Actually Shergar has had a terrible 2013 so far. First he was downgraded by international handicappers from 140 to 136 to accommodate Frankel’s all-high time ranking, then he turned up in countless burger jokes.
This is a further Shergar article from The Mail
Shergar's head with that silken white flash poked out of his box until Jim Fitzgerald patted him, whispered soothing words, and shut him away for the night. An infra-red light shone warmth on the back that had carried Walter Swinburn to a 10-length victory in the 1981 Derby.
‘You need a telescope to see the rest,’ Peter Bromley told radio listeners that warm afternoon at Epsom. And Swinburn still swears that Shergar had so much in reserve that the winning margin could have been twice as majestic.
But on this night — 30 years ago to the day — the bronze letters spelling the champion’s name over the door were chilled by icy winds which carried hail across The Curragh, County Kildare, to the nearby Ballymany Stud. There Shergar spent his post-racing life as the world’s most profitable sire. He had ‘covered’ 35 paying customers in his first season, at £80,000 per mare, and the second was soon to begin.
On Wednesday, February 8, 1983, having locked the box door, Fitzgerald, Shergar’s groom, walked to the house he shared with his wife Madge and their family. Jim had been a stable boy since he was 14. Aged 53, he was caring for an animal worth £10million even then.
As the Fitzgeralds settled in for the night, snow fell and fog spread across the heart of Ireland’s tight-knit horse community. Nothing stirred. Such were the quiet beginnings to the night of the most remarkable racing tale ever told.
At about 8.30pm, the stud’s unguarded gate opened. A Ford Granada pulling a horsebox, a van and another car came through. There was a knock at Fitzgerald’s house. His elder son Bernard was closest. As he opened the door, he saw a dark figure. Bernard turned to fetch his father and was stunned by a blow to his back. Jim hurried forward to be met by a pistol barrel pointing at his heart. The IRA.
History: How the Daily Mail reported it
‘We’re here for Shergar,’ he was told, his blood turning as cold as the night. ‘We want £2m for him.’ Three kidnappers, all masked and armed, piled in. Four members of the gang waited outside. Jim was led at gunpoint into the stable yard. Under the threat of death, he helped entice Shergar into the raiders’ horsebox. His wife and children were held in the house. ‘Call the police and you all die,’ they were warned.
The IRA took Jim away, driving him around the back roads of Kildare before releasing him on an empty road, shaking but alive.
The Fitzgeralds now live just two miles from the Ballymany Stud in a modest end-of-terrace house. Jim is still in robust health and, when the weather allows, he walks up to the stud gates — now electrified, of course — to look out over the yard that holds so many memories.
‘I forget a lot of things these days but I never forget anything about the taking of the horse,’ he told Sportsmail this week. ‘It’s like it was yesterday. It was a dreadful thing. All the searching for him, the police hunts, everything and them asking me questions, I knew it would do no good. I knew those people would never be able to handle him. You could see they didn’t know what they were doing. He’d only last a few days with them before they killed him.
‘Only because I was there did he go into the horsebox. He would never have done that for them. But of course they made me bring him in and he trusted me and he walked in for me. I feel terrible about that.
‘When the kidnappers told me to get out of the car, I walked to the nearest village and rang my brother, Des, and asked him to come and collect me.
‘He never asked why or what I was doing in that village and, even when I was in the car with him, I never told him what had happened until he was dropping me at my door.
‘He said, “Jim, you better ring someone”. So I rang my manager (the Frenchman Ghislain Drion). Up until that point, I was frightened for my family because the kidnappers had left a gunman with them. When I got back, he was long gone.
‘My youngest, Gillian, was only coming up on six at the time and my (younger) boy Patrick was not yet eight. The effect it had on them must have been terrible. Imagine seeing men with guns come into the house and take your father away. We never talk about it at home but I think about it a lot.’
Jim still has a framed picture of Shergar at the top of the stairs. Every night when he goes to bed he looks over fondly at the handsome horse. Now he takes the picture down and holds it in his lap. ‘Ah, he was a lovely animal, a noble horse and an intelligent one,’ says Jim, a big, simple, gentle man with a well-defined long face under his white hair. ‘He never gave us a day’s trouble when he was with us but with those IRA fellas, I’d say it was a different story.
‘He was the best horse I ever saw. One of the best days of my life was when he arrived here and we paraded him through the village and everyone came out and cheered. The saddest was when they took him. Then to learn what they did to him. It was a terrible, terrible business.’
What precisely they did to him, as Jim puts it, is a riddle that has never been entirely solved.
Word of the kidnapping spread cautiously from the Fitzgeralds to stable bosses to government ministers, so that by the time the police were informed it was eight hours after that fateful knock on the door.
Soon Shergar and Jim were headline news all over the world. The local hotel was full of reporters, while the country’s roads were packed with horseboxes being driven to that day’s Goff racehorse sale. The IRA knew that would be the case.
