Back on track
Robin Oakley
For Dean Gallagher, Christmas came early. Two years ago, the rider stepped into the November night outside the Jockey Club, banned from riding for 18 months (at the age of 33) over the use of cocaine and reckoning his career was over. Next day he read his professional obituaries. But a surprise phone call from a French bloodstock agent as his ban ended this summer, and a shoulder injury which finished Thierry Doumen’s riding career, led to a meeting with Thierry’s father, top French trainer François Doumen.
On 10 September, Dean stepped back on to the course in Paris and rode a winner. And by the time the Paris tracks of Auteuil and Enghien closed for the winter he had ridden 16 more, including several doubles. He had won the Swiss Gold Cup, a Listed race in Germany, and he had been back in Britain to win on James Fanshawe’s Persian Waters in the navy diamond on blue colours of his admirably loyal supporter, the owner Paul Green.
Whatever you may think of him drifting into the use of cocaine in the first place, it has been a remarkable story of one man’s rediscovery of self-worth, and of racing’s ability to rescue its own. It is all the more remarkable because Dean had burned his boats not once, but twice.
The story began with his arrest, along with fellow-jockeys Jamie Osborne and Leighton Aspell, back in January 1998 over allegations of race-fixing. For 14 long months, until finally, as most in racing had expected, he was told he had no case to answer, he was constantly rebailed. I remember talking to him at that period. Head up, his clear gaze fixed firmly on you, he would insist that the period of notoriety was giving him his opportunity to show trainers what he could do and he was letting his riding do the talking. It seemed to work. He rode 51 winners in that troubled season amid the pointing fingers and parade-ring whispers, but there was a price. There was the bitter cost of having to sell the first house he had bought to meet legal fees. Closing that front door for the last time is etched on his memory. And there was the hidden cost of the public bravado: drink, and then a little white powder to help him face the world.
It was a mistake, a disaster. A jockey on drugs is a danger to himself and to his fellow-riders. But what strikes you about Dean is the lack of whingeing or self-pity. Nobody, he says, forced him to take cocaine. And the first time, after a sixmonth ban, his success in working his way back was crowned with the emotional moment when he rode Paul Green’s Hors La Loi to victory in the Champion Hurdle. But then the Bad Fairy struck again. In France, Dean again tested positive for cocaine and we all thought we had seen the last of the compact, muscular bundle that is Gallagher in the saddle, a horseman who blends with his mount, creeping quietly through a field of jumpers to strike at the last fence.
Fortunately, when disaster struck a second time, former champion jockey Richard Dunwoody, forced by injury to quit prematurely himself, counselled Gallagher not to do anything too final, warning, ‘You’re a long time retired.’ Flat trainer Richard Hannon employed Gallagher to ride out and to socialise with his owners on the racecourse. ‘He took me under his wing and gave me my confidence back,’ says the jockey. And then came the Doumen offer.
The Paris punters have taken to Dean. At first his French mounts started at long odds, now they are almost always at short odds. He gets on well with Doumen. ‘He’s a hard taskmaster, but that’s what I really like about him, he does the job right ... he made a very big decision, a very brave one, in taking on a jockey who hadn’t ridden for 20 months and with a past history.’ He finds the two-meetings-a-week pace of French racing much easier — ‘none of that driving all round the country like a headless chicken’ and it suits his quiet style. At Sandown, he told me, ‘The boys are moaning about the soft ground, but to me it’s like a carpet compared with what I’ve been riding on. The style is completely different over there. The ground at Auteuil is very, very soft — bottomless — and they have to go slower otherwise they wouldn’t get round, so the races are tactical. I find I have lots more time to ride a race. Here, the first mile is faster than the second; in France they only start racing over the last mile. It’s like it was here until Martin Pipe changed it all.’ Despite all his tribulations, racing folk insist that ‘Dean’s a good guy’. He now has a French tutor, a place in Chantilly, an agent in France and Dave Roberts booking him Saturday rides in Britain. Life is back on track, and his riding is as good as ever. At Sandown, I watched him on Touch Closer, a horse by no means convinced he wanted to be doing what he was doing. They were plumb last down the back straight, but Dean coaxed, niggled and pushed for two miles and came with a long run to finish second. ‘We could even have won if I’d jumped the last better,’ he said, breaking off our talk to study the rerun. He would not have come back, he said, ‘just to be banging round Newton Abbot for ones and twos’. This is a jockey who still has the will to win, so let us pray for no more slip-ups.
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