‘My whole body has been broken’: Davy Russell on bust-ups, Grand National glories and a life in the saddle
Maye Xxjob Vickie Weekend 16/12/2023 Attn
Davy Russell’s wife, Edelle, sometimes brings out a skeleton that resembles his battered body during her anatomy classes at school. The skeleton looks as if it has contracted measles because it is covered in red dots, with each dot marking a bone that Russell broke during his 21 years as a professional jump jockey. He had a remarkable career where he became Ireland’s champion jockey three times, won the Grand National twice, as well as the Gold Cup, while also being infamous for punching a horse and a rival rider before he finally stopped racing in 2023.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Russell says as he confirms that the skeleton is still wheeled out at Edelle’s school down the road from where he and I have lunch in his kitchen in Youghal, a small town less than an hour from Cork. “When there’s a quiz on the telly and they ask where is the ulna bone, your fibula or tibia, I know every answer.”
Russell puts down his delicious chicken sandwich and chews thoughtfully when I ask how many bones he broke while racing. “A lot,” he says cheerfully as he knows that he still won many more races. “Pretty much my whole body has been broken – both my eye sockets, both sides of my face, my neck, lower back, ribs. My arms.
“You can see the bolts in one arm and if I hit it now, in the wrong place, oh Jesus! I bruised my heart, punctured my lungs, broke both fibulas and tibias, dislocated both ankles. My toes. I broke my big toe when it got caught in the railings.”
The 45-year-old holds up his hands. “I had loads of bother with these bones. As you can see, there’re still lumps and bumps on them. I dislocated both thumbs. Then there were the cuts and stitches. So there was a stage when I could have been a model, but … ” Russell’s weathered face lights up with a grin as he looks up from his poor old hands. “Fucking glove modelling, maybe.”
We’re deep into the second hour of our interview and, while Russell has revisited his career with the same compelling detail that illuminates his new autobiography, it’s time for him to consider the broken neck that nearly paralysed him.
In October 2020, while racing in the Munster National on a horse called Doctor Duffy, Russell suffered a horrible fall as he was driven head-first into the ground.
“I knew there was something wrong,” Russell says, “so I didn’t move. I told the doctor on the track it felt as if a firework had exploded inside my thumb. It was a different pain. You know when you hit your funny bone – that was the kind of pain I had all the time. I was trying to move my bum or my legs and just couldn’t.”
He had broken one vertebrae, crushed another and dislocated a third in the type of accident that leaves 90% of its victims paralysed for life.
“The doctors explained that nine times out of 10 the break goes inwards and touches the spinal cord. If that happens you’re fucked. I was in the 10% where my break went out. Now, when I see a parking space reserved for wheelchairs I remember how lucky I am.”
Russell shows me a photograph on his phone that captures his agony in hospital. He is flat on his back while his head is covered by a metal contraption attached to a hook and a pulley. “That’s the halo on my head,” he says, “where they had to drill a bolt into each side of my skull.
“I was awake as they were drilling and it’s like when you close a bottle of baby oil with a click. That was the halo – click, click, click and this pressure was squeezing my head. I’m trying to be the real hard jockey but they’re squeezing my skull. I’m starting to wince and the doctor’s saying: ‘Give him another one, and another.’
“Then it really started. See the string? At the bottom was a bag of water. They keep adding to the weight of the water so it’s pulling and stretching the vertebrae until the dislocated disc would be pushed back into place. There was excruciating pain in my hips and I was roaring. I told the male nurse: ‘I can’t handle the pain.’ He said: ‘You’re going to have to stop shouting because when the pain is not in your neck you are very lucky.’”
As he adjusted to the torture, Russell eventually turned to the surgeon. “I said: ‘Doc, I’ve broken my neck but will I ride a horse again?’ He said: ‘Why not? Your neck will be stronger than before.’”
Russell was 42 when, after 11 months in rehab, he got back on a racehorse. “The only fear was if I’d lost my bottle. But I was the same rider as always. It’s like anything in life. The only person stopping you is yourself.”
He also overcame many psychological wounds. The most grievous occurred 11 years ago this month when Michael O’Leary, who runs Ryanair and the immensely powerful Gigginstown racing operation, replaced Russell as his principal jockey with Bryan Cooper. O’Leary did not like the patient way in which Russell rode or the fact that he approached each horse differently. Russell, who could be abrasive, bristled at the instructions to race every horse hard from the start.
