Galway Races Results | Galway Festival Winners

© Photo Healy RacingThe Galway Races are almost upon us once more, with seven days of thrills and spills at Ballybrit for one of Ireland's most treasured summer sporting traditions.

The Galway Races became synonymous with the Celtic Tiger era in Ireland, when everything was done to excess and marquees and betting rings were seemingly awash with cash.

The Celtic Tiger era

The Galway Races experience perhaps peaked in the late 1990s and early part of this century, up to the global economic crash around 2007, when the atmosphere of partying like never before in Ballybrit ground to a halt.

Helicopter arrivals and vast expenditure were commonplace, with off-track activity mostly concerned with all-night poker marathons and all-day drinking sessions for the cash-rich property developing generation.

The good times rolled but they came to an abrupt halt in 2008 when incoming Taoiseach Brian Cowen suggested it would be "