![]() ![]() ![]() Tom Dreaper’s brilliant chaser Flyingbolt also contested a handicap hurdle there in 1965 before National Hunt racing was stopped at the track situated beside the Ashtown gate on the Navan Road. Two of Vincent O’Brien’s best ever flat performers, Roberto and Sadlers Wells won there while his three-time Champion Hurdle winner Hatton’s Grace won his first hurdle race in the Park in 1947. McCoy wasn’t the only great to grace The Phoenix Park, which was one of only three Group 1 flat racecourses in Ireland, hosting the Irish Champion Stakes and Phoenix Stakes.ĪP McCoy and Jim Bolger after his first ride in 1990 Indeed, memories of the Park’s former racecourse are still precious to many people and its demise is still mourned to this day in Irish racing. His dad Peadar had said to racing photographer Pat Healy: “Will you take a picture of my son’s first ride? He might not get many more.”Ĥ,358 winners and 20 British jump jockey’s championships later, McCoy has been snapped tens of thousands of times, but that Phoenix Park frame is priceless. ![]() Just six weeks earlier a 16-year-old AP McCoy had been pictured at The Park with trainer Jim Bolger, after his first ever ride in public saw Nordic Touch finish sixth in a flat handicap. READ MORE - Paul O'Donovan's medical finals as much on rower's mind as next worlds READ MORE - Brian Mullins wasn't just part of Dublin's big bang moment, he was the big bang ![]() Ironically, it was buried alive after one of its biggest ever days.Įurope’s richest race, the 1990 Cartier Million, had been the sellout feature that Saturday afternoon but mounting debts of £1m a year and falling attendances meant the show was over. Shortly after Wild Jester and Christy Roche became the last horse and jockey to ever win a race at the old Phoenix Park racecourse, a bugler poignantly played The Last Post, and the crowd sang Auld Lang Syne.ģ2 years ago, this month, the iconic and mythical racecourse in Europe’s biggest city park, controversially closed its doors for the very last time.Īn 88-year-old story of boom to bust. ![]()
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