Shergar, Horse Racing’s Very Own Lord Lucan - RSN927

2022-06-11 01:25:29 By : Ms. Ray Ho

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In 1981 and presumably to this day, a sign on the railing at the entrance to Ballymany Stud in County Kildare politely asked visitors to “please close the gate.”

It was dark irony that the four masked, gun-toting, rumoured IRA operatives who pulled up at the stud at 8.30pm on a Tuesday night in 1983, and stole Shergar – and later machine-gunned him to death and dumped his body in a bog – did just that.

They closed the gate behind them. As they say, the horse had bolted.

The horse thieves first entered a house across a small road where they locked groom Jim Fitzgerald’s wife and kids in a bedroom then marched Fitzgerald to Shergar’s box and ordered him to load the horse and himself into the back of a van.

The van disappeared into the night and the 1981 Epsom Derby winner was never seen again.

There are so many extraordinary twists in the Shergar story, making it probably the greatest sport-related scandal of all-time.

The Epsom Derby will be run again this weekend and there has not been an edition since 1983, the year Shergar was stolen, when the great lingering mystery has not been raised.

Funny enough, the insular Yanks don’t seem to have heard of Shergar.

You can google dozens of “world’s greatest sporting scandal lists” and not one mentions Shergar.

American football, baseball and basketball have been riddled with scandals; doping, thrown games, bribed officials, unseemly off-field behaviour.

The “Black Sox Scandal”, where eight Chicago White Sox players threw the 1919 World Series tops most lists.

There have been summer and winter Olympic scandals – none greater than the smashed knee delivered to Nancy Kerrigan by a thug hired by rival Tonya Harding – and also Ben Johnson and in the wider world of sport, Tiger Woods and his 13 mistresses, Lance Armstrong’s EPO habit, Hansie Cronje’s betting, Fine Cotton’s identity crisis, Diego Maradona’s “Hand Of God” and OJ Simpson’s dash across LA in a white SUV.

None really compare to Shergar, a story so layered you forget what you knew or learn something new when you revisit it.

Four hours after the kidnapping, a blind-folded Fitzgerald was released just outside of Dublin. He wandered to his brother’s house nearby wondering what he would tell the boss, the Aga Khan.

This was a most unusual situation. “Boss, guess what happened?”

Instructions were clear: “We want two million pounds if you want the horse back in one piece.”

The Agha Khan refused to pay the ransom because Shergar had been subdivided into 35 stud shares, making a quick ransom impossible.

Piggott aboard Shergar in the Irish Derby pic.twitter.com/TLUU2hRtwu

— Sports & Betting History by BestBettingSites (@CDCHistory) June 1, 2022

The thugs would negotiate only with two news reporters, and later a stud master. There were code names and proposed drop offs. At one stage photos of Shergar alongside a very recent edition of The Irish News were dumped at a pub, to prove the world’s most famous four-legged hostage was still alive.

The ransom demands became increasingly haphazard and impossible. One requested payment in 100-pound notes, which did not exist, another for payments into a French bank long after the bank had closed.

Over 50 clairvoyants, psychics and diviners had joined the expansive search for Shergar.

There were jokes. A “witness” claimed to have seen Lord Lucan riding Shergar down a country lane.

One media outlet claimed that Libyan dictator General Gaddafi had helped the IRA steal Shergar.

In the weeks after Shergar was stolen, a horse trainer who claimed IRA contacts told police he had received a current photo of Shergar and a revised ransom note for 80,000 pounds.

The deal was that a car would be left in a remote village with the loot in the boot and once the thieves had claimed it, Shergar would be released.

Alas, when police returned to the car, the loot was gone and Shergar was still missing.

The weeks, months and years dragged on.

Sir Michael Stoute had made an impassioned plea to the thieves for Shergar to be returned, to no avail.

The IRA was the prime suspect because it cost a lot of money to wage war on the British. They’d taken human hostages before and successfully demanded ransoms.

In 1999 a former IRA operative named Sean O’Callaghan claimed to have bene part of the kidnapping of Shergar. He said the horse had been killed within days, saying operatives had no idea how to deal with a flighty horse, panicked and gunned him down in a barn.

O’Callaghan said Shergar had then been buried somewhere in County Leitrim, in a bog.

One of the saddest aspects of the Shergar story is that the IRA had reportedly ordered his safe return to Ballymany just days after he was taken but intense media focus had made the kidnappers skittish and trigger happy.

There has never been a less believable, but true, racing story than Shergar. There has never been a horse with greater mystique.

They will be whispering his name at Epsom Downs this weekend.

Posted in Featured, Horse Racing News, Matt Stewart, Racing, Racing News

Tagged Horse Racing, horse racing news, Lester Piggott, Shergar

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