Michael O’Sullivan was blessed with a rare talent and had a huge future in racing after absorbing the wisdom of giants, writes DOMINIC KING after the jockey’s tragic death aged 24

The tragedy of this story is its heartbreaking, premature conclusion. Michael O’Sullivan had it all ahead of him, a young man of 24 with a rare talent and tremendous temperament, but today there is only emptiness. A family and a sport are in mourning.

How it stings to write these words. This is the point in the year when dreams take flight, as Cheltenham looms into view, but suddenly that Festival, such a happy distraction, feels irrelevant. O’Sullivan lit up Prestbury Park in 2023 and it is unfathomable we’ll never see him do so again.

For if ever a jockey was made for that stage, it was Michael O’Sullivan, a former winner of Ireland’s Under-21 Point-to-Point Championship, a young man from Lombardstown near Mallow in County Cork who had graduated from University College Dublin with a degree in Agricultural Science.

His breeding for the job was impeccable. His father, William, had won the 1991 Foxhunters Chase at Cheltenham on Lovely Citizen for his brother, Eugene. Michael’s cousin, Maxine, won the same race – known as the amateur’s Gold Cup – in 2020 on It Came To Pass, another of his uncle’s horses.

There was something about young Michael, though, that made him stand out. Tall and lean, courteous and respectful, he was the kind of guy you could easily strike up a conversation with and come away feeling positive. He was committed to his work, passionate about his profession.

And he could ride. How he could ride. Cheltenham, the most ferocious of arenas, asks questions of jockeys like nowhere else and no race is more eagerly-awaited than the Supreme Novices Hurdle, the one which kicks-off the four-day jamboree with roar from the stands that keeps on rolling.

Two years ago, O’Sullivan arrived at The Festival entrusted with the mount on Marine Nationale for the Supreme. He had only had one previous ride at Cheltenham, he’d only turned professional six months earlier and it left some wondering whether the occasion would be too much too soon.

‘On the morning of March 14, 2023, I stood outside the Cheltenham racecourse stable yard in the unloading area, talking to Charlie Swan,’ Ruby Walsh recalled in his Irish Examiner column on February 8. 

‘A figure hovered behind us before approaching, looking for advice.

‘Michael O’Sullivan didn’t want to know how he should ride his horse or what we thought of the race. He wanted to know about the track. He wanted any small pointers he felt he should know. Charlie voiced a few ideas, I chipped in with one or two more. He thanked us for our time and left.’

He absorbed all the wisdom these giants imparted and returned a winner, a breathtaking one at that. When you watch the replay, your eye is drawn to O’Sullivan, a pair of dark goggles fixed on the leaders of the equine peloton, his yellow and black silks scything through rivals at 32mph before he unleashes an unstoppable charge.

‘We had the best horse in the race – and we had the best jockey,’ owner-trainer Barry Connell declared, aware of the magnitude of his words. ‘Honestly, he is unreal. He is a future star.’

For good measure, O’Sullivan would partner Jazzy Matty for Gordon Elliott in the Boodles Hurdle – a frenetic four-year-old handicap in which anything can happen – to a resounding success. Days don’t come much better but he took it all in his elegant stride.

‘When you are really just greedy for more,’ he said. ‘I hope this isn’t the last one I have, anyway.’

It shouldn’t have been. That double ought to have been a foundation for many, many more. O’Sullivan might have split from O’Connell, the man who had also provided him with another Grade One horse in Good Land, last autumn but plenty of trainers were in full admiration of his talents.

Willie Mullins, for one, had given him good rides lately. O’Sullivan had partnered Embassy Gardens for the Champion in the Irish Gold Cup on February, the reward for the victory he achieved on the same horse at Tramore, the seaside course in County Waterford, on New Year’s Day.

He had allies in France, too. The upwardly-mobile Chantilly yard of Noel George and Amanda Zetterholm had an agreement with O’Sullivan that he’d partner their UK runners, having spent time working with them last June, and you could see why – a ride he gave to Do It Again at Bangor-on-Dee last November was a front-running masterclass.

O’Sullivan spoke to Mail Sport that afternoon, enthusing that he would “go wherever I need to for winners” and it seemed certain there would be many more conversations of this nature, outside weighing rooms, with him in the years to come as his career progressed.

Now here we are, lamentably reflecting in the past tense. It is rare for a jockey to lose his life on a racecourse; since the turn of the century in Ireland, there were two in the annus horribilis of 2003 – Kieran Kelly (August) and Sean Cleary (October), perished after respective falls at Kilbeggan and Galway – while Jack Tyner never recovered from a fall at Dungarvan point-to-point in October 2011.

Kelly is a tragic comparison. He, too, had dazzled at Cheltenham, delivering Hardy Eustace impeccably in the Royal & Sun Alliance Hurdle that March and seemed sure to be a regular in all the top races. His passing, after four days spent in Dublin’s Beaumont Hospital, still haunts Walsh.

There is no question O’Sullivan’s death will have a profound impact on the riders of this generation, many of whom were at Thurles on that fateful day when his mount, Wee Charlie, crashed out at the final obstacle in a two-mile handicap worth €6,875 to the winner.

It was a horrifying incident. Wee Charlie was one of three horses to fall independently at the final obstacle and, in the carnage, two other horses were brought down. 

Fatally, Wee Charlie’s momentum meant he flung O’Sullivan at force from his saddle before capsizing over him.

We know the clear and present danger of horse racing, we see ambulances pursing the field after every race at every course around the world every day of the week, but you are never prepared for an outcome of this dark nature.

Michael O’Sullivan’s story should not have ended like this. He rode 95 winners in Ireland in total, the first of which poignantly came on Wilcosdiana, for his uncle Eugene in April 2018. The race, at Cork, is staged in the memory of Tyner. 

It is scarcely believable the same tragic fate should befall him.