” he said. “They’re so f*****g cute they have everything covered.”
“How?”
“They ship the horse down to me in the pre-training yard. I feed him with this, and inject him with that, and Lynn Hillyer arrives: ‘Where’s the horse?’ He’s in the pre-training yard. ‘Why is he down there?’ Oh, he has a lung infection. She goes to the medical book. The vet has logged him as being on medication. Book closed. They juice him for three weeks, leave him a week for the stuff to clear, and he goes back to the training yard.”
“F**k!”
“I’m telling you Mahon, it’s f*****g unreal! But he’s sailing close to the wind.”
“What do you mean?”
“He had a winner last week . . . He didn’t want to run him, he was on the powder and hadn’t come down, but he was under pressure from the owner and didn’t think he’d win . . . he pissed in!”
Now Bolger was interested. How had the horse passed the mandatory dope test for winners?
Mahon relayed the details to Hillyer and they spoke regularly in the months that followed: “I didn’t tell her who was giving me the information but she knew it was good,” he says.
A WhatsApp message from Hillyer on August 22: “Thanks for that and the call.”
A WhatsApp message to Hillyer on September 28: “Whatever I can do to help you I will.”
Then something extraordinary happened.
It was a Friday afternoon, and John Doe had just finished lunch at Trainer X’s when an order came down to move some horses from the yard.
“Where do you want them moved?”
“To ---------.”
“Why do you want them moved?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
A list was drawn up. The horses on it were shipped out.
Twenty minutes later there was a second order: all medications were to be removed from the barns to be collected by an assistant trainer. The following morning, two inspectors from the IHRB arrived. They were expected.
It was a day later when Mahon spoke to John Doe, and almost midnight when he delivered the news in a WhatsApp exchange with Hillyer:
Mahon: “. . . They are a step ahead of you.”
Hillyer: “Thx. Speak tomorrow if you have time.”
Mahon: “That’s no problem Lynn.”
The Sunday Independent made several unsuccessful efforts to contact Lynn Hillyer last week. On Friday, IHRB communications manager Niall Cronin sent a written response to questions emailed directly to Hillyer, in which he referred to “a pre-arranged inspection relating to a change of training premises which is standard procedure.”
In October 2020, Bolger decided to go public with his concerns about “the lack of policing in racing”.
A week later he met Hillyer.
*****
7
July 8, 2021: Lynn Hillyer questioned by Fine Gael TD Paul Kehoe at an Oirechtas Committee hearing.
Q: Prior to arrangements being made for the IHRB to visit non-licensed yards, was it aware that some trainers — this information was given to me anonymously — were moving horses to non-licensed yards where they may have been getting drug treatment? Was the IHRB aware of this abuse and does it concentrate its efforts on trainers engaged in this practice?
A: I will be brief. The IHRB is aware of horse movement and we have done something about it in pursuing our authorised officer status.
Q: I ask Dr Hillyer to confirm what has been done in that regard.
A: We have authorised officers status, which means we are now tracking horses. Over the past month, if we arrived at a yard and were unable to find a horse that was supposed to be there we searched for it and found it.
Q: Have horses been moved?
A: Horses are moved all the time.
Q: Has the IHRB found anything improper?
A: No. Horses are moved all of the time for perfectly good reasons, but we are now able to follow them.
The IHRB has always been consistent in its approach to tackling doping. It was all about “taking the right sample from the right horse at the right time”.
Hillyer has always been clear on what doping means. “Cheating in sport takes many forms,” she said. “To me, somebody who tries to gain an advantage by using a medication inappropriately is cheating as much as someone who uses more traditional performance-enhancing type drugs such as EPO.”
So how did they explain Trainer X?
Mahon had delivered in spades and they hadn’t laid a glove on the trainer. And in the eight months that followed, they did not return to his yard.
Perhaps Bolger was the problem. The ink barely dried on his interview with the Racing Post when the regulators hit back.
The Irish Times on November 2: “Irish racing’s regulatory body has said up to 60 drug tests on hair samples taken from horses since the summer have been negative for prohibited substances. The IHRB, formerly the Turf Club, has confirmed that a policy of taking hair samples from animals on race-day has been in place for some months.
“The advantage of such samples in comparison to blood or urine is that they can provide a detailed historical record of drug use in a horse — including anabolic steroids — in some cases up to years after medication has been administered.
“On Sunday an IHRB spokesman said it was the first racing regulator anywhere in the world to introduce such testing and that it has been carried out across a wide range of trainers in Ireland. ‘None of the hair samples has returned results of any concern,’ he said.
“It comes on the back of weekend comments by one of the country’s top trainers, Jim Bolger, who suggested that not enough is being done to catch trainers using banned substances.”
Five days later, the numbers had gone up in The Irish Field: “The Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board has defended its drug testing procedures in the wake of comments made by trainer Jim Bolger . . . This week the IHRB told The Irish Field that it has tested approximately 80 hair samples taken from race-day winners since this year’s Galway Summer Festival.”
Two days later, on November 9, Bolger met Hillyer in Rathvilly and explained his concerns. He came away from the meeting thinking that Hillyer was “keen to do something”, but he was unsure as to whether she had “the back-up”.
All the while when Mahon was having his back and forth with Hillyer in phonecalls and WhatsApp messages, Bolger’s stock was falling among many of his fellow trainers. He was dragging the sport through the mud, they said. He was pointing the finger without producing any facts, they said.
When Bolger doubled down on his comments in a Sunday Independent interview in June 2021, he was effectively disowned by the body representing his peers. The Irish Racehorse Trainers Association (IRTA) said it was “not aware” of the concerns he had raised.
Bolger would have seen that coming. He would have understood that the default reaction for those upset by the unwelcome claims of a whistleblower is to shoot the messenger.
The problem for those upset with Bolger, however, was that he had too much respect in the sport to be shot down, or silenced. His credentials were unimpeachable — one of the greatest Irish trainers in history. Far easier to attack the credibility of a lesser training mortal, preferably one with some convenient stains on his character — a man like Stephen Mahon, say.
Lynn Hillyer, though, was grateful for Mahon’s co-operation. She said as much when questioned during the hearing that followed the inspection of his yard in Galway. “We had dealings with Mr Mahon last summer, and Mr Mahon was helpful in providing some information — I say we, [I mean] I personally. He had given us information about some anti-doping matters and bits and pieces.”
Like Bolger, Mahon had the sense that Hillyer was “keen to do something”. And he was keen to do whatever he could to help her.
He points to some of the calls and messages they exchanged in the months that followed their initial contact, such as an exchange of texts on February 21, 2021:
Mahon: “Well done. Well spoken. You have them on the run now. There is a lot of horses running bad. They are afraid to give them anything.”
Hillyer: “Good morning — well — just have to keep going!”
Mahon: “You’re doing a great job. Thank God the field is starting to level out.”
Hillyer: “The next bit of testing will take it on a level again. Thanks for your help to date.”
Mahon: “That’s good. Keep up the good work.”
Seven weeks later, IHRB inspectors rushed into his yard and Mahon’s world came crashing down around him.
