The turf | 31 August 2017

I guess his mother may have called him Patrick, or even, when he was in trouble, ‘Patrick Joseph’, but in the racing world, like the great McCoy, the Yorkshire-based jockey P.J. McDonald is known simply by his initials. It is proving to be a very good year for ‘P.J.’ and those initials are becoming steadily more familiar to southern as well as northern racegoers. He won the National Stakes at Sandown and the Molecomb Stakes at Glorious Goodwood on Karl Burke’s Havana Grey, and as I write he is firmly ensconced in the top ten riders’ table with nearly 80 winners. ‘I’d love to get the hundred up this season,’ he says, and there must be every chance he will. But at 35 his is the success of a hardworking slow-burner, not that of a precocious youth.

Sometimes it looks as though everyone in Ireland has a trainer in their family tree, a horse in their backyard and an ex-jockey for a neighbour but there were no such advantages for P.J.: ‘I had no racing connections. I never had ponies. I just wanted to be a jockey.’ He was taught to ride by Dusty Sheehy and mentored in point-to-points by Padge Berry, but at Goodwood on Saturday he confessed that, after his first four years in racing with Irish trainer Charles O’Brien had brought him only 70 rides and just three winners, he had been on the point of giving up and enlisting for a trade. Then a friend, ex-jockey Michael Cleary, persuaded him to contact the England-based jumps trainer Ferdy Murphy, and P.J. boarded the boat to give racing one more try.