Tracy’s just horsing about
RTÉ’s Dublin Horse Show presenter Tracy Piggott on her passion for ponies and the turf
NEVER let it be said that Tracy Piggott isn’t a consummate professional. In the week before her busiest time of the year —presenting at the Galway Races and Dublin Horse Show — she found herself in hospital with a torn ligament.
‘I twisted over on a step,’ she explains. ‘The timing couldn’t have been worse. I thought I’d broken a bone in fact, because I’d been feeling pretty sick and I usually get nauseous when I’ve broken something.’
Not that you’d be aware of Piggott’s ankle problem; painkillers or not, she is in flying form presiding over RTÉ’s racing coverage, just as she has done for nearly 30 years.
It is a comfort zone for Piggott for many reasons: her mother Susan Armstrong was an eventer, while her father is legendary jockey Lester Piggott. In fact, a spot of recent sleuthing turned up an unsurprising family revelation. ‘I got my dad’s family tree done recently, and it turns out that racing goes back in the family to the year 1627,’ she explains. ‘The only flat jockey was Daddy though… it’s been in my genes to go for jumpers.’
Perhaps not surprisingly, Piggott has been riding racehorses since she was 10 or 11, becoming a jockey herself in her early 20s. To this day, she rides the flat, lush plains near her home in Kildare.
‘It was kind of a way of life,’ she says. ‘I didn’t do it regularly, and then I had my daughter (Thea, now eight). A few years ago I decided to bite the bullet when a friend asked me, “when are you going to ride again?” and it was the best thing I ever did. You get a great connection with the animals, and riding each morning is brilliant for your headspace. I get my daughter off to school, get back home around 11am, and then jump on.’
Thea, too, is likely to follow in the family tradition, and recently started Pony Club.
‘She was a bit reticent, and I think in the beginning I was worried she wouldn’t like it, but now she adores it,’ reveals Piggott. ‘She went in Monday, went in Tuesday, and then on Wednesday, she broke her arm. But even though she couldn’t really ride at the beginning of the summer, she loves all this.’
Piggott gave birth to Thea at 42, while in a relationship with horse trainer Stephen Mahon. The two announced their split in 2008, when Thea was 10 months old.
By her own admission, Piggott says she thought she had ‘missed the boat’ on motherhood.
‘It’s late in life, 42,’ she muses. ‘I had a really good pregnancy and everything went fine, and I did all the tests to make sure she was alright.
‘It’s not ideal, I suppose, and I had thought I’d missed my chance. I had accepted that I wouldn’t have children. I was fine with that; I might have gone through the whole biological clock thing in my early 30s, but then it passed, in a ‘this is what’s meant to be happening to me’ way. I got pregnant quite quickly in the end, and it was probably the right time for me. I’d lived life and gone travelling.’
‘Stephen and I split when (Thea) was small, but he’s happy,’ she adds. ‘He’s in another relationship and had a couple more children. He had a son before we met and I remember him saying that it was the most amazing thing to have a child. And it is the greatest gift; she’s wonderful. She drives me mad as she can be opinionated and bossy.’
Thea, too, takes after her famous grandfather.
‘I like that she has certain traits of his,’ she says. ‘She has his naughtiness. They play games on the lawn, and I can see them both cheating when the other’s back is turned. It’s great for her to have these memories, as he’s 82 now. But we get on very well. He’s been a quiet man for a long time, but we both share a warped sense of humour. We like to bend the rules; I inherited that from him.’
Lester’s apparent fondness for breaking the rules has led to a tangled personal life. In among 11 champion jockey titles, 30 Classic victories and nine Derby wins, Lester was jailed for tax evasion, serving 366 days of a three-year sentence before walking out of prison and 12 days later winning the 1990 Breeders’ Cup at the age of 54. Despite being married to Susan for over 55 years, Lester also has a girlfriend, Barbara, with whom he lives in Geneva.
Tracy has the great highlights from his career etched on her memory. ‘I remember (the champion horse) Najinsky, of course in 1970, when I would have been five,’ she recalls. ‘I remember watching the Derby on TV with my pillow over my face. I remember they used to do replays of the races, and I’d see that Daddy had fallen off the horse, and I got really concerned, thinking that he had fallen all over again.’
As was the case with her father, Piggott herself has had to get used to media attention in her life away from the cameras, too.
The year before Thea was born, 2007, proved to be tough; she had to contend with her then fiancé’s conviction for animal cruelty — the Dublin circuit court ordered Stephen Mahon to pay more than €34,000 in damages to the owner of the horse he had mistreated. Then, the pair attracted further attention when they postponed their wedding, having to quash speculation their relationship was on the rocks. In 2010, over a year after they did eventually split, Piggott took out an injunction against Mahon, alleging that he had spread malicious falsehoods about her.
