In the opening scene of Five Stone of Lead there is a close-up of Dylan Browne McMonagle pounding a punch bag in a boxing gym, his fists rattling against the leather like hailstone. When tiredness slows the frequency of the punches, he leans his head into the bag and dredges the floor of his stomach for whatever is left, not stopping.
In the next scene, McMonagle is sitting alongside his sister on the family couch, transfixed by the telly, the flanks of his head shaved, a fringe of sandy hair combed above his handsome face like a boyband singer from Central Casting.
The scene is overlaid with McMonagle’s voice from an interview off-screen. “The dream is to be champion jockey just,” he says. “That’s it.”
He was 12 years of age when Five Stone of Lead was made, 10 years ago now. The British filmmaker Jonny Madderson was in Donegal on a golf project with Paul McGinley when McGinley’s dad Mick told him about pony racing over dinner one night. Madderson’s interest was piqued.
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The biggest pony races are held on beaches along the west coast and within weeks, Madderson landed in Glenbeigh with a film crew. “We knew the night before the race that all the kids were basically going to be in this pub,” Madderson says now, “and we said we’d go along and cast one of them there.
“I remember it so well. All these kids were there, all lovely kids, and we met their families and stuff. And then Dylan walked in. He was tiny, so much smaller than the other kids, but you know when you meet somebody who has just got a presence. There was a touch of James Dean about him. You see him back then and he’s got a cool haircut and he’s got just a swagger about him.
“I asked him about his horse, which compared to him was absolutely enormous, and he said he was ‘a wee lamb’. Dylan was the underdog which was part of the attraction. I felt like he was this little Rocky. He was going for it basically. The horses running on the beach is a really visceral thing and we knew it was going to be a visual, cinematic film. We just needed someone to lead it.”
McMonagle walks into the weighing room at Cork racecourse on a workaday Wednesday, the gusting wind playing hell with his fringe. With a couple of months left in the season he is leading the Flat Jockeys Championship by half a dozen winners, making him an odds-on shot with the bookies to lift his first title. Every time he’s asked about it now, though, he takes refuge in his 12-year-old self and deflects it as a dream still.
Most childhood dreams have short lives. Reality is intrusive and fantasy has weak borders. With McMonagle, though, there have been no injunctions along the way, or at least nothing that knocked him off course. He continued to be what everyone imagined he would be.
The film reached a huge audience on YouTube and some of the most influential people in racing posted about it on social media. One of them was AP McCoy, the 20-time champion jumps jockey in Britain. Out of the blue, McCoy’s wife Chanelle made contact with Madderson.
“She said AP has seen your film and he sees something of Dylan in himself,” says Madderson. “He’s so impressed with Dylan’s courage and grit and we’d love to help him.”
They made contact with McMonagle’s parents and McCoy wrote him a long letter that was put under the tree with his presents on Christmas Day. The gist of it was that he wanted McMonagle to spend time with him at his home in England and mentor him.
“I went over for a week the following March,” says McMonagle now. “Went to Ascot with him, went hunting, did loads of different things. I met plenty of new contacts that I still speak to now. I met Sheikh Fayed [head of Qatar Racing], Oisín Murphy, David Redvers, Salvo Giannini, who had a couple of horses in AP’s pre-training yard. He sponsored me pony racing for a couple of years.
“AP was great for giving advice riding-wise and what I should do going forward and where I should go. He was the one that said to me I should go to Joseph’s (O’Brien). That led to something great.”
By the time he arrived in O’Brien’s as a 16-year-old, he had ridden more than 200 winners on the pony racing circuit and his reputation had scorched a path before him. “I don’t follow pony racing at all,” says Kevin O’Ryan, the broadcaster and jockey’s agent to many of the top riders, including McMonagle. “But you were reading about Dylan Browne McMonagle in The Irish Field every week riding four-timers and five-timers and trebles.”
But there are child prodigies in every sport and many of them flash across the sky like a comet. “A lot of the kids that have success and get attention when they’re very young, it just fizzles out,” says Kevin Blake, the commentator and race planner in O’Brien’s yard.
“I try to help out all the young fellas in the yard as best I can but he just kind of copped on. He had this level of intelligence and sharpness. I would have been sending him notes on races he was riding in, just to help the process along and get him thinking about it. But the thing you realised very quickly with Dylan was that it wasn’t really necessary, he was doing it all himself. At that age, that’s so rare.”
McMonagle’s progression was handled with care. In another yard he might have flown through his apprentice’s claim in jig-time, but in O’Brien’s yard nobody gets ahead of themselves. When McMonagle reached a certain threshold of winners in his first season as an apprentice, they applied the brakes so that he was guaranteed a second season as an apprentice.
But they couldn’t shield him from everything. McMonagle was just 18 when he rode Baron Samedi for O’Brien at Ascot on Champions Day in 2021. Holding his racing line around the home turn he pushed Frankie Dettori wide on the favourite, Stradivarius. Dettori eventually finished third and was furious. Immediately after the race he branded McMonagle’s ride “a disgrace”. With insufferable arrogance, he referred to McMonagle as a “kid” rather than by his name.
Everything that involves Dettori is amplified and in racing’s little village his outburst made headlines for days.
“I shared a taxi with Dylan to the airport afterwards,” says Blake. “He obviously told me what happened and I couldn’t believe how cool he was about it. I’m not saying he should have been angry, but he would have been entitled to be angry.
“Put yourself in that scenario when you’re that age. You’re in an unfamiliar weighing room where at that time, he would have known very few and this absolute legend of the sport is standing over you giving you dog’s abuse even though you did nothing wrong. He did the right thing in the race. Frankie was trying to take a liberty with him and he didn’t let him do it.
“I was super impressed with him because a lot of young lads at that age would have completely lost the head or completely retreated into themselves and been rattled by it. He just wasn’t fussed by it, as if nothing had happened. Frankie apologised in due course and all was forgiven, but it was not an appropriate situation for him to be put in.”
Ask McMonagle about it now and he answers with a veteran’s diplomacy. “I was only a baby at that stage,” he says. “I was only starting off, so there was not much I could have said. Less is more sometimes. When you say nothing, it’s better.”
In his early teens, McMonagle continued to box. When he was 12, he weighed less than five stone, but over the years he amassed five Ulster titles in his weight division and one national title. If you’ve ever seen him ride a close finish you can imagine him in the ring.
“The mental side of it was great,” he says. “And the discipline. Boxing teaches you so much. Boxing was a big help to me in school too. You’re able to stand up for yourself. When you’re going to the National Stadium to fight a big lad, you know you have to be doing more than the fella across the ring or you’re going to get your head taken off.”
In Five Stones of Lead, there is a scene on the beach in Glenbeigh where the jockeys are gathered before the race and McMonagle is dwarfed standing alongside the others.
“Them boys are the best in Ireland,” he said later. “Bigger and stronger and taller and older. You have to make yourself as big and competitive as you can.”
The size of the fight in the dog. Nothing else mattered.