“As I found out later in life,” Russell says wryly, “it doesn’t matter what instructions they give you as long as you win. If I had been a bit brighter and cuter, it would have been fine. With some horses it was far better to come on late instead of absolutely emptying the tank and having nothing left. But Michael was a new breed of owner and, instead of me coaxing a horse to finish third, they’d rather put him into the race and find out if he’s any good. If he pulls up, he pulls up. That was alien to me and I found it incredibly hard to adapt.”
Russell was insulted when O’Leary, after firing him, suggested the jockey should go out and prove him wrong. “It helped relight the fire in me. I thought: ‘I will prove you wrong.’ There were brilliant riders: Ruby Walsh, Barry Geraghty, AP McCoy, Paul Carberry. Maybe I was outside that bracket but I was definitely better than the rest.” To be stripped off the Gigginstown firepower was devastating and Russell briefly considered retirement. “But it would have killed me if my career finished on that note,” he suggests.
Three months later, in March 2014, Russell had his greatest day at the Cheltenham Festival. Cooper suffered a bad injury and, suddenly, there was an opening for Russell to ride O’Leary’s horse, Tiger Roll, in the Triumph Hurdle on the last day of the Festival. The horse, and their subsequent victory, gave Russell “the most pleasure” of all his many winners. It came when he was at his lowest and set him up for two further victories, including winning the Gold Cup on Lord Windermere, that unforgettable afternoon.
“I was meant to have only one ride that day, a 33-1 shot in the Gold Cup. I ended up having three winners including Lord Windermere in the most important race of them all. I showed everyone I was back.” Russell and Tiger Roll made an irresistible combination and, four years later, they ran in the Grand National. “That day,” Russell recalls, “Tiger Roll and I were being led by the stable girl and we heard our introduction as ‘the oldest jockey and the smallest horse in the race.’ I joked to the girl: ‘Sheesh, we’ve got to do something about this fairly quick.’ But that’s the beauty of the National. Spend enough money and you can buy a Gold Cup horse as there’s a blueprint for that race. The National is different.”
Russell’s book opens with a vivid description of the 2018 Grand National, which Tiger Roll won in a gripping photo finish. A year later they returned to win it again, in dominant style. Those twin triumphs in the National fulfilled a childhood ambition that had been forged on the very farm where he still lives. The jockey shows me where he used to try and build replica Grand National fences out of the grass cuttings he collected after his dad had mowed the lawn.
Of course there have been less romantic episodes in Russell’s racing life. He is suitably contrite after I ask him about the terrible moment when he punched a horse called King’s Dolly before a race at Tramore in 2017.
At first he received only a caution but, after a media uproar, an appeal resulted in a four-day ban. “It was justified,” he says. “What I did was wrong. But she frightened the life out of me when she ran clean away with me on the way to the start line and all I could see was the stanchion, a car and the practice hurdle. There were no other options so I aimed for the hurdle. I had a stick in my hand and I could have hit her with that but I just reacted with a punch and said ‘Fuck you!’ I’d got such a fright.
“I accepted the ban but, to this day, if you Google my name that’s the first thing that comes up. I could put something up [on social media] about raising money for cancer, or something about the kids, and someone will say: ‘You’re the fellow that hit the horse.’”
Russell also punched his fellow jockey Danny Mullins during a race in 2014. When they were called in to face the stewards Mullins protected Russell by insisting that the blood that spurted from his nose had been caused by the head of his own horse.
Mullins knew Russell had been wasting, to make weight, and was on a short fuse that afternoon. “He didn’t have to do that,” Russell says of Mullins, “because I was completely wrong. If someone had punched me I wouldn’t have liked it. But if I was in Danny’s shoes I’m confident I would have done the same thing because he’s a good fellow.”
Russell is now the father to five children, the youngest four of whom live with him and Edelle, and the house is a cheerful riot of colour and noise after they all return home from school. Our interview is done and, after I meet everyone, and hear about the kids’ love of riding, I ask Edelle about her famous skeleton. She tells me how she brought it out only a few weeks ago and asked who in the class had ever broken a bone. Only the biggest boy, a rugby player, had fractured a bone in his little finger.
What did they think of Davy when they saw the red dots signifying all his broken bones? Edelle looks across at her husband, a cheerful man who now makes a good living out of rearing and selling horses. Davy is yakking away to their kids.
“They thought he must be quite a man,” she says with a smile.