Dorans Pride at Clonmel: The Complete Story

Dorans Pride was a chestnut gelding foaled on 27 May 1989 in Ireland. He was by the sire Orchestra, out of the mare Marians Pride, with Pry as his damsire, and was bred by Hugh Suffern Bloodstock Ltd. He carried the colours of Tom Doran, and was trained throughout his big-race career by Michael Hourigan at Lisaleen, near Adare in Co. Limerick. Around the yard he was known as "Padjo."

His overall record is quoted differently depending on which starts are counted. Wikipedia lists 73 starts, 30 wins, 14 seconds and 10 thirds, with earnings of around £657,357. Contemporary obituaries put it at 27 wins from 62 races under National Hunt rules for close to £633,000, while Hourigan himself said the horse crossed the line in front 33 times in all once Flat races, a point-to-point and a charity race were added in. The totals differ by what is included rather than by any real dispute, so they are best read as "roughly thirty wins" rather than a single fixed figure.

From bumper winner to Festival champion

Hourigan bought and sold Dorans Pride on to Tom Doran in February 1993. The horse won a bumper at Ballinrobe and then made his way up through the hurdling ranks. The performance many remember him for came at the 1995 Cheltenham Festival, where he won the Stayers' Hurdle, then run as the Bonusprint Stayers' Hurdle. For a good number of racing followers that remains his signature day, the moment a genuine staying hurdler announced himself at the top level.

He did not stay over hurdles. Sent chasing, he matured into one of Ireland's leading staying chasers of the late 1990s. Across his career he won seven Grade 1 races in total, two over hurdles and five over fences, a tally that puts him among the better staying chasers of his generation. The headline chases included the 1998 Hennessy Cognac Gold Cup, the Irish Gold Cup, at Leopardstown, and the 1998 Ericsson Chase, also at Leopardstown. Along the way he added the Drinmore Novice Chase in 1996, the Kerry National in 1997, the Powers Gold Cup in 1997 and the John Durkan Memorial Chase in 1997. Few Irish chasers of the era had a fuller big-race CV.

The Cheltenham near misses

The one prize that got away was the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Dorans Pride ran into a place in it twice. He was third in both the 1997 and 1998 renewals, and the 1998 running was the agonising one: he was beaten less than two lengths behind Cool Dawn and Strong Promise after making a mistake three fences from home. On another day, with a cleaner jump at the third-last, the result might have read differently. He even showed his versatility on the level, finishing third at Royal Ascot in 2001, a rare Flat placing for a horse built for the winter game.

Character and temperament

What connections remembered most was his attitude. Dorans Pride was a tough, genuine, front-running stayer who, in Hourigan's words, "died doing what he loved most." When the yard tried to wind him down towards retirement, the horse would not have it; Hourigan told how he "just stood at the gate" waiting to go back into work. That willingness, the sense that the horse wanted the job as much as the people around him, is a large part of why he became such a favourite, and why the Clonmel crowds warmed to him year after year.

The Clonmel connection

It is against that career backdrop that the Clonmel record stands out. Four consecutive wins in the track's feature chase, from 1997 to 2000, all of them starting odds-on, made Powerstown Park the course most closely tied to his name. A reigning Gold Cup winner was among the horses he beat there. The wins were not the biggest of his life in prize-money terms, but their regularity, one a year, every year, for four years, turned an ordinary November fixture into an annual appointment with a local hero. The detail of those four races is the subject of the next section.

He should not be confused with his great rival Danoli, a bay hurdler-chaser known as "the People's Champion," nor with Imperial Call, the horse he beat at Clonmel in 1997, who has his own commemorative chase at Cork. His name appears as "Doran's Pride," with an apostrophe, in some sources, but the registered spelling is Dorans Pride.

Dorans Pride ran in Clonmel's feature chase four times, in November 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000, and won on every visit. That is his entire Clonmel record, and it is the whole of the horse who most defines the race. In his day the contest was run as the Morris Oil Chase; it has carried the Clonmel Oil Chase title only since 2003. The status was already what it is now, a Grade 2 steeplechase over roughly two and a half miles, run in November as the highlight of the track's jumps year.

