Mick Kinane: 'It doesn't matter whether you win or lose - until you lose'

This article was first published in September 2019 to mark the tenth anniversary of Sea The Stars' brilliant victory in the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe.It has now been republished to coincide with the 63rd birthday of legendary jockey Mick Kinane.

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It used to be that any year ending with a nine saw the name MJ Kinane inscribed on the Qatar Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe roll of honour. Sepia-tinted Longchamp folklore.

In 1989, Kinane’s Parisian swoop on Carroll House proved the catalyst for a seminal career that would see the rider single-mindedly transform the perception of Irish-based Flat jockeys on the global stage. It was the wider world’s first real glimpse of MJK’s unadulterated class.

A decade later, his sublime coup aboard Montjeu, after that enthralling duel with El Condor Pasa, cemented a Coolmore alliance that witnessed both parties soar to the peak of their considerable powers. A victory suitably defined by both style and substance.

Then, in 2009 Sea The Stars delivered one of modern Flat racing’s most iconic moments when securing his own legacy, simultaneously crowning a glorious autumnal swansong for the man tasked with negotiating his destiny. Farewells don’t come any more enthralling.

Each Arc triumph was a landmark of its own for Kinane, but 2019 won’t be similarly punctuated. That much proved beyond even the irresistible overture of Pat Smullen, who reached out to his predecessor as Dermot Weld’s stable jockey to partake in the spectacular success that was the Cancer Trials Ireland charity race at the Curragh on Irish Champions Weekend.

“I’m 60 now and I haven’t ridden out for over a year,” Kinane explains of his decision to turn down Smullen, whose initiative raised a mind-boggling figure in excess of €2.5 million.

“I gave it a lot of consideration and I was happy that it was the right thing to do until Pat was ruled out of the race. Then I kind of wished I had, but you have to be sensible as well, and we did help out with the auction.

"The whole thing was a tremendous success and it just shows you how the racing industry, as much as we often might differ, can rally for a cause.”

The 13-time champion is speaking during a break from inspecting yearlings at this week’s Tattersalls September Sale, where he signed for the top lots on both days on behalf of the Hong Kong Jockey Club. His link with the Chinese territory dates back to the early 1990s, when he plied his trade there every winter.

Mick Kinane, pictured signing for one of the top lots for the Hong Kong Jockey Club at this week's September Yearling Sale at TattersallsCredit: Patrick McCann

“It keeps me humble,” he once responded when asked why he competed in Hong Kong against rivals and in races that were ultimately inferior to the level at which he operated at home. Kinane remains reassuringly unpretentious, although beneath those bushy eyebrows a withering intensity still simmers.

Happily, a nostalgic raid on the memory bank proves that mischievous glint in his eye endures more forcefully.

Kinane’s Arc story in three acts

Act 1 – breaking the mould

The Ireland that Mick Kinane was operating out of in the 1980s was very different from the one we know now.

Within racing’s realm, it was a time when a large percentage of the big races habitually went for export and, even when they didn’t, exotic names such as Lester Piggott, Cash Asmussen, Steve Cauthen, Pat Eddery or Walter Swinburn were flown in to get the job done.

The prevailing wisdom had it that you had to go away to come back. Kinane was keenly aware of that perception and went about dismantling it.

It was a slow grind, and it took time to convince even the likes of his old ally Weld that you didn’t need to look elsewhere for a safe pair of hands on foreign expeditions.

Eventually, Kinane’s domestic Classic haul began to grow, and winning Sir Henry Cecil’s backing for Alydaress in the 1989 Irish Oaks represented significant progress. Kinane had also set about building his own international portfolio in places like India and Italy.

So when Michael Jarvis needed a replacement for Swinburn on Irish Champion Stakes contender Carroll House, the horse’s Italian owner Antonio Balzarini needed little introduction to Kinane.

Opportunity was about to knock. First at Phoenix Park, then far beyond.

Kinane, pictured with Carroll House after their 1989 Irish Champion Stakes victoryCredit: Caroline Norris

“In the Irish Champion, the ground was firm and he hung like a gate,” Kinane recalls. “I was just able to get him there on the line, and when we headed for the Arc the ground was good to firm at declaration time.

