The corners of Brendan Walsh’s mouth upturned into a smile, but the rest of him barely moved. He turned slightly to receive an embrace, but really, the smile was the entirety of his personal in-the-moment celebration, a subtle expression of satisfaction before the elation sank in; he’d just won the G1 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies at Keeneland with the unbeaten Emphatic, his first Breeders’ Cup win, and the smile was enough for him.
Not bad for an Irish apprentice school dropout. That was a long time ago, though, and the journey in between, via Dubai, France and England, has shaped Walsh into an adept and respected horseman trading blows with the very best.
His reaction to Emphatic’s win, that’s Walsh to a T: there’s a subtle, unobtrusive coolness to the way he carries himself – the way a man does who knows what it means to work up from the bottom and holds the lessons close, never forgetting the breadth of his experiences from the days before he was the man who has his name in the race card.
“I’m really ecstatic,” Walsh said after Emphatic’s impressive win under Tyler Gaffalione. His words landed in that measured, even, rolling way of a Cork farmer’s son. “She went great and Tyler did a fantastic job. Everybody on my team – hats off to them.”
Walsh’s team these days operates mostly out of his home base at Churchill Downs – he lives in Louisville – about an hour and a half from Keeneland racetrack along Kentucky’s westward stretch of I-64.
It’s a long way from southern Ireland where he was raised, but a Breeders’ Cup win is just as far again, figuratively, from Palm Meadows, Florida, where he started out as a trainer with six horses and a broad range of experiences behind him.
Walsh’s first winner was at Gulfstream Park, Miami, a maiden special weight back in March of 2012, the sixth starter of his training career.
“I can remember the first one like it was yesterday: Sandcastle was a filly of Trish Moseley’s, Julien Leparoux rode her,” he told Idol Horse outside of the barn row at Keeneland one morning, three days before Emphatic’s win.
“I had a very good filly for Mrs Moseley about seven or eight years ago as well, a filly called Proctor’s Ledge, I’ve trained a few of her daughters since – she won multiple graded stakes for me as well – so she’s been a great supporter the whole way through.”
Moseley has remained a firm supporter, but has been joined since by big-hitters Godolphin, as well as the likes of Andrew Rosen and Antony Beck of Gainesway Stable who own Emphatic.
The numbers since Sandcastle attest to Walsh’s rise to sit among America’s top stables: he ranks seventh this year with more than US$14 million stakes money and 122 winners, just ahead of Todd Pletcher and Bob Baffert in eighth and ninth; that puts him in striking range of the 133 wins and US$15 million in purse money he accrued in his peak season last year; he is closing on 1,000 career wins, too, with 977 on the board.
Walsh reflected back on a budget buy in just his third season training as a pivotal moment in his career.
“I claimed a horse in Florida called Cary Street for US$10,000, and he ended up winning a Breeders’ Cup marathon,” he said, referring to the staying race that was ditched by Breeders’ Cup and renamed on the undercard as the G2 Las Vegas Marathon by the time Cary Street won it.
Cary Street won a Grade 3 at Parx first-up out of that claimer for Walsh, that was in September 2014 and the ball was well and truly rolling, with improved year on year tallies through to the stable’s 69 wins in 2017.
By 2019 he had his first major overseas win with Plus Que Parfait in the G2 UAE Derby, back in his old Dubai stomping grounds, and two years later Extravagant Kid in the G1 Al Quoz Sprint.
Emphatic’s win was a first actual Breeders’ Cup win, but she is not an anomaly for Walsh. His stable has conditioned 11 individual Grade 1 winners in his time, including Godolphin’s 2023 Kentucky Oaks and Eclipse Award-winning three-year-old Pretty Mischievous, and another Godolphin star, the two-time Grade 1 winner Maxfield.
That Godolphin connection is an important one for Walsh. It takes him right back, almost to the beginning, and forms the core of his foundation as a trainer.
But his love for horses began as a child, even though his family’s place in Shanagarry was not a horse farm. He convinced his father, Patrick, to buy him a pony and at age 15 he was off to Kildare, and that short-lived spell at the Irish apprentice school.
“I was in the apprentice school in Ireland for six months when I was a young fella and I didn’t like it, I went back to school. I’d only ridden ponies when I went there,” Walsh said.
“I think I got homesick. I mean, you’re only fifteen when you go there. Which is very young when I look at it now, I was very young. And I think that was it more than anything: I was probably a bit of a mammy’s boy. But it’s funny because when I got into my early twenties, and I started travelling, that’s all I wanted to do.”
After Walsh left school, he worked for a vet in Cork, then did the stud management course at the Irish National Stud and found his way to Sheik Mohammed’s Kildangan Stud.
“We used to break a bunch of yearlings back then and ride them,” he said.
Then to trainer John Hammond in France for a couple of summers as he worked “to get experience everywhere” he could. Back at Kildangan he was asked to go with some horses to Dubai. He wound up going back for nine winters.
“I ended up working for Godolphin for the main yard in Dubai and Newmarket, for Saeed bin Suroor, for a long time. There were a lot of good horses when I was there like Dubai Millennium was there and Daylami, Fantastic Light.”
He rode the 1,000 Guineas and Oaks heroine Kazzia and the Dubai World Cup winner Moon Ballad in their work and ran one of the barns.
“It was great because we brought some great horses all over the world, so they were great days,” he said. “But, you know, eventually I was coming over here to the States a little bit with Godolphin too.
“I always kind of was drawn to come back here. I figured if I wanted to train there was going to be more opportunity for me here.”
Walsh also worked for Newmarket trainer Mark Wallace, but after getting a taste for America during a couple of summers there for Godolphin, he made the move and at first worked for another Kentucky-based Irishman, Eddie Kenneally, as assistant trainer. Kenneally trained Kelly’s Landing to win the 2007 G1 Dubai Golden Shaheen.
“I was with Eddie for four years. And then I kind of recruited a half dozen horses of my own and off I went,” he said.
Working for Kenneally familiarised Walsh with the American way of doing things, and the seasonal circuits at Churchill Downs, Keeneland and Turfway Park in Kentucky, and in the winter Fairgrounds in New Orleans and south Florida.
“There’s a lot of moving but that’s the way it is here,” Walsh said. “You have to have a good team and I’ve been very lucky. I have a great team of lads, assistants and everything. But we have a good routine now and we all know each other and it all works pretty well.”
As well as a good team and good owners sending him quality horses, he emphasised the importance of the time he had at Godolphin working so closely with those great horses.
“I learned how to be around good horses and a lot of people, I think, when they start, if they haven’t been exposed to it, it gets a little intimidating,” he says.
“Young kids here that are wanting to start off and train, I always say to them, try and expose yourself to Europe, Asia and Australia or wherever else because I think it all helps and you learn some good stuff from people. And you learn some stuff that you need to forget from people too.
“But you try and take the good stuff and put it all together and hopefully you never stop learning in this game.”
Walsh and his team go into the winter in the enviable position of being able to dream with a juvenile that has topped her division and has the three-year-old fillies’ majors to look forward to.
“She’s a little bit highly-strung,” he said of Emphatic. “But, to be fair to her, she was a filly that we were concerned when she came to us at first that she was going to go the right or the wrong way mentally.
“Obviously she’s gone the right way, but we shipped her around for races too, and I think all that travel stood to her well, she’s had plenty of exposure, so I think that’s standing to her now.”
Sounds familiar. Walsh left behind the mammy’s boy mindset and matured long, long ago and his many travels and experiences in that process of learning and developing as a world class horseman are standing him well now. ∎