The four wins

Every one of the four came at odds-on, which tells its own story about how the market and the crowd regarded him at Powerstown Park. The per-race detail below is drawn from his form record.

Year	Race	Jockey	Starting price	Winning margin	Runner-up	Ran
1997	Morris Oil Chase (Grade 2)	Richard Dunwoody	1/2f	9 lengths	Imperial Call	3
1998	Morris Oil Chase (Grade 2)	Richard Dunwoody	1/5f	35+ lengths	Merry People	4
1999	Morris Oil Chase (Grade 2)	P G Hourigan	4/5f	3.5 lengths	His Song	6
2000	Morris Oil Chase (Grade 2)	P G Hourigan	4/6f	2.5 lengths	Clash Of The Gales	8

The winning margins for 1997 and 1999 and 2000 are the official recorded distances. The 1998 figure is capped in the form record at "35+ lengths," so the precise official distance is not confirmed; what is clear is that it was a beating of enormous proportions, comfortably the widest of his four.

1997: beating a Gold Cup winner

The first win is the one that gave the sequence its weight. In a three-runner race Dorans Pride, ridden by Richard Dunwoody and sent off at 1/2 favourite, beat Imperial Call by nine lengths. Imperial Call was no ordinary opponent: he had won the Cheltenham Gold Cup only the year before, in 1996. To put a reigning Gold Cup winner nine lengths away, however small the field, was a statement of class, and it set Clonmel up as a track where Dorans Pride would take some beating.

1998: the demolition

The following November he returned and produced the most emphatic performance of the four. Again under Dunwoody, this time at the prohibitive price of 1/5, he won by a distance recorded as more than thirty-five lengths, beating Merry People in a four-runner contest. It was less a race than an exhibition, the sort of front-running rout that leaves nothing for the placed horses to do but finish.

1999 and 2000: closer, but still his

By 1999 and 2000 the winning distances came down, and the rides passed to P G Hourigan, the trainer's son. In 1999 Dorans Pride beat His Song by three and a half lengths at 4/5 in a six-runner race; in 2000, in the biggest field of the four with eight runners, he saw off Clash Of The Gales by two and a half lengths at 4/6. The margins were tighter and the fields a little larger, which is no surprise for a horse now getting on in years, but the outcome never changed. He remained odds-on, and he remained unbeaten in the race.

Why Clonmel suited him

Clonmel's Powerstown Park is a right-handed, undulating oval of about a mile and a quarter with a stiff uphill finish, seven fences to a circuit, and downhill sections that can ride heavy. It is a testing, front-runner-friendly track that rewards a horse who can gallop and jump from the front and keep going up the hill. That description fits Dorans Pride almost exactly. A tough, genuine, front-running stayer who wore rivals down was made for a course like this, and the record bears it out. Sources differ on the exact length of the run-in after the last fence, with one course guide giving around 150 yards and another two and a half furlongs, but on a stamina-sapping track the horse who is already in front and staying on is hard to peg back, and Dorans Pride usually was in front.

Four visits, four wins, one reigning Gold Cup winner beaten and one field demolished by a distance. No horse has matched it. Most successful trainer at the race is now Willie Mullins with ten wins, all since 2013, but the most successful horse remains Dorans Pride, and his four-in-a-row is a record that still stands.

Four wins over four years give a spoke like this more defining moments than most. Two of them stand above the rest: the 1997 win that put a Gold Cup hero in his place, and the 1998 rout that showed just how far clear of the local opposition Dorans Pride had moved.

1997: the Gold Cup winner comes to Clonmel

The context is what makes the 1997 running memorable. Imperial Call had won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1996 and was one of the best-known chasers in Ireland. When he turned up at Clonmel, the natural assumption might have been that a recent Gold Cup winner would set the standard. Instead he found a horse operating on a higher level that particular afternoon.

