Under The Radar: McGivern's pedigree paying in more ways than one

Watching the race live, it looked like

Temperance

might not get a clear shot at it.  Travelling well but locked away on the far rail as the two-furlong pole flashed past.  Her jockey Chris Hayes was the only one of the seven riders who was still high in the saddle as he angled to come out, but there was no real gap there.

Then Jorge Alvares went forward, and that created the gap.  had at least a length and a half, maybe two, to make up on her old rival though, and they had just left the furlong marker behind them.  Up the final incline at Naas, and Hayes sat low in the saddle and asked his filly to pick up.  Temperance responded, joined the leader with 50 yards still to run and forged on to win by a half a length.

“I was delighted with her,” says Temperance’s trainer Katie McGivern now, reflecting on the performance.  “She really had to go and pick up the other horse.  She had to finish off her race.  I thought she’d have been winning her maiden before now.  On her homework, she should have been winning her maiden, but she kept bumping into one.”

She timed it right though, it was a good race for the Churchill filly to pick to get off the mark, a valuable handicap, €26,550 to the winner.

“I thought that she would win her maiden at Dundalk in February, but she was just beaten by Johnny Murtagh’s filly Songhai, who finished a close third in a listed race last week.  Then the race at Cork early last month didn’t work out for her, and I ran her back too quickly next time at Dundalk.  We rode her a little differently too on Saturday, so it was nice that it all worked out.”

Unsurprisingly, Temperance was bought as a breeze-up horse, but she needed more time. That’s the way with the majority of the horses who end up racing for McGivern, also supremo of Derryconnor Stud, a big player in the breeze-up scene. 

Derryconnor Stud topped the sale at the Goffs UK Breeze-Up Sale in April 2024 when the Havana Grey filly who would later be named Adrestia clocked a fast time and was sold to Anthony Stroud for £420,000.  Adrestia won twice last season as a juvenile for Simon and Ed Crisford.

“I love following the horses we have sold,” says McGivern, who has also been involved with Group One winner Helvic Dream and with Jersey Stakes winner and French 2000 Guineas runner-up Le Brivido.  “I get a big kick out of seeing them do well.”

She sold Daban at the Tattersalls Guineas Breeze-Up Sale in 2016 for 260,000 guineas, and Daban went on to win the Nell Gwyn Stakes as a three-year-old for John Gosden, and to finish third in the 1000 Guineas.

Daughter of ground-breaking jockey and trainer Joanna Morgan, and of the late Tommy McGivern, who was associated with top-class horses For Auction, Greasepaint, Drumgora and Irish Fashion, it would have been surprising if she did not have an innate affinity with horses.  She rode of course, but there was a greater depth to her interest in horses than just what happened on race day.

She always loved the training and the sales side of it, but remembers her mother’s riding days well.

“My sister and I would go off on our own at races when she was riding,” she says.  “I used to love The Bower.  He was my favourite horse that she rode.  But I remember then, in those days, you’d never have thought that you’d have a horse who would be good enough to run in some of those big races.”

When

So Majestic

won a three-year-olds’ handicap at Down Royal in June 2023, she registered  McGivern’s first win as a trainer.  So Majestic was another breeze-up horse, sold for €160,000 at Arqana in May 2022, bought back at the Goffs February sale in 2023 for €29,000.  

It took the Siyouni filly a little while, but, on her seventh start, she realised her objective and won that race, repaid her trainer’s faith in her.  Then in May last year, McGivern sent her to Naas for the Listed Sole Power Stakes and, allowed go off at 150/1, she finished third, beaten just three parts of a length by the winner Aesop’s Fables, and bagged some valuable black type.

“She always wanted fast ground, fast pace, so I thought that the race would suit her.  That’s the great thing about owning them ourselves, we can run them where we want to run them.  You can take a chance.  I got a bigger kick out of that than I got out of topping the sale with the Havana Grey filly.”

So Majestic proved that that was not a one-off when she finished third in a listed race at Ayr the following month.  Then she went to Cork in June last year, and chased home her stable companion Kendall Roy in a five-furlong handicap.  Two racehorses in the yard essentially, and they finish first and second in a premier handicap at Cork.

Kendall Roy was a breeze-up horse too – there’s a familiar refrain here – but, unsold at the Craven Breeze-Up Sale in April 2023, he is another who needed time, and who ultimately became what McGivern thought he could become.  Winner of a nursery at Naas on his fourth and final run as a juvenile, he won four five-furlong handicaps last year as a three-year-old, rising from a mark of 65 to a mark of 93.

Temperance was raised from a mark of 75 to a mark of 84 by the handicapper for Saturday’s win, but a hike of that magnitude was not wholly surprising.  She is a progressive filly who loves fast ground and who has the potential to improve again.

“I have her in the Listed race at Naas on Sunday over seven furlongs and in the Group Three race over six.  We’ll see.  She came out of Saturday’s race out-of-her-head fresh, so we’ll see how she is, but she loves fast ground so we might let her take her chance.”

The timing could be right.