“I was going over there thinking, this is going to be a terrible ride, how am I even going to keep him straight? Now, we didn’t have any weather apps in those days, so when we got to Paris we weren’t up to speed – turns out there had been a deluge overnight. It had turned testing and we didn’t even know it.

“In the jocks’ room we started to go through the list of who would handle the ground, and we were cancelling everything out. Next thing, I’m on the shortlist, so I went from thinking I had no chance to suddenly thinking, ‘Wow, this race has turned on its head’. I knew Carroll House grew a leg on soft ground, and that’s what he did.”

Connections had to survive a lengthy stewards’ inquiry after Carroll House glanced across the Aga Khan’s Behera in the straight. It was a fraught wait but the verdict confirmed the placings. As well as Kinane’s arrival.

Carroll House surges to victory under Kinane in the 1989 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe at LongchampCredit: Mark Cranham

“Fortunately, Behera got up to be second by a short head, otherwise I would have been thrown out,” he recalls.

That observation diverts the conversation back to the future. The French authorities recently abandoned the policy of giving the benefit of the doubt to the victim of such transgressions. Kinane isn’t a fan.

“There was no grey area in France before,” he insists. “If you interfered with a horse’s placing you went behind it.”

Did that mean you rode accordingly? “F*****g right you did. For me, I always think clarity is better than the lack of it.”

So what of this month’s Prix du Moulin controversy – would someone in Ryan Moore’s position have done more to keep Circus Maximus straight if the rules were as they used to be?

“Yeah, I’d say they would have. You should take corrective action, no matter what. Like, it’s careless if you're allowing it to happen – that’s intentional. And if you don’t know, you should.”

The counter-argument goes that Moore changed his whip into the correct hand and if he stopped riding it could have compromised his chance.

“I’ll never forget trying that against one of the first professional stewards in Hong Kong,” Kinane remembers with a smile.

“I said, ‘I changed my whip,’ and he told me, ‘I thought you steer a horse with your hands’. That put me back in my box – I never played that card again!”

Carroll House’s victory in Paris was a turning point. Kinane promptly became the go-to man for many of the most decorated trainers, in 1990 winning a 2,000 Guineas on Tirol for Richard Hannon snr and the King George on Belmez for Cecil and Sheikh Mohammed.

When the Kentucky Kid, Steve Cauthen, retired in 1992, Kinane was the man Sheikh Mohammed went after. His head was turned, but the offer wasn’t substantial enough for him to uproot his young family. “I just didn’t think they wanted me enough,” he says simply.

Months later, Kinane plundered his first Derby aboard Cecil’s Commander In Chief for Khalid Abdullah before ending 1993 with that immortal Melbourne Cup success on Vintage Crop.

He had been spectacularly vindicated in spurning the Dubai prince’s advances. Now Kinane was the one taking on the world, and he was doing it on his own terms.

Come 1994, he agreed a retainer to ride for Sheikh Mohammed on the big days when he wasn’t required at home. Again, his terms. The best of both worlds.

“Everyone goes through those periods where you have to get yourself on the next rung of the ladder,” he reflects. “And when it comes your way, you’ve got to be able to take it.”

Act 2 – the master of cool

By 1997, Aidan O’Brien, still just an emerging force on the Flat for all that he had been John Magnier’s chosen one to succeed his namesake Vincent in Ballydoyle, was also utilising Kinane’s expertise outside of Ireland. A year later he succeeded Christy Roche as the de facto number one.

Soon, Magnier and Michael Tabor looked to get him on anything they could, including when taking Asmussen off Montjeu so Kinane could ride John Hammond’s rising star in his Prix Niel Arc prep.

Asmussen had ridden the talented colt in each of his six previous starts, latterly in that devastating Irish Derby romp. By then, though, it was Kinane who did the usurping.

“I think Michael Tabor wanted me to ride the horse and I wasn’t going to say no. I didn’t ask questions – I was just happy to get the call.”

In the Arc Montjeu showed he had the constitution to match his quality. “John Hammond did an exceptionally good job with him,” Kinane says. “He was a horse with loads of temperament but he had to channel it. At his best he was an imperious racehorse.

Montjeu begins to get on top of El Condor Pasa en route to Arc glory in 1999Credit: Edward Whitaker

“El Condor Pasa was a hell of a horse and he took off in front in the Arc. He had got away. It took me a while to rein him in, and only a horse with Montjeu’s courage was capable of doing it.”

