Fallon: Genesis of Genius

Kieren Fallon grew up on a farm in the middle of County Clare. He was one of six children, having to share a bed with his three brothers.

‘We lived what I suppose you would call an isolated existence’, he explains in his autobiography. ‘There was a village a few miles away … we lived up among the peat bogs, up a little narrow road, the kind that has grass growing down the middle of it’.

At the school he attended, the headmaster was ‘a very angry man. He must have been angry at life because he was always bitter. He beat you if you didn’t know something.

You wouldn’t go home and tell your mother that the teacher had hit you because you’d get a kick up the arse and asked what you did to deserve it’.

Church, a regular ritual, brought no respite. ‘We had a priest called Father Larkin and he was a big man, a hard man, and he would walk up and down the rows of our classroom, threatening to hit people’.

Fallon gives his father credit for teaching him ‘discipline and structure and the meaning of hard work’, but recalls his dad was ‘quick to fly off the handle. Whoever it was who was messing around didn’t really matter. There was a stick over the mirror and he would grab it and, whoever was there, he would lash out’.

Fallon admits that it ‘wasn’t an affectionate house’. Of his parents he says: ‘They weren’t ones for praising’, but then adds: ‘I’m not saying it was a bad way to bring kids up’.

There was a milking cow and a bull (‘a mean bastard’), goats, calves and lambs. There was fishing. There were no horses. Fallon is unique amongst the great jockeys in having no racing heritage.

The closest he got to a horse was watching Westerns which he loved. He used to ride his bike pretending it was a horse, or sit on a stone wall imagining he was riding a finish.

One day the real thing arrived, sort of. His father was ‘always buying and selling cattle … there was always something thrown in with the deal. Once, dad came back with a Connemara pony’.

Without knowing, Fallon utilised the instinct that was to make him a champion. ‘It was wild and I was the only one who could get near it’, he said. ‘I was a small kid but I managed to get that pony close to this slab of rock that was in our field and I clambered onto her back that way. I could ride her bareback. I would hang on for as long as I could’.

The nearest racetrack was Galway. ‘The Galway races have to be seen to be believed. I couldn’t believe how small the jockeys' saddles were. It still didn’t occur to me I could make my living out of riding horses’.

In one of his sisters' magazines, he read a list of possible jobs. Jockey was one of them. The Irish Turf Club sent him a list of trainers. ‘My mother wrote the same letter to all of them, saying I was five stone dressed’.

Kevin Prendergast wrote back. There was a job at his yard near the Curragh. Two days later Fallon had moved to Kildare.

Whatever challenges that somewhat wild town posed to a young country boy, and there were a few, his harsh background had served a purpose. Kieren Fallon (aged17), yet to sit on a racehorse, could cope with just about anything.