The bungling police investigation was headed by trilby-wearing Chief Superintendent James ‘Spud’ Murphy of the Kildare County Garda. ‘We have got a good description, but what we haven’t got is a clue,’ he once said. To further ridicule, he announced he was turning to diviners, clairvoyants and psychics.
Rival theories about the kidnapping soon surfaced. The New Orleans mafia were cited by some. Colonel Gaddafi by others. Adding to the confusion, police in Dublin worked against police in County Kildare, refusing to share information.
Amid this turmoil, the kidnappers began negotiating a ransom with the Aga Khan. Their intention: to raise money for arms.
But the approach revealed an oversight by the IRA: the Aga Khan, the billionaire spiritual leader of 15 million Ismaili Muslims, no longer entirely owned the horse. He had syndicated Shergar for £10m and was now one of 35 co-owners. How, practically, could they all agree to pay up? That was leaving aside the dangerous precedent that would have been set by giving in to kidnappers.
So the gang were left with a horse they could not handle (a vet who was supposed to help pulled out after his wife got wind of what was happening) and from which they now knew funds could not be raised.
Two serious theories have emerged to explain what happened next. The first was contained in a book by Sean O’Callaghan, an IRA killer turned informer. He claimed Shergar soon became agitated, injured a leg and ‘was killed within days . . . even though the IRA kept up the pretence he was alive’.
He made it sound almost like a mercy killing. But in a Sunday Telegraph investigation five years ago, an ‘impeccable’ IRA source said O’Callaghan was not privy to the details of Shergar’s final hours — and the truth was more gruesome.
If this account is to be believed, the end came on the fourth night after the kidnapping and not because the horse was badly injured. The great Shergar, so gentle and calm, was machine-gunned to death in a stable by one of his IRA handlers. ‘The horse even slipped on its own blood,’ the source said. ‘There was a lot of cussing and swearing because the horse would not die. It was a very bloody death.’
By that point, Kevin Mallon, the convicted murderer identified by O’Callaghan as the mastermind of the operation, was under surveillance. The Garda were swarming everywhere. So Mallon ordered the horse shot dead. An animal lover, of all things, Mallon now keeps and races greyhounds.
The bloody shots were seemingly fired in County Leitrim, the bandit land across which arms were smuggled north in those grim days of the Troubles.
Shergar’s body has never been found. But according to Sean Feeley, the Garda chief superintendent who took over the investigation into Shergar’s disappearance in 1995, an informant came forward to say the horse was buried in bog and woodland on the Leitrim/Longford border.
Revealing the development for the first time, Feeley said: ‘The peace process was in full swing and it was in the spirit of those times that we were given this information. We investigated thoroughly. The informant said the horse was buried in an area where a lot of cattle were buried. We had no definite area. Our searches never came to anything, then the informant went to ground. I still believe that’s where he ended up.’
Feeley thinks men like Martin McGuinness, now the deputy first minister of Northern Ireland but a former member of the IRA, should admit that the IRA captured Shergar 30 years ago today and say sorry for his ‘appalling death’. Not to mention reveal where the great horse is buried.
‘They should apologise,’ said Feeley. ‘It’s the very least they could do. You think when you see them there in the Dail (the Irish parliament) that they could hold up their hands and admit what they did. It was a dastardly thing. It was an appalling death.
‘They could tell us where he is buried and DNA tests could be done and then the owners could finally be paid out their insurance policy for him.’
Stan Cosgrove, Shergar’s vet and a syndicate member, is now 86. Speaking a few days ago, he said: ‘It’s like talking about your mother who died 30 years ago. It’s too painful. I think they will find the grave in 50 years when all the people who took him are dead. Every time some bones are found, it’s Shergar. I’ve seen some of these skulls and they were only two-year-olds. I do not believe I will ever know where Shergar is buried.’
Cosgrove has spent £80,000 trying to ascertain the whereabouts of his horse, partly because the Norwich Union insurance pay-out depended on proof, first, of the horse’s death and, secondly, of it occurring before the policy expired.
The file into Shergar’s disappearance remains open.
In the lobby of a London hotel, the jockey who rode this wonder horse to that unforgettable Derby success allows himself to smile. Walter Swinburn, now 51, happily recited all the old stories again.
‘People apologise for asking me about Shergar but I never get bored of talking about him,’ says Swinburn, who learned of Shergar’s death when the BBC World Service called him while he was away in Mumbai. He initially thought it was a hoax and phoned trainer Sir Michael Stoute for grim confirmation.
‘The IRA destroyed families’ lives, so what’s a horse to them?’ he added. ‘They saw the opportunity, they saw the money, they saw the headlines.
‘I was just very blessed to come along and ride Shergar. I was lucky to fall on top of a horse and not need to do anything to win.
‘I always say that the ending can never spoil the great memories.’
:lol:
