‘It was a big move at my stage of life’: Patrick Neville on leaving Ireland to shake up horse racing’s elite

Like most of us at some point in our lives, Patrick Neville started to wonder a few years ago whether the time might be right for a complete change of scenery. Unlike most of us, he did something about it.

Neville had been training race horses in his native Ireland for 15 years and watching on as the serious money and firepower became concentrated in an ever-decreasing number of stables. Winners were never easy to come by, but from the autumn of 2017 the annual trickle of four or five had all but dried up. Even getting a run for a lowly rated horse was becoming a struggle.

And so, as he puts it, it was time “to up sticks and go”. Two years later, as he prepares to run The Real Whacker against Britain’s best chasers in the King George VI Chase at Kempton Park on Tuesday, it looks like the best decision he made.

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“It was a big move at my stage of life,” he says. “Fifty years of age, it wasn’t easy.

“We were getting results but we weren’t getting the real owners into the game, and it’s hard to compete with the big boys.

“They were taking up all the owners and we were finding it hard with low-graded horses, we were struggling to even get them into races. We had one horse, we couldn’t get a run into him for six or eight weeks, and owners would think it was my fault when it wasn’t. It’s just the system over there. There’s too many horses for so little racing.

“So I started coming over [to the UK] and I had a few winners at Perth and Hexham and places like that, and we just saw that we were able to run our horses. Then someone said to me: ‘Would you think about staying over?’”

Shortly afterwards, Neville pitched up in Yorkshire with a handful of horses, including The Real Whacker, bought as an athletic but unbroken three-year-old in 2019. While waiting for a British trainer’s licence he worked as an assistant to Ann Duffield, who took the official credit for The Real Whacker’s four-race career over hurdles. By the time he came to jump a fence in November 2022, however, Neville had his licence and a yard-sharing agreement with Duffield that gave him a vital foothold on British turf.

Four months and three races later for The Real Whacker later, Neville once again found himself up against “the big boys” – and beating them on the sport’s biggest stage. The Real Whacker made every yard of the running in the Brown Advisory Novice Chase at Cheltenham and held the late charge of Gordon Elliott’s Gerri Colombe, the 5-4 favourite, by a short head.

For Neville, who retains a share in the seven-year-old, the triumph was particularly special as his co-owners include Davie Mann, a lifelong friend who grew up on the farm next door to the Nevilles in Ballysteen in County Limerick. “He was a really athletic horse when they walked him, but physically very light,” Neville says, “so he needed a bit of time and I minded him along the way, and he’s rewarded us.

“I’ve sold bits and pieces of him to keep going, and Davie has been there from day one. He’s a real character, he’s been over during the week with an ITV film crew filming us for a few days and he just loves it all. He’s only run eight times and won four for us, so we’d be hoping that he improves another little bit again.”

A small yard taking on the giants of the game always adds romance to a race such as the King George, which has been won by either Paul Nicholls, Nicky Henderson or Willie Mullins in 15 of the past 17 years. In Bravemansgame, Shishkin and Allaho respectively they are expected to field the only three runners in Tuesday’s race at shorter odds than The Real Whacker.

Between them the powerhouse yards have saddled nearly 250 winners this season, from about 900 runners. Neville, though, is undaunted, despite having had to wait until last week for his first winner of the campaign, from 28 runners in all. Nor is he concerned that The Real Whacker was pulled up on his only start this season, in the Paddy Power Gold Cup at Cheltenham in November.

“Whacker is in unbelievable form,” Neville says of Sam Twiston‑Davies’s mount. “He’s a horse that takes a run every year [to hit peak form] and the man on his back knows the horse and knew things weren’t right, so he looked after him.

“People say to me: ‘Have you seen the price he is?’and I say, they don’t know him, they’re only going by his last run. It’s even helped a bit because it took a bit of the pressure off us. We don’t mind going in as the quiet horse.”

Ireland’s jumps trainers are enjoying a period of historic pre‑eminence at Cheltenham’s Festival meeting in March, and the irony of The Real Whacker’s success nine months ago counting towards the total of 10 (from 28) trained in Britain is not lost on the man from County Limerick who upped sticks and left.

“We didn’t take any notice of them last year,” he says. “He met them all and he beat them. Wille Mullins put in three or four [at Cheltenham] to try and front-run with him and it didn’t work, and we beat Gordon Elliott’s horse, thank God. I didn’t mind what flag I went under, once I’d won the race.”