Daniel King drove home from Galway after racing on Wednesday. Busy week, full-on. The celebrations could wait. He went to bed early and tried to sleep, but he couldn’t. How could you sleep?
He was up early on Thursday morning and into Willie Mullins’ to ride out. All the well-dones and good-mans and congratulations. It hadn’t really sunk in. A Galway Plate. Sure, Galway was part of his childhood, Galway was something that he watched on the television with his parents and his brothers when he was growing up. You couldn’t be thinking that you’d ride the winner of the Galway Plate.
The way that it happened too. Checking the declarations on Monday morning to see if his name was down beside anything in the Plate. A gap in the space reserved for the jockey’s name and the hope that his name could be in that gap. Then a text from his agent Garry Cribbin: King Alexander, thumbs-up emoji.
“I suppose I was hoping that I would get to ride one of Mr Mullins’ in the race,” says the jockey now. “But there are so many good jockeys there. You couldn’t be expecting it. I was actually expecting that I wouldn’t have a ride in the race. So I was obviously delighted when I got the text from my agent. I was so lucky, so grateful.”
Go back a little further, when he started going into Willie Mullins’ to ride out.
“When I lost my claim,” he says slowly, “I just thought that I needed to spread my wings a little bit. I was in Denis Hogan’s, and Denis has been so good to me. I was apprenticed to Denis when I was 16, and he has given me so many opportunities.”
He rode Frankie John for Denis Hogan to win the Latin Quarter Beginners’ Chase at Galway on Tuesday.
“Joey Sheridan gave me David Casey’s number.”
David Casey is a key cog in the wheel at Willie Mullins’, so he just picked up his phone and called him. He thinks it was a Monday afternoon. He was in Closutton riding out on Tuesday morning.
“David Casey was brilliant. He just said come in the next day, and I have been going in to Closutton one or two days a week ever since. It’s brilliant there, the people are so good, the staff, the riders. And top horses, top riders, you learn so much.”
He had never ridden King Alexander at home. He says that he had seen him, but he had never sat on him. Even so, horse and rider were in harmony from the moment that the starter dropped the yellow flag for Wednesday’s Galway Plate. Away sharply from the start and quickly into a racing rhythm, and that was crucial.
“His jumping was so good, I was able to sit on him after every fence, fill him up. He travelled so well for me down into the dip, to the final two fences, but it’s a long way home from there, so I sat.”
He could have kicked. Young rider riding in just his second Galway Plate, he could have had that adrenaline rush, he could have seen the headlines and kicked for home, but he didn’t. He may have young shoulders, but he has a calm head on them, so he sat still, allowed his horse pop the final fence and start the climb around the home turn, still up on the outside of the leader Nouvotic.
He gave his horse a squeeze as they rounded the crown of the turn, but he didn’t really go for him until they had fully straightened up. King Alexander responded, picked up and hit the front. He moved on ahead of the horses who were immediately around him, but then Conyer’s Hill finished off his race well, flush against the stands rail.
“I saw Conyer’s Hill and, to be honest, I wasn’t fully sure that we had held on. I thought we had, but I wasn’t sure. I had to have a look down to double-check my number, number 16. Then they called it, first number 16. That was unbelievable.”
He was 11 when he rode his first winner on the pony racing circuit, at Ballyferriter in the summer of 2016. By then, his older brother Connor had already been crowned champion apprentice jockey twice. Connor ultimately lost the battle with the weighing scales, but he was a hugely talented jockey, and he is now doing really well as a trainer with a small team of horses, headed up by Oscars Brother, who is now owned by JP McManus and whom Daniel rode to win a brace of Grade 2 chases last season.
“My parents were brilliant, taking us pony racing,” says Daniel. “Me and my brothers Connor and Rory. They drove us everywhere, all over the country. And pony racing is a great grounding. It’s remarkable now many of the top jockeys have come through pony racing.”
As if to illustrate the point, that day, the day that he rode his first winner at Ballyferriter, Danny Gilligan also rode his first winner on the pony racing circuit. And, in a curious twist of happenstance, between the two young riders, they have now won three of the last four renewals of the Galway Plate.
He started going into local point-to-point handler and pre-trainer Damian Murphy. He rode 99 winners on the pony racing circuit and took out his apprenticeship with Denis Hogan, but, deep down, he knew that it was in National Hunt racing that his future lay. In time, he would form alliances with John Ryan and Mark Molloy and Tony Martin and others.
“I always wanted to be a jump jockey,” he says. “Even when I was a kid, I loved watching National Hunt racing. And I always loved jumping.”
Currently sitting second behind Darragh O’Keeffe in the 2026/27 Irish National Hunt jockeys’ championship, he rode Putapoundinthejar for Tony Martin to win a handicap hurdle at Bellewstown in early July. After that race, the Galway Hurdle was the plan. Different to King Alexander in the Plate on Wednesday, he knew from a long way out that, all things being equal, Putapoundinthejar would be his ride in the Hurdle on Thursday.
“Tony has always been great to me. Ever since I started going in there. I rode Putapoundinthejar out during the week, and he felt great, so we were hopeful. But you need everything to go right. It’s special just to be riding in these races, to be going into them with a chance.”
It was a different ride to the King Alexander ride too. In behind and along the inside. He rode for luck, but when you are riding with confidence and when you have the talent and the horse, the luck follows you, the gaps appear. It was a sublime ride, up the inside around the home turn, switched in between horses on the run to the final flight. Now go. Putapoundinthejar scampered up the run-in and cleared away from his rivals.
“It was unreal. Honestly. It was hard to put it into words. It’s still hard to put it into words. I’m so lucky to have the support that I have from all these people.”
It was a rare double, the Galway Plate and the Galway Hurdle in the same year, in the same week. He is the first rider to complete that double since Joe Byrne completed it in 1984.
It still hasn’t sunk in.
© The Sunday Times, 2nd August 2026
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