“Underrated” Champion Colin Keane Has Long Been Ready To Seize The Moment
Ireland’s six-time champion jockey is not as prominent on the world scene as his talent, his achievements, and Ger Lyons’ opinion, suggest he should be.
GER LYONS is not known for holding back with his views and the trainer was typically forthright in his praise of Colin Keane following their Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf Sprint win with Magnum Force last November. Sitting alongside his stable jockey at the post-race press conference, he made his opinion plain.
“(Colin) is the most underrated champion jockey on Planet Earth … I need the world to wake up to him,” he said.
His view has not changed in the six months since. Speaking to Andrew Le Jeune on the Idol Horse Podcast this week, Lyons doubled down without hesitation.
“I’d like any of you to prove me wrong on that one,” Lyons challenged, adding: “He’s the best there is. I think they’re slowly coming round to him. I don’t know why it’s taking so long. He’s a world class rider, he’s a world class human being, and I think he’s only going to get better from this moment.”
The moment Keane, 30, finds himself in suggests some beyond Ireland’s shores see what Lyons sees. Juddmonte, for one, has not been slumbering and has chosen the rider to take over from the jilted Kieran Shoemark aboard the John and Thady Gosden-trained Field Of Gold heading into the G1 Irish 2,000 Guineas.
“It’s a brilliant ride to get,” Keane told Idol Horse the day after he’d ridden Juddmonte’s Babouche to win the G3 Lacken Stakes at Naas.
Given the media and public scrutiny around Shoemark’s removal from the race favourite, Saturday’s Curragh Guineas is as high-profile an assignment as Keane has been handed, despite his six champion jockey titles and 13 Group 1 wins, including on Juddmonte’s Siskin for Lyons in the same race five years ago and on the same operations Westover in the G1 Irish Derby of 2022.
That first classic win in May 2020 was a clear sign that Keane was a rider capable of mixing it with the sport’s very best. It came at age 25, almost nine and a half years after he rode his first winner, No Trimmings, for his father Gerry Keane, and seven years after he first walked into Lyons’ Glenburnie Stables in his native County Meath.
Lyons’ yard is a few miles down the road from Keane’s hometown of Trim, and the connection came about when the rider’s agent, Ruaidhri Tierney, contacted Lyons and told him about the good but underused young jockey nearby. The trainer told him to send him along.
“It became very apparent to me, very sharpish, that we had something on our hands here,” Lyons said.
Keane had ridden one, nine and 12 winners each season to that point. With Lyons’ support, he was second in Ireland’s champion apprentice race in 2013 with 42 wins and won that crown in 2014 when he put 66 wins on the board for the calendar year. He went on to be champion jockey for the first time in 2017, and has been champion again every year since 2020.
He also holds the record for the fastest century in a season in Ireland, achieved on August 28, 2021, and the most wins in a season there, 141, that same year. Yet he has not had the profile of Irish champions from the past who became well-known further afield, jockeys like Mick Kinane and Johnny Murtagh.
The Field Of Gold booking could be a sign that Keane’s profile is about to boom, yet he is in some ways the quiet man among champion jockeys, living close to home with his partner Kerry Lyons, the boss’s daughter.
It’s not that he has never ridden overseas, his Breeders’ Cup wins attest to the fact he has, and he has also contested the International Jockeys Championship in Hong Kong three times. But he’s not even close to matching the air miles of Ryan Moore or Tom Marquand, and he has never made a regular winter base overseas, unlike Kinane who was an off-season rider in India, Hong Kong and the UAE.
“We’d love to be on the international stage more often,” Keane told Idol Horse in Hong Kong, speaking before his latest IJC in December 2024. “We’re always looking for the opportunities to open up: they haven’t really, so I suppose we can only take them when they come.
“When you get a taste for a place like Hong Kong and the racing here, it’s definitely something we’re thinking about doing for a short term. But we’ve a yard at home, we have land and we’re busy, so we’re not usually in the city, so you don’t know until you try it.
“Myself and Kerry have a farm in Meath, she pinhooks foals to yearlings and things like that, so we have our own set-up at home and we’re busy all year round. If we didn’t have any of that it would probably be an easier decision, but hopefully there’ll be options down the line even if for two weeks or a month at first to try it and see how it goes. If I did get asked in the future, I’d be open to it.”
Lyons blames himself for Keane’s international profile being lower than he believes it should be.
“He should be riding in all the big races and I’d be very hard on myself that I’ve held him back, in the sense that I don’t travel, I don’t run my horses abroad, I have no interest in that stuff,” the trainer said.
Lyons also told the Idol Horse Podcast that Keane is “seriously loyal” and that is apparent when listening to the rider.
“We wouldn’t be in the position we’re in without Ger,” he said. “I went from my father’s to Ger’s and we wouldn’t be where we are today without him, so a lot of my career is dedicated to him, only for him, I should say. He’s only been behind me 100 percent. That’s the type of man he is.”
He has received support from outside trainers of course: notably Dermot Weld, Aidan O’Brien, Tony Martin who put him up on his first Group 1 winner, and John Murphy and his assistant son George.
The Murphys train White Birch who last year looked all the world like he would take Keane to some big days following an impressive win in the G1 Tattersalls Gold Cup. That was until a setback intervened.
The five-year-old grey returned with a sound second to Los Angeles in the G2 Mooresbridge Stakes at the start of May and will attempt to go back-to-back for Keane in the weekend’s Tattersalls Gold Cup.
“By all accounts John and George are very happy with him since his run and I’m looking forward to seeing him again at the weekend,” Keane said. “You coudn’t have been more happy with him the way he ran after being off the track for so long and he can only improve for a run.
“He was very impressive in the Tattersalls Gold Cup last year and he looked like he was going to go on and continue that progression through the season but he got his setback to put him out.”
Keane also has Babouche to look forward to, perhaps in the G1 Commonwealth Cup at Royal Ascot, while the sharp two-year-old Lady Iman is another fine prospect, whether she goes to Ascot for the Queen Mary or Albany Stakes or goes elsewhere.
That’s then, though, and for the moment, Field Of Gold will thrust him to the centre of the spotlight his achievements deserve. Yet the Meath man’s approach remains straightforward.
“We’ll just try to improve each year,” he adds. “Try and ride a bit better quality of horses, and try to travel a bit more.” ∎