In the circumstances, at that early point in his Coolmore association, Kinane knew he had to deliver. And few performed so calmly when expectation was at its zenith.

“They have high expectations and they're trying to make stallions,” he says of the Coolmore conglomerate. “Remember, it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose – until you lose.

“That’s sport in a nutshell. The stakes were high, but that’s why they paid me. It was my job to get it done.”

There were difficult days, not least with Giant’s Causeway and Rock Of Gibraltar at the Breeders’ Cup, but the partnership flourished right up until the end of 2003. From The Iron Horse and The Rock to Galileo and Johannesburg, it was an epoch-defining era for the Rosegreen establishment.

“It’s amazing,” Kinane ponders.

“All through the years when you walk into the ring on those big days, you meet kings and queens and princes, the wealthiest people in the world, and they’ll be white with nerves. And you can’t be.

"So it’s a tense, emotional environment, and nothing lasts forever. Eventually, the relationship with Aidan broke down. But that’s the nature of it. Sport is very fickle and racing is very fickle, and we all moved on.”

Act 3 – swansong written in the Stars

Kinane didn’t have to wait long for the next equine conveyance equal to his expectations. He and John Oxx hit the ground running in 2004, spearheaded by Azamour plundering the St James’s Palace Stakes and Irish Champion Stakes.

When 2008 rolled around, though, pickings had got slim. For the first time in nearly 20 years Kinane drew a blank at the highest level.

Then they found a diamond in the rough. The Cape Cross colt Sea The Stars, who was having his third start when winning the Beresford Stakes at the Curragh, was of another constellation.

“We knew he was special from what he was doing at home,” Kinane relays as his face lifts. “What he was showing, for such a big, immature horse, was incredible. We could never get anything to go quick enough for him.

“I was in the twilight of my career, and if he hadn’t come along I mightn’t have stayed going, so he arrived at an unbelievable time.”

An international sensation who plied his trade from an Irish base, Sea The Stars was the equine embodiment of Kinane’s life work.

He was keen, uncomplicated, brilliant and reliable, he wasn’t flashy and his three-year-old campaign is a neat encapsulation of their contributions to the sport.

Come Longchamp in October the fairytale finale was all that anyone, save for the opposition, wanted. “I remember being in the parade ring and they clapped him into the ring,” Kinane recalls with some amusement.

Sea The Stars and Mick Kinane gallop to immortality in the 2009 Prix de l'Arc de TriompheCredit: Edward Whitaker

“I said to John, ‘I hope they are clapping him in ten minutes!’ Because everybody had turned up to see him win, not lose, so the expectation was huge. That’s part of the job though. Again, it's what I was paid to do.”

It’s an assertion that sounds rather glib, but maybe that was Kinane’s gift.

To seize their destiny Sea The Stars had to overcome an unhelpful draw in stall six, and there was a bit of wrestling early on. It wasn’t straightforward but it never looked in any doubt either, Kinane extricating his willing mount out of a pocket before they surged home for a climax of epic proportions.

“When he jumped initially he was fine, but Pat Smullen had missed the start on one of the pacemakers and came flying by me after about three-quarters of a furlong, so Sea The Stars wanted to go after him,” Kinane recalls. “I had to get my fellow to come back but he always looked to be freer than he actually felt to me.

Kinane returns to a rapturous crowd after Sea The Stars' Longchamp successCredit: Edward Whitaker

“I needed the run in the straight and I remember following Olivier Peslier on Vision D’Etat. A gap appeared ahead of him and I was able to get there before he got it. Sea The Stars was able to turn it on like that," Kinane says, clicking his fingers, "but that was the first time I really had to ask him to.

“He was a phenomenal racehorse and he had no weaknesses really.”

Beyond the bright lights, the intervening years have been kind to Kinane. The HKJC position has thrust him back into a public role for the first time since his retirement a decade ago, but he was never idle.

He has long had a select breeding operation at his Kildare home and already produced a Derby winner in Authorized, the 2007 hero whom he bred courtesy of a nomination to none other than Montjeu.

“I stay busy and like to be active,” says Kinane, whose father Tommy also remains hale and hearty.

Then he quips: “And you're a long way from being retired at 50 anyway – you have to work hard at not working for a living.”

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