Oisin Murphy: 'I made mistakes and now I've worked hard to get back to where I want to be'

This interview by Peter Thomas was originally published in May exclusively for Racing Post Members' Club subscribers and has been made free to read for users of the Racing Post app as our Sunday Read. Peter visited the three-time champion Flat jockey to talk about his return to the saddle and his hopes for a season of redemption.

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At what point in the piece does a serial offender become a good role model? It's a dichotomy Oisin Murphy must have pondered in the course of his lengthy battle against the booze, and it sounds as though he's still pondering, digging deep into the psyche of the drinker. The difference is that now he's doing it from the right side of the divide.

"I read recently about Richard Hughes feeling invincible when he went out the night before Royal Ascot and then won three races the next day," says the man whose own demons now sit quietly in the background, no doubt ruing their missed opportunity but still hopeful. "He felt he was riding better because of his drinking. In his own mind it made him have that edge.

"He wouldn't have been pissed. Maybe he would have passed the breathalyser. It's hard to say. He wouldn't have slept much, that's for sure, but the bottom line is that when things are going well, it's all fine, but when it's out of control, like it was for me and it became for him, then it's a problem."

There's not an ounce of condemnation for those who succumb to the lure. Murphy has been down that road and he knows all its twists, turns and unrepaired potholes; he's winning the fight on points, but he knows it's going to be a lifelong struggle, so you won't hear him crowing about beating the bottle where others have lapsed.

"I'd tried and failed a few times," he admits. "No-one finds it easy. You have to decide for yourself that you've had enough and that's only the start of it."

When he crowned his comeback by winning the 1,000 Guineas on Mawj, the temptation may have been to celebrate wildly and proclaim victory. Instead, he went home, his sister cooked supper for him and his parents, and they toasted the moment alcohol-free. He knows the finishing line for an addict is a meaningless concept; he knows because another serial offender/good role model told him.

"Alcoholism is always there, inside of you," says Murphy, "and Johnny Murtagh said something that stuck with me: 'If I get through today without a drink, I'll be fine.' That's how it is."

'It was the first time in my adult life I had free choice of how to spend my time'

For a while, Oisin Murphy was famous. Famous, that is, beyond the realms of racing, which is quite rare for a jockey and hardly ever constitutes a gesture of affection. He had become the tabloids' drunken sportsman of choice – not quite in the league of Gazza, but he'd put a (plastic) glass into somebody's face in a Newmarket pub and not remembered it, so he was good for a few headlines.

There were the failed breath tests, the breaches of Covid rules and finally the 14-month ban. Assurances that he'd learned his lesson and taken responsibility for his actions began to ring a little hollow, and it became clear that the suspension needed to act as a salutary punishment if his potentially glittering career were not to fall into a ditch and expire.

As he won the Cesarewitch on Buzz in October 2021 and the Breeders' Cup Distaff on Marche Lorraine a month later, the joy was tainted by what he knew was to come and how it might impact on his future. The thing was, he wasn't an especially young man anymore. He was 26 when he began misleading the BHA about his trip to red-listed Greece – a lie that helped him win that year's jockeys' title – and many people's patience with him was wearing thin.

Luckily, there were some who kept the faith, and their advice seemed to be that 2021 had to be a watershed year, and they were there for him at what would be a challenging and crucial time.

"The day I got banned, as I was walking away from [the BHA offices at] High Holborn, my phone rang," he remembers. "It was Ralph Beckett. He said if I wanted to come and ride out or stay while I was off, I should come down. He told me to take the punishment, don't appeal, enjoy the free time and come back riding even better. I remember it vividly – it was solid advice."

Murphy took Beckett's advice and, if you were wondering why you hadn't heard much from him as he made his comeback on February 16 at Chelmsford – riding a winner on Jupiter Express in a Class 5 handicap – it wasn't that he'd fallen down the plughole, just that he'd decided to 'keep his head down'.

He wasn't in the mood for interviews, after the battering he'd taken during his wild years – some of it warranted, much of it purely for titillation – so he'd stepped away from the limelight, and where it might have been tempting to sit in a darkened room and lick his wounds, he decided to 'busy' himself better.

"It was the first time in my adult life that I'd had free choice of how to spend my time," he says, looking back at a year of growing positivity. "It was impossible to be level when I was younger. I'd work very hard in the mornings, very hard in the afternoons, go drinking, get very little sleep, the same every day, and there was never a period of quiet.

"Being off gave me that period of rebalancing, but it wasn't easy because there had been a terrible amount of self-guilt, particularly when I'd failed the breathalysers. Maybe the fact that I was putting on a brave face, going racing every day and not crying in the paddock, maybe people thought I wasn't apologetic for my errors, but I genuinely was and I had to just keep chipping away from day to day to make it better."

Fortunately, his principal backers – old ally Andrew Balding and the Qatar Racing team of Sheikh Fahad Al Thani – led the way in backing him, and with so much to come back for, he kept his eye on the ball and himself in the picture.

Oisin Murphy ponders his turbulent past and bright future at home in Upper LambournCredit: Edward Whitaker

"I was very busy for that year, flat out, between showjumping, going to counselling, being in the gym, trips to Ireland – there were no days when I had nothing to do. That happened a little bit naturally but also thanks to people who wanted to keep me busy.

"I made sure to ride out as much as possible and follow the racing, and the groundwork I put in helped. It was about the desire to be proud of myself for my inner strength. I wanted to walk into the winner's enclosure and feel good about it, so every day I had a plan in place."

We all know what they say about best-laid plans, though, so it was good for Murphy that, chastened by previous failures to bring his dependency under control, he allowed himself to be guided by people who could steer him straight.

"The difference was that this time I had the time and the help," he explains. "I have a very good counsellor who I speak to twice a week. She understands me, but you still have to decide for yourself.

"I used to go to AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] meetings, but I stopped a year and a half ago. I found a lot of great people there, and some of the stories were quite amusing, particularly from guys who had been sober for 20 years and could look back at their journey and smile; but it was large groups of people with lots of distractions where the speaking can be done for you. In a one-on-one environment you have to speak, and that suited me better."

As our conversation moves away from the deceit, the guilt and the reckoning, Murphy visibly relaxes. He's breathing cleaner air now, approaching life with a rediscovered sense of purpose, the impish smile back on his face as he lounges on the sofa at his home at the foot of the gallops in Upper Lambourn – but he's under no illusions that what he's achieved is in any way the end of the process.

There's a sense that he's been able to make reparations to his parents – "it must have been terrible for them, watching all this happen from a small place like County Kerry, where everybody follows sport" – and that Mawj's win was somehow the result he needed before he was happy to put his head back above the parapet, but he knows that one thrilling race, one productive season, means little in the grand scheme of a recovering alcoholic's life.

They don't call themselves 'recovering' rather than 'recovered' for no good reason, as the three-time champion explains, slowly, carefully: "For the first few months sober, you have to catch up on all the sleep you've missed for the last ten years, allow all the toxins to get out of your body, and then approach it with a fresh mind. Until then I don't think you can make any decisions or think too far ahead.

"Even when things are going the right way, you don't talk about progress. The BHA asked me about that, but the people that ask have obviously never needed counselling and don't understand it. There's no performance appraisal, you just approach it with honesty and try to get as much out of it as you can.

"You can't measure it, but I could leave a one-hour session, real or virtual, and feel the energy, the stress and pressure you've released on somebody who understands what you've been through, and it's a great feeling."

The Foxes (right): Dante winner at YorkCredit: Edward Whitaker

'We were thrilled – and I'm really looking forward to him'

From one great feeling to another: Murphy's fruitful Dante meeting at York presented the rehabilitated rider with a few plums, not least the Balding-trained The Foxes, whose success in the Dante Stakes turned him into a live Derby contender.

"We were thrilled with him," he enthuses, "and he obviously improved from the Craven. This time I counted for a few seconds before I asked him to go and he ran on like a really exciting horse.

"He's easy to ride, relaxes brilliantly and you couldn't ask for a nicer character. They've done a great job with him at home and he's very chilled, so I'm really looking forward to him.

"We won't know until raceday if he'll stay the extra two furlongs – because he'd do most of his work over six – but it was a truly run Dante and it'll be nice finding out."

As part of the preparation for the Oaks, Murphy rode Running Lion in public exercise at Epsom and wasn't put off at all by what he felt. "She relaxed nicely and felt in super shape. I resisted the temptation to ask her for maximum effort but she'd clearly come out of her Pretty Polly win in tremendous shape," he says.

"She's another who we won't know if she'll get the trip until Epsom, but I like her a lot and she's like The Foxes, she'll go on anything from the soft side of good to decent quick ground."

Quite apart from more Classic success, Murphy has one major objective in a season he hopes will be remembered for the right reasons.

"My big ambition is to stay out of the stewards' room, because the whip is a major concern," he bristles. "Are the public and the media any happier now that the stick rules have changed and we're one stroke less, or has it just created more jobs for people at the BHA to scrutinise these things?

"The penalty for going over isn't a problem – that's enough of a deterrent and you won't see many people breaking the number at Royal Ascot – but there are so many other hidden rules, like four days of my livelihood if a steward decides they don't like the way I tapped a horse down the shoulder with my hands on the reins.

"Who thought this was a good idea for the image of racing? There will be more offences and more media coverage – and for what reason?

"There's an agenda that we have to make positive change all the time, but I think the best way of racing thriving over the next few years is people being able to afford to go racing and when they go, to enjoy it, or for those that can't afford to go to be able to watch it on TV for not too much money."

Wariness of the 'beaks' notwithstanding, this is a season that can already be hailed as a triumph for a man who has taken on what is surely the biggest challenge of his life to date – even bigger than fighting for his life after being born 11 weeks premature – and is currently proving more than a match for it.

He's looking towards a bright future – even if he declares himself happy to leave William Buick and Tom Marquand to fight out this year's jockeys' title – but moments of introspection are never far away; he's under no illusions that he has the game cracked, but he's happy to take the positives from his year at the psychological coalface.

"I was cantering to post at Longchamp the other day and thinking to myself, 'Why regret any of it?' I can't go back and change it," he shrugs. "When I was younger, I worked myself very hard to achieve things that meant an awful lot to me, and it took over my life. It was a big burden, and at times I couldn't cope with it. That's the reality.

"I didn't want to make any mistakes but I made them and I served a pretty big punishment, and now I've worked hard to get back to where I want to be."

Which isn't to say he feels he's performing at his peak.

"There have been afternoons when I felt like I could win on anything," he insists, "but some days you can walk on water and other days you can't, and there's an acceptance there now that maybe wasn't there in the past."

You might think that Classic success on Mawj, on one of those 'walking on water' days, and the prospect of more on The Foxes and Running Lion at Epsom next weekend, would serve as Murphy's strongest motivation, but he's a horseman above all and gives a horseman's answer when pressed.

"My motivation is that I love riding," he says. "This morning I rode out five horses and that's where the dream always begins, with a horse that could go to the next level.

"I've ridden so many that have gone on to big things and I've predicted it, which is always a great feeling, and although I was riding out when I was banned, I wasn't able to partner those horses at the races, and it made me appreciate the times when I was able to ride big winners all over the world."

Surrey may not count as all over the world, but it would be an apt place to resume the journey.

More Sunday Reads:

Epsom: a world-famous racing town, an inspiring place to train - but where are all the horses? 

Martin Pipe: 'I wanted to commit suicide. I really did, knowing the world was against me' 

Shark Hanlon: 'I'm a nice, gentle shark - but I don't think the bookies like to see me coming!' 

Leonna Mayor: 'People have no idea what my life has been like - I've no reason to be ashamed' 

Sir Henry Cecil remembered: 'The public have always been fantastic to me and I really don't know why' 

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