HOW did she feel about so much media attention being afforded to her personal life? ‘I think there’s a line you have to draw,’ she muses. ‘There have been rather unpleasant things, like when Stephen and I split up, that was horrible. I was quite frightened (by the media attention). I hadn’t experienced it before. I had in some way, with my dad and the jail thing, but not first hand. That was a bit weird.’
Yet Piggott is evidently tougher than she looks. While her father was in jail and her mother was on lifesupport following an accent, Piggott, then a jockey herself, won the Ladies’ Race in Leopardstown in 1988. In some small way, it would end up being the catalyst for her TV career.
‘I didn’t know what to do with my life at the time,’ she recalls. ‘I knew I wasn’t going to train racehorses as personality wise, it wouldn’t have suited me. After the Ladies’ Race I was doing an interview with Jonathan Irwin who ran the Phoenix Park (stud farm) who said, “you should think of doing TV or radio”. At the time, there was only one woman in RTÉ sports — Caroline Murphy.’
According to lore, Piggott walked into the RTÉ’s Sports Department without an appointment, and asked if the Head of Sport was there. Tim O’Connor brought her into his office to discuss her experience — negligible at the time. Six months later, he decided to take a punt on her, and the chance meeting has led to a varied career in sports journalism.
From horse racing, she moved onto rugby coverage, and punditry for the Olympics, which Piggott recalls as a ‘baptism of fire’. ‘Oh, my first Olympics was absolutely terrifying,’ she recalls. ‘It was so different to what I usually do and there was a real sense
of pressure as it was a big gig for RTÉ. But the people I worked with on the Olympics, and when I did the rugby, couldn’t have been kinder.’
Even before she started covering rugby for RTÉ she was a huge fan of the sport. ‘When I was in school I went out with a rugby captain, and that must have been the start of it,’ she smiles.
‘Eddie O’Sullivan was the (Ireland team) coach when I was covering rugby, and I did it in the era that people like Brian O’Driscoll, Peter Stringer and Ronan O’Gara were all starting out. It was a real privilege to watch them become legends. But these days I just do the racing, and I’m happy about it.’
Of course, live TV isn’t without its surprises, no matter how seasoned the star. In 2002, horse trainer Peter Casey was so overcome with emotion after his success at the Arkle Novice Chase at Leopardstown that he told Piggott: ‘It’s unreal, I can’t believe it. I’ll have f**king sex tonight.’ Needless to say, the moment went viral. ‘I remember thinking, “oh my God, he just said that live on air”. I was so shocked I couldn’t hear anything in my ear-piece,’ Piggott recalls. ‘It was quite funny though.
‘I remember another time I was doing a walking interview in Punchestown and unbeknownst to me, (jockey) Paul Carberry, who is married to one of my best friends, pinched me on the bottom. Someone caught it on camera. It’s pretty hilarious.’
It being a male-dominated realm, has she ever experienced sexism within sports journalism?
‘I always get asked this and I have never felt it,’ she affirms. ‘But I was brought up around a very male-dominated sport, and never felt anything like that.’
That said, the recent coverage surrounding revelations of the gender pay gap in RTÉ has not gone unnoticed: ‘It raises its head every so often, doesn’t it?’ she says. ‘We’re getting there, I think. It will happen, but it will take time. But it’s so great that that conversation is being had.’
Piggott admits were opportunities to open up in RTÉ to do more in-depth interviewing, she would jump at the chance. ‘I did a chat show for RTÉ years ago, and I got to chat with George Best, Jean Butler, James Nesbitt and Frank Kelly from Father Ted,’ she says. ‘That’s the sort of thing I loved, those one-on-one chats.’
For now, Piggott has other irons in the fire. ‘I love working for RTÉ and they’ve been so good to me, but it’s possible I’m not going to get a life on a yacht in the Mediterranean from them. It would be nice to strike gold with the businesses and drift off into my 60s. I like being challenged and keeping busy, and I have to say I’m really happy where I am.’
This, in itself, is a happy outcome for Piggott, who was vocal in the past about experiencing depression. ‘I know a lot of people who have gone through tough phases and have struggled.
‘I did too, and I’m glad in a way as it’s taught me to look after my own mental heath. These days, I know it’s important to eat right, surround myself with positive people and not work too hard. It’s about keeping everything in balance.’
O The Dublin Horse Show runs at the RDS until August 13. See dublinhorseshow.iee, rte.ie/sport