Dorans Pride, sent off at 1/2 under Richard Dunwoody, treated it as the front-runner's race it always was for him. He jumped, he galloped, and he came home nine lengths clear of Imperial Call in a small but high-class field. For a Grade 2 at a country track in November, beating the reigning Gold Cup winner by nine lengths is about as strong a piece of form as the race has ever produced. It is the win that gave the whole four-year sequence its authority, because from that day nobody could dismiss his Clonmel record as the product of weak opposition.

1998: winning by a distance

If 1997 was about the quality of the beaten horse, 1998 was about the sheer scale of the performance. Back at Clonmel a year on, and now at the near-unbackable price of 1/5, Dorans Pride produced the widest of his four wins. The official margin over Merry People is recorded only as "35+ lengths," the form book effectively giving up on measuring it precisely, which is its own kind of tribute.

A winning distance that large is rare in any graded chase. It happens when a genuinely top-class horse meets a field it simply outclasses and its jockey lets it stride on rather than take a pull. That is what unfolded here. There was no drama in the closing stages, no need for Dunwoody to get serious, just a champion staying chaser bowling along in front and drawing further clear with every fence. For the Clonmel crowd it was the afternoon that confirmed what the 1997 win had suggested: the best staying chaser to visit their track in years was treating the race as an annual exhibition.

The old fella and the Clonmel crowd

Beyond any single race, the lasting moment is the relationship itself. Dorans Pride started odds-on for all four runnings, and the local supporters came in numbers each November to see him, affectionately calling him "the old fella" as he got on in years. There are not many country fixtures where a single horse becomes the reason people turn up four years running, but Clonmel had exactly that. The wins in 1999 and 2000, closer on the clock, did nothing to dim it. He kept turning up, he kept starting favourite, and he kept winning, and the crowd kept coming to watch him do it.

That is the great moment that outlasts the individual results: an ordinary November race at Powerstown Park turned, for four seasons, into an appointment with a horse the crowd had taken as their own.

Dorans Pride's four wins in the Clonmel Oil Chase, then the Morris Oil Chase, are the record by which the race is measured. As the most valuable and most prestigious contest of Clonmel's year, its roll of honour carries big names, and plenty of good horses have won it once. Only one has won it four times. Willie Mullins has since become the race's most successful trainer with ten wins, and Paul Townend its most successful jockey, but the most successful horse remains Dorans Pride, and no runner has come close to matching his four-in-a-row.

That record still stands more than two decades on. For the race to be equalled, a horse would need to win it a fifth time across a career, and none has managed even a third. It gives Clonmel a permanent piece of history and gives the horse a permanent home there. When the Oil Chase is discussed, his name is the first that comes up, which is exactly what a signature-horse association should be.

The end at Cheltenham

His story closed on the hardest of days. On 13 March 2003, Gold Cup day at the Cheltenham Festival, Dorans Pride, by then a 14-year-old running in the Christie's Foxhunter Chase, fell at the second fence and was put down after breaking a hind leg. It was a cruel way for a tough, willing horse to go. Worse still for the Hourigan yard, stablemate Beef Or Salmon had fallen earlier the same afternoon in the Gold Cup itself. Hourigan later described it as the hardest day he ever had with horses. That the two blows landed within an hour of each other, on the sport's biggest day, only sharpened the loss.

A name that lives on

His memory was kept alive in the sport almost at once. The Dorans Pride Novice Hurdle, a staying novice hurdle run at Limerick's Christmas festival, was first staged in 2003 and named as a tribute to him. It has since grown in stature, upgraded from Grade 3 to Grade 2 in 2015, and its roll of honour includes the future Champion Hurdler Faugheen, who won it in 2013. A race named for a horse is the sport's way of saying he mattered, and this one has done well enough to keep his name in front of new generations of racing followers every winter.

The verdict is straightforward. Dorans Pride was a Cheltenham Festival winner, a multiple Grade 1 chaser and an unlucky Gold Cup also-ran, a career that would stand on its own without any of the Clonmel wins. But it is Clonmel that claims him most completely. Four Novembers, four wins, a beaten Gold Cup winner and a race demolished by a distance, all in front of a crowd that came specifically to see him. Powerstown Park has staged racing for over 150 years and will stage plenty more, but the four years it belonged to one chestnut gelding are among the ones it will not forget.