IT’s not all about the ’orses.
In the first of a new column we speak to the big names in racing to find out their secret love outside the sport. First up is Neil Mulholland.
I’VE loved motor sport since I was a young boy.
I was born and brought up in Northern Ireland in Glenavy, County Antrim and when I was a boy, I always had scramblers.
When I was about five or six, Santa brought me my first motorbike — a little Honda 50cc.
My brother, Mark, who is a couple of years older than me, was given a Yamaha 80cc for the same Christmas. My father, Brian, owns some land and we always had motorbikes and ponies.
Over the years, my passion for bikes and go-karts grew and grew.
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When I was still a jockey — I rode from the age of 15 to 27 — I got myself a go-kart and kept it at a circuit called Clay Pigeon Raceway near Dorchester.
The owner is a friend of mine and sometimes, if I didn’t have a ride, I would go down there and practice on the go-kart.
I love the speed and the fact go-kart racing is so different from horse-racing.
It’s such a buzz to be sitting two inches off the ground in a machine that will do nought to 60mph in about three seconds. I don’t think people realise the karts do 85mph around the track.
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That kind of speed concentrates the mind, I can tell you. What I also love about it is it allows you to get away from all that is going on at the yard.
Everything is happening so fast you can’t think of anything else. It’s all about saving fractions of seconds here or there.
I’ve always enjoyed it and I’ve been lucky enough to have plenty of good days on the track.
I’ve got lucky number seven on my kart and I’d like to think I could hold my own on the track even if I’ve never had the time to compete at the highest level.
Training is not a job, it’s a way of life and something that I love doing. But when you are in a go-kart or on a motorbike it’s a total escape. And that’s the big appeal of it for me.
However tricky it was to get the time off as a jockey, it was a lot easier than now when I am a trainer!
And especially now I have a young family — I am married to Rebecca and we have three boys: Patrick, 7, Connor, 4 and Finn, 1.
You have to weigh up whether family time means more than having an hour on the go-kart. My family means everything to me which means, sadly, the go-karting gets neglected.
As a jockey, I broke a lot of bones – I had a frame on each broken leg at different times and my two shoulders are pinned and plated.
But the injury which caused me the most pain was from go-karting.
About nine years ago — soon after I took up training — I was on the kart and didn’t quite take the right line into a corner.
I ended up with a broken rib. It’s a common injury in a go-kart from firing a front wheel onto a kerb on a corner.
Despite all the knocks I got when riding horses, the broken rib was the sorest, most niggly, thing I ever broke — especially as I used to sneeze a lot!
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