Tony Martin has endured the downside of National Hunt racing this year, losing more than a dozen of his string to mortality. But the Trim man has high hopes that he will be back in the winner's enclosure at some of the winter season's biggest meetings.

There's no place for sentimentality in the racing game. Its heroes cursed by fragility, racing can be robbed of its top performers at any moment. Tony Martin, based just outside Summerhill, has forged a reputation for plundering some of the sport's biggest pots. That he has done so with horses who may have been regarded as short of top class - managing to extricate the best from his charges through an unparalleled understanding of the handicapping system - only adds to his allure.
Often, though, racing brings you back down to earth with a bump. It is a game in which hope is the dominating sentiment. Whether it's a midweek Thurles maiden hurdle, or the biggest occasions at Cheltenham or Aintree, no sooner has a horse crossed the finishing line but talk inevitably turns to the future. For several of Martin's string, though, fate robbed them of that future in recent months.
"It's been a good and bad year," he says. "We had plenty of winners but we had a few hard luck stories as well. We lost more than a dozen horses and we had high hopes for a few of them, like Clarified, Drumconvis and Robin Du Bois. So that's hard enough to take but you just have to get on with it. We have a few nice young horses to look forward to."
Foremost among those are Northern Alliance, who lifted the Kerry National at Listowel in September, and Psycho, an unlucky loser in two of the calendar's most prestigious handicap hurdles over the past couple of seasons.
"Northern Alliance is a lovely horse to have and hopefully he'll carry the flag for us this year. He could be fairly good but he's probably a few pounds below Graded class. You don't know if he'll be able to find that next 10, 12 pounds of improvement but he could, he's an eight-year-old now and the age could help him.
"Psycho won a nice hurdle at Punchestown at the start of the season and he's going novice chasing. He's been very unlucky a couple of times - in the County Hurdle [at Cheltenham in March 2008], things just went wrong for Paul [Carberry, his jockey] on the day, and then this year he was just beaten in the Pierse Hurdle when the weights rose on the day of the race. He ran in a point-to-point before he ever went on the track for us so chasing should suit him, and he's jumped fences well at home."
While Northern Alliance and Psycho are still patently on the upgrade, there must be doubts on that score over another of the standard-bearers for the Tony Martin regime in recent seasons - one which, by its name alone, will be of interest to readers of the Meath GAA Yearbook. Royal County Star won Meath's most illustrious race, the Troytown Handicap Chase at Navan, in 2007 and subsequently finished second in the Irish National. He turns 11 on January 1st but Martin is hopeful that the Dunsany Racing Syndicate-owned chestnut can still land another decent pot before his career draws to a close. "He ran an absolute blinder in the Kerry National this year," he says. "We were lucky to have the fella who won it [Northern Alliance] as well but you'd hope he'll still have another big day at some stage."
Royal County Star was unlucky to come up against a classy, in-form lightweight in Hear The Echo in the Irish National of '08, but Martin has experienced the highs of winning the premier event on the Irish calendar. Davids Lad managed that feat in the summer of 2001, stealthily picking off the front-running Rathbawn Prince after the last under a perfectly-judged ride from Timmy Murphy.
Martin had initially made his name as an amateur jockey of some repute, having spent time with Oliver Sherwood in England and Michael Cunningham, Clem Magnier and Ted Walsh here, winning the Irish amateur championship on two occasions. In 1999 he enjoyed perhaps his finest hour in the saddle, getting the Michael Hourigan-trained Deejaydee home by a neck in the National Hunt Chase at Cheltenham. That it was an Irish winner on St Patrick's Day only heightened the sense of occasion.
By that stage, he was already making a splash as a handler. Hollybank Buck won the Leopardstown Chase before launching a successful raid on the north of England to win Newcastle's Eider Chase. She's Our Mare had won seven races under his watch and, within two months of Deejaydee's win, Martin would saddle her up for wins in valuable handicap hurdles at Fairyhouse and Haydock. The following year, there was the unusual sight of a Meath man celebrating in top and tails as Barba Papa won at Royal Ascot.
All those wins had one thing in common: they came in handicaps, and the reputation as a handicap specialist soon attached itself to Martin. He insists, though, that it's not something he worries too much about. "Whichever races suit the horses, that's where they go," he says. "A lot of them are only fit to win handicaps anyway, so it's better to go for a valuable pot rather than the lesser ones."
He would love the chance to train a champion, and he believes Xenophon was the closest he has come so far. An impressive winner of the Coral Cup as a six-year-old, Xenophon pre-empted the fate of Drumconvis by sustaining a fatal fall in the Irish National a year later. "He was very good," says Martin, "probably the best horse I've trained. He fell two out in the Irish National and he was probably going to win. He had a bit of class and I think he'd have gone all the way to the top."
Before the track and the gallops claimed his full focus, Martin was a promising hurler and footballer for his native Trim. Hurling was in his blood - he has strong family links to one of Kilmessan's most renowned hurling families, the Donnellys - and he went on to represent the county before horses took him in a different direction. Twenty years or more down the line, he was back in action at Simonstown in November when the jockeys took on the trainers in a charity football game in aid of Temple Street Children's Hospital.
"It was a bit of fun," he says. "There were a lot of lads who would have been fairly handy - it was probably more like a junior or intermediate club game. The referee was Andrew Shaw - he's the National Hunt handicapper as well but he's very fair, as both a referee and a handicapper!"
Incidentally, Martin was Man of the Match at Simonstown. On and off the track, it seems, the competitive edge is alive and well. Tweet

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