Good evening, readers! He's had a 'horrendous' two years and friends told him to pack it in - now he's the viral trainer of the moment

Good afternoon, readers.

Brendan Duke's charmingly formal greetings at the start of his media engagements – which have since been hilariously parodied by mischievous jockey Rory Cleary – have gone viral in recent weeks.

Yet the 74-year-old trainer’s inimitable gaiety is not something many people in the sport expected to see being brought to a new legion of fans at this stage in his career, given he had seemed to be accumulating frequent flyer points to hell and back for far too long.

Duke has emerged swinging, though, with a remarkable resurrection born of extraordinary endurance.

He has saddled three winners since July 25 from just six runners. A fortnight ago, his record stood at three winners in the last four years. Three years ago, he was turfed out of his yard due to a rent dispute that descended into chaos. Fifteen years ago, he was in financial disarray after a precarious period training in Britain.

His jovial and theatrical demeanour is juxtaposed with the fact he is a stubborn and dogged survivor in a bruising game. Nothing can stand in the way of him training racehorses. Everything has already.

"Well, it certainly never makes sense," he assures me when I ask him if there has ever been a point when he had the blood-stained towel on standby.

"We've had a horrendous two years and I won't go too much into that, but I'd very few runners. I've had really sensible people come to me and tell me there's no way you'll keep this going. You've a lovely wife, two young children. You'll get a job, just give yourself a bit of ease and pack it all in.

"I just don't wave white flags. There was an opportunity to go and manage a racing operation a year and a half ago, but I'm driven to train horses."

He then gently leans forward on the living room sofa in his County Kildare home.

"I have never, ever wanted to pack this in," he says. "There's never been a day when I have. And I've had some really bad days. There have been days I've stood over the gallop not really knowing my own name."

Brendan Duke: 'I just don't show white flags'Credit: Patrick McCann (racingpost.com/photos)

There was also a time when a certain young and fast-emerging trainer from Clonsilla did not know his name either, and might never have but for a chance encounter at Leopardstown in December 1979. 

Jim Bolger had trained his first winner only 18 months before Duke spotted him in the car park before racing and decided to ask whether he would be interested in training a filly he bought as a foal for 220gns.

"I'd known a little bit about him," remembers Duke. "A good friend of my father's had a grain store in Smithfield. They had a stand on the Dublin market and Daddy used to buy around about 500 pigs every Wednesday for Donnelly’s bacon factory. That was his business. And he was telling Daddy about this guy out in Clonsilla who had a different outlook to training, feeding horses and managing horses. I was fascinated.

"Jim asked me why I wanted him to train her and I said it was because I thought he was going to be a champion trainer. I loved the way his horses looked and how fit they were. When I brought the filly down to him the following March, I asked him if I could ever give him a hand and he told me to come down whenever I liked.

"I asked him about training fees and he said, 'I have a runner called Exalted in the Victor Ludorum at Haydock Park and you have your first month's training fees on him, right?'

"I told him that I didn't back horses, that I didn't have much money and had a wife and two children. He told me if the horse got beaten, I'd have my first month's training fees paid."

Needless to say, Exalted won. After an IR£25 punt at 9-2 in the Crumlin village bookies, an ecstatic Duke rang Bolger and he ended up working for one of the most remarkable trainers the sport has seen for close to two decades.

Jim Bolger: master trainer was Duke's bossCredit: Patrick McCann (racingpost.com/photos)

"We just hit it off," says Duke. "He was, and is, unbelievably brilliant to me. At the start, I kept a few cattle for the winter and he used to get the guys to put all the waste feed in bags and I'd get the feed for the cattle. He was really decent to me, and is still really decent. 

"He’s unbelievably loyal. He's also really demanding, particularly if he thinks you have any kind of ability. He's always striving for perfection and trying to teach you. But I was in Jim's from the early 80s to the late 90s and I loved it. I loved being around him, loved listening to him, everything about him."

'To my dying day, I'll always see Jim catching him by the colours'

I am tentative at the prospect of awakening too many sleeping tangents, but it is hard not to share in Duke's penchant for one when in his company. I ask whether Exalted was the last horse he backed and am soon strapping myself in.

"A horse I backed was Auntie Molly, the crooked 220gns filly," he says. "She was running in the O'Brien Cup at Tralee and Jim told me a week before the race that she'd win.

