THE buzz was still settling in Oran McGill when they stopped at the nearest bar on the way back from Navan.
Two fences from home in the 3.05 handicap hurdle, Dolly’s Destination sat seventh with the Maghera man on its back. Priced at 22/1, not much had been expected.
But McGill timed the charge perfectly. He jumped the last in front and held off Gold Speed by a nose for the biggest career win so far of both horse and jockey.
As he’d lined up towards the back of the 23 runners, Glen were just heading for the changing rooms in Celtic Park wondering what to do about Errigal Ciaran and the Canavan boys in the second half.
By the time they’d stopped and found a TV they could turn to TG4, there were ten minutes left and the Derry champions were on their way to an Ulster semi-final.
He’d just come off the biggest buzz of his life and found himself staring at the one he wasn’t having, wondering what that would be like too.
“You’re away racing and seeing the lads getting out, you’re sorta, like… I don’t think I’d ever change what I’m doing but there’s the thought you could have been in the middle of that.
“They’re two totally different things. The riding, it’s all you and nobody else. Then it’s hard to beat that team feeling too, the togetherness and everybody working for each other.
“As a jockey, when you’re going well, it’s great – there is no better feeling. But when things go wrong, the first person to blame is the jockey and that’s where you start thinking is this all what it’s made out to be.
“As long as the good days come more often than the bad, it’s hard to beat.”
Oran McGill was supposed to be part of Glen’s extended panel for the Errigal game but the decision was made early in the week to run Dolly’s Destination on the Sunday. The horses come first. They’re the day job now.
Clashes are becoming more frequent at the business end. It’s only misfortune that will see him in Armagh this Sunday.
He will be neither togged for Glen nor at one of the three point-to-point meetings scheduled around the country on Sunday after coming off a horse last week.
“You don’t get many like it, you usually fall over the jumps, but the horse fell on the flat. It probably clipped heels. It’s worse because you’re not really expecting it.
“I was probably lucky to be walking away with just a sore knee, I could easily have done something to my back or something a lot more serious. That comes with it.”
The damage was a slight tear in his medial ligament and some bad bruising on the bone around the knee.
Bones around the knee are something he knows all too well about. It could have done serious harm to both careers but the 23-year-old has thankfully recovered from a horror injury he suffered when riding out on the morning of February 24 last year.
“We’ve cross country jumps like logs and tyres and stuff, they’re only knee-high really, or up to your thigh, just for a day doing something else or to freshen the horses up instead of going around the gallop every day.
“We were doing that and popping over them. We’d been over them maybe twice up the line and turned to go back, I dunno whether the horse spotted something in the hedge and spooked and duked, and I came off. Just a simple fall.
“The horse didn’t jump the log, I came off over her head, landed on my feet on this side of the log, my feet just landed in the wrong place, right under it. My knee clashed straight into the log and I just flipped out over it.”
He had to be lifted by air ambulance and taken to hospital, where scans showed he had shattered his kneecap in five places. The top fracture was a displacement, complicating things further. Surgery to put in a figure-of-eight wire and pins helped knit it all back together.
“I went back in a while after and they took all the wire and pins out, and that helped. But even today, you can see it, the kneecap is a lot bigger than the other one.
“It still does be sore, even with [football] training too, for the first while to get back close to what I was training like, it was tough.
“You’d be coming home in the evening and the next morning you’d be crippled, because it just wasn’t used to the work it would have been.”
Life has had to turn one way or the other since then. He’s still at the football and it’s a measure of his ability that he remains part of the 30 men selected for games.
But his body is built for racing now more than football. His father Gary, who trains the horses, was a lean shooting machine when Derry were at their peak in the mid-90s.
Oran reckons he’s consciously lost a stone in weight since he left school. He’s tipping the scales now at 10 stone and seven pounds.
For a long time his destiny seemed to be Sunday afternoons trailing Ruairi Canavan or Conor Laverty around the place.
He captained the club’s U14s to an All-Ireland Féile na nÓg title and then played corner-back on the Derry team that reached the All-Ireland minor final in 2017, only to run into the boy wonder himself.
A goal inside 50 seconds from David Clifford started off his record 4-4 tally for the afternoon. Derry found themselves swimming against a fearsome tide.
McGill quickly graduated into a blossoming Glen team and was wearing the number two for their ever senior final against Magherafelt three years ago.
Shedding weight has changed his footballing profile. He finds himself able to cover ground more easily, but admits that other aspects of the game have become more difficult.
“I do find myself, compared to what I was, a lot less strong. It does help with the running side of it, you get about the pitch a bit more, but to be playing that level of football you need to be up to it size-wise and strength-wise.
“It’s hard to balance it, even training. Most weekends, the lads are training and I’m away riding.”
Younger brother Dara is heading down the same path.
The interest was always there, with their great-grandfather and grand-uncles in Loughgiel having always been into horses and planted the seed with their own father.
He in turn passed it on to his boys at the farm where they live on the Upperlands side of Maghera. They keep a dozen horses. A few for racing, a few to be trained up and sold on in time.
Two winners on Building Bridges in the summer gave him a real taste for it.
Oran McGill is sold now on the life of a jockey.
