Rosallion Shines A Light On Slow Burner Sean Levey’s Big Race Profile
Two classic winners last year showed that the jockey has emerged as a worthy Group 1 pilot long after his apprentice days riding the Ballydoyle also-rans in top-flight contests.
THREE HUNDRED and thirty three days is a long time to have to wait for the next race ride on the best miler you’ve ever piloted. That’s how many Sean Levey has had to count down to Rosallion’s race track return in the G1 Lockinge Stakes.
That’s nothing to the 13 years he had to wait for a first Group 1 win, though. Not that he was doing much waiting. There are no prizes for waiting around in this game: good things happen to those who work, who press on through the tough days, make the right connections at the right time, deliver results, and, after all that, receive the breaks that lady luck allows to fall their way.
Levey was a precocious student of riding Group 1 races during his time as a young apprentice at Aidan O’Brien’s Ballydoyle stable, but his mounts were never the main contenders. So it was that his Group 1 break came at age 30 – seven years after he left Ireland to go his own way in England – in May 2018, when he rode the 66/1 longshot Billesdon Brook to victory in the 1,000 Guineas at Newmarket for Rosallion’s trainer, Richard Hannon Jr.
“It was a bit of a weird one for me” he tells Idol Horse. “I had kind of got to the stage where I needed that Group 1. I don’t think I would have been happy retiring on the fact that I never had one. I felt winning the first one was a relief that I finally got that monkey off my back. It came at a good time and it opened doors to a lot of opportunities.”
A fall at Salisbury a short time later, that broke his collarbone and put him out for four months, wasn’t quite so well-timed, but Levey had his Group 1 and the filly delivered a second the following year in the G1 Sun Chariot Stakes, followed soon after by a G1 Queen Elizabeth II Stakes win on Hannon’s King Of Change.
Heading into the 2025 season his Group 1 count stood at nine after 2024 proved to be his best year yet, all-round: Rosallion was at the heart of that with wins in the G1 Irish 2,000 Guineas and G1 St James’s Palace Stakes, before sickness and an aversion to softer going saw Sheikh Mohammed Obaid’s colt put away from mid-summer for a four-year-old campaign full of high expectations.
But even with Rosallion side-lined, Levey’s season continued on an upward Group 1 curve thanks to further high-profile bounty: an important and poignant G1 St Leger victory on O’Brien’s Jan Brueghel, which added heft to the jockey’s slow-burning reputation as someone worthy of big rides in the major races.
“I started off with Aidan and he was extremely good to me,” Levey says. “I had ridden in every classic in Ireland before I’d lost my seven-pound claim, I’d also ridden internationally in the Arc and major races in England so I’d become accustomed to riding those big meetings and always wanted to win one, or ride a good horse with a chance of winning one.
“That didn’t happen at Ballydoyle while I was there, it happened after I’d left and done my own thing but I always felt I owed him that major winner and it felt great to have won the Leger riding a horse for him.”
Levey was born in Swaziland and it was there that he lived the first 12 years of his life. That was until the family moved to Ireland, his late father Mick’s homeland.
“I had a great upbringing, I grew up in and around the culture of Swaziland and I went into horses on my own back, really,” he says, despite his father’s interest in horse racing as rider, sometime trainer and bookmaker.
“At the start we had horses, but I was too young to ride them, they were gone by the time I was riding. I just turned up at a yard with a mate of mine and it went from there. Obviously, with the guidance of my dad, I kind of picked it up a bit quicker than most and thoroughly enjoyed it.
“There was no racing in Swaziland, so I started off showjumping, Eventing and what have you,” Levey continues. “Dad was more into the boxing at that stage and riding became me and my brother’s thing. To be honest, at that stage I had absolutely no interest in horse racing and knew very little about it.”
But once in Ireland, with his father working at the world famous Ballydoyle, the interest grew.
“I was 14 or 15 and was starting to ride out on the weekends in Aidan O’Brien’s and through someone who was working there we spent the summer up in Ballinasloe where we started pony racing,” he says.
“I thought every stable was like Aidan’s because it was the only and first stable that I went to. It wasn’t until later I realised that it was the best and why it was the best stable in the world.”
He had one win from 16 rides in his debut apprentice season, in 2005, and by the time he left Ireland at the end of 2010, he had 46 wins, with single figure tallies each year until he put 16 on the board in his final campaign there. He headed to David O’Meara’s yard in North Yorkshire where Silvestre de Sousa was the trainer’s choice, and still put up a solid tally of 34 wins in his first year, riding effectively as a freelance for outside stables.
“There’s been hundreds of occasions when I was just going to give up and do something else,” he admits. “There were times in the early stages when I just didn’t think it was for me, even in the early days when I was an apprentice at Aidan’s. I left school in third year and there was a time when I could have easily gone back to school, and there was a time I nearly did. So throughout the whole thing – and I’m sure every jockey would know – there’s been plenty of occasions when you’d seek to do other things.
“It’s extremely hard to make it. It’s an incredible sport because it’s a game of two minds: there’s the understanding that you can be as good as you want to be, but if you don’t ever get the opportunity on one of those good horses, it’s just not going to happen.”
It was when Levey moved south to the Hannon stable in Wiltshire that ‘it’ began to happen for him.
“A friend of mine, Kieran O’Neill, was working in Richard Hannon’s at the time and I stopped off and rode out there. It being a bigger yard and what I was used to, it seemed a very good fit. Seeing as I still had my claim, I asked would he consider taking on my licence and allow me to finish off my apprenticeship there and he obliged.”
Hannon Jr has a policy of using ‘the best available jockey’ and in many instances that jockey is Levey.
“It’s hugely dependent on what his owners want,” Levey says, “I’m lucky enough to have had a great deal of support from the majority of owners he has.”
Sheikh Mohammed Obaid has been happy for Levey to maintain his connection with Rosallion through all seven of the colt’s races to date for five wins, featuring the G1 Jean-Luc Lagardere as a juvenile, then those triumphs in the G1 Irish 2,000 Guineas and G1 St James’s Palace Stakes that marked him as a brilliant three-year-old with champion miler aspirations.
The Lockinge will bring together Rosallion and his English 2,000 Guineas conqueror Notable Speech in a Group 1 clash for the third time, with the score at one apiece. An elevated temperature saw Rosallion scratched from the G1 Sussex Stakes last July, leaving his Godolphin-owned rival to take those spoils.
“With that turn-of-foot he’s got, he’s probably the fastest miler I’ve ridden,” Levey says, “It’s exciting but water has gone under the bridge since last season. There are other horses that have shown they can step up to the challenge, and it’s a long time since we saw Rosallion; so for everything that he’s doing at home, and we’re happy, we won’t know until the day when the real question is asked. The Lockinge is starting to look like a very strong race.”
Just the kind of Group 1 test Levey relishes these days.
“I think I’ve learnt to accept a lot and enjoy a lot more of it now with the Group 1 winners I’ve had. It’s nice to have good horses and it’s nice to turn up and compete at all of those big stages. That’s something I thoroughly enjoy.
“But at the same time, I do know how hard it is to find good horses. I do know they’re not going to be there every year, so once they’re there I enjoy them and when they’re not, I just look on to find the next ones.
“I’m happy that that’s part of the game,” he adds. “I enjoy the challenge of it all.” ∎