"I arrived at Tralee like the Procol Harum, a whiter shade of pale. Jim pulled alongside me in the car park and asked if I was all right. I'd put aside a fiver whenever I had it in the Crumlin post office. I had IR£360 ready to back her. I walked down to the ring, and my filly was 2-1 favourite. I wasn't close with Jim at that stage and I told him I wouldn't be backing her as she was favourite. 

"He just looked at me and said, 'Sorry?! I'll see you in the parade ring.'

"Her rider Declan Gillespie came into the parade ring and started cutting the heads off the dandelions with his stick. He said, 'Jim, I told you we should have run her at Dundalk last week, she's in season now and we don't know what way she's going to run.'

"To my dying day, I'll always see Jim catching him by the colours, like this [he furiously clutches each side of his own collar with his hands and yanks himself forward].

"Jim pulled him over and said, 'We're taking it that it won't affect her whatsoever, are you listening?!' I walked down to the ring and she was 14-1 with the late Sean Graham as people had heard she was in season. 

"I put the IR£360 on her and of course she won. That's when my link with Jim really started. I was so grateful to him and he was absolutely delighted for me. I said if I live to be as old as Methuselah, I'll never have a bet like that again."

Brendan Duke with two-year-old filly Sword Of State, one of his recent winnersCredit: Patrick McCann (racingpost.com/photos)

Given his productive relationship with a trainer who was already teetering on the brink of the legendary status he holds today, it strikes as peculiar that Duke would jump ship to start from scratch in Britain. His wish-list did not have room for comfort or stability; it could bear the weight of only one heavy aspiration.

Duke says: "I told Jim I was leaving, as I wanted to train. He said, 'Look, Brendan, aren't you training horses here? There's over 100 horses here to be trained. I'm carrying the can, you have no worries. This is really hard, Brendan, really hard. You're getting some money, stay where you are and work away. Is it the bright lights you're after?'

"No-one ever treated me the way Jim did, but I really wanted to train horses and Charlie Mann was looking for a head man and assistant trainer. I said I'd have a look and see the feasibility of starting up in Britain."

'I was under real pressure financially'

After a successful year with Mann, Duke set up in Lambourn in 2001. His final year in 2011 was his most successful by some way with seven winners, but keeping the lights on had become a futile exercise. 

A well-known ex-trainer told him on one occasion that his aversion to "lining one or two up" would ultimately lead to him crumbling financially, and Duke concedes that, in retrospect, he was right.

"The problem I ran into in Britain was money, specifically prize-money," he says. "I went to the BHA in London on the train from Newbury one day to talk to them about the impossibility of keeping things going with the levels of prize-money and how open it was to corruption. They told me they understood, but they didn't get it.

Charlie Mann: had Brendan Duke under his wing before our interviewee took out his own licenceCredit: Matthew Webb

"We know about the episodes of corruption in British racing at the time. But the level of prize-money lent itself to something like that happening.

"I had a horse who got a touch of a leg and between myself and Michael O'Gorman, a fantastic vet, we got him back. At this stage, I was under real pressure financially. 

"We got him ready to run and he was running in the last race in Kempton. He ran his heart out and finished second, and I was back in the yard at midnight. It had cost £7,240 to get the horse back between minding him, vets, everything else, and he got £124 for being second. I came home, and I said, 'I just can't do this any more.'"

Roicead got Duke off to a flyer on his return to Ireland in 2011, winning three sprint handicaps and rocketing from a rating of 74 to 108. Although he was a curious type who took a bit of minding – Duke recalls how plenty thought he was a "lunatic" for getting someone in to do Reiki treatment with him every week – the trainer believed he had a King's Stand winner on his hands for the following year.

It was a familiar case of one step forward, two back, however, as Roicead was removed from his care when the relationship with his owner soured because of a disagreement over where the sprinter would spend the off-season and Duke's unflattering appraisal of a crop of jumps horses by the owner's stallion.

Roicead and Willie Supple win for Brendan Duke at the Curragh in May 2011Credit: Caroline Norris (racingpost.com/photos)

Over the next few years, the man who gave Duke his start in racing supplied him with some key ammunition.

Duke is one of the few trainers to saddle winners in the famous Jackie Bolger silks and Warm The Voice was a splendid flagship horse for him. The son of Vocalised landed a maiden and two nurseries and finished third behind Saxon Warrior in the Beresford Stakes in 2017 before being sold to Hong Kong.

That was the last time Duke had a regular slot on our airwaves, so for many younger viewers or newcomers to racing, this current spectacular run of form is their first taste of the affable veteran and, in this age of social media, his eccentric personality and bombastic dictation have made going viral an inevitability. 

'No matter what horse comes into the yard, I tell myself this is going to be the one'

Duke's training career has sailed close to the wind at several junctures, but finite adversities have always been swallowed up by infinite hope. An eternal optimist, he still hops out of bed at 4am every day secure in the knowledge he is capable of excelling with a gem if he happens upon one. 

He says: "I'm seriously religious, as is Shirley [his wife]. I say a few prayers every day. The minute I put my arse in that car in the morning at 4.15am, I just say thanks that I woke up.

"Parts of the last couple of years have been really bad. I do believe He doesn't make it easy but that He'd never let anything really horrendous happen. I'm seriously optimistic. No matter what horse comes into the yard, I tell myself this is going to be the one. Until the day comes, I'll live with that illusion. 

"I remember Jim saying to me one day, 'If I’d two more with an engine as big as you, I would be absolutely flying!'

"Regardless of what people think – and some haven't a clue about you or the reality of what you're training or dealing with – the few really good horses who I have had in my life, I was able to train them: Roicead, Warm The Voice, Openide, Leagan Gaeilge. I didn't miss those horses. And the horses Jim sent me, I did really well with – I won with them and I got them sold."

Leagan Gaeilge with Una and Kevin Manning, Sean Flanagan, Jim Bolger and Brendan Duke after winning at Leopardstown in December 2019Credit: Caroline Norris (racingpost.com/photos)

In Gowran Park maiden winner Sword Of State, Duke has another long-awaited opportunity to show that he can hit the bullseye if the point is sharp enough.

"She'd spot an insect on a branch at 400 metres," he smiles. "She's bright. Any good horse I ever worked with has been bright; they've had some kind of a little quirk in them.

"We'll probably go to the Curragh on Sunday. It's a race with a very good tradition, despite it not being a black-type race. Martin [Hayes, co-owner] and the guys are going to the Breeders' Cup and she's very quick around bends, very well balanced. It would be a dream for us. 

"I have it in my head – perhaps foolishly but I'll just say what I'm thinking – that if she wins at the Curragh, we might get an invite to the Breeders' Cup."

After such a spell waiting out in the cold, well-wishes have poured in for Duke as his London buses, Sword Of State, Zheleznaya Dama and Canon Law, arrived at the same time. 

I ask about the most satisfying aspect of it all, giving him ample opportunity to deservedly champion his own resilience. But he does not bite.

Zheleznaya Dama and connections after winning at Naas on MondayCredit: Caroline Norris (racingpost.com/photos)

"I'm very lucky that I have a wife who absolutely loves me beyond words and is quite prepared to let me do this," he says. "We have two beautiful children, Amy [8] and Adam [12], and I have a deal with your man upstairs that He'll leave me here until they're in their teens. 

"I've a huge sweet tooth and I've cut down enormously and try to keep myself as fit as I can. The longer into their teens they are, the better they would cope with me not being here. 

"The big joy in the last week has been how absolutely elated they've been that Daddy had a couple of winners. You might have noticed Adam got the prize at Naas and Amy got the prize at Gowran. 

"We were sitting up in Gowran Park in the winning connections' bar and Adam and Amy are having their Coca-Cola with myself, Shirley, Martin and Peter [Slezak, co-owner].

"Amy turns around and she says to Martin, 'Well, Martin, that guy is not just the best Daddy in the world. He's also a really, really good trainer.'

"It's like someone handed you gold dust. After the time we've been through and sticking at it, it just means an awful lot."

I often wondered who Duke was trying to prove himself to whenever he peeled himself off the canvas to go again. Now a few stars have finally aligned, it is clear whose approval he was craving the whole time.

Maybe that moment was the bright lights Bolger said he began pursuing all those years ago.

Racing Post+ Ultimate subscribers can read more interviews here:

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'It was brutal when it didn't work out - but I don't feel sorry for myself and I don't expect anyone else to feel sorry for me' 

'I still feel I'm the equal of any other jockey - but I'm not in the right place at the moment' 

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