ITBA Wild Geese Award

If you bump into Edmond Mahony over the next few days at Park Paddocks and congratulate him on his ITBA Wild Geese Award, the chances are that it will be greeted with mild embarrassment and an assertion that there are other more deserving recipients out there. Mahony is famously averse to fuss. He has, equally famously, guided the good ship Tattersalls to extraordinary growth, even through some choppy waters, in his long-running tenure as chairman. There was the not insignificant matter of a global pandemic which somehow the bloodstock sector...

"I was speechless," says David Bowe of being presented with this year's Wild Geese Award at the ITBA's National Breeding and Racing Awards on Sunday night.  The award recognises Irish men and women who have forged successful careers in the bloodstock industry worldwide, and its recipients to date have included those working in Australia and America. Bowe didn't fly too far afield, though he did serve a stint in the States early in his career. For more than a quarter of a century he has been based just across the...

Dolphins swimming in the Venetian canals may have been pandemic fake news, but that the world will have benefited environmentally is one of the few upsides to the coronavirus crisis. What is not fake news is that many heads and livers will have been feeling better on Sunday morning than would otherwise be the case following the annual ITBA Awards, but that is the only benefit to missing out on what is always one of the social highlights of the racing year. Attendance at this event is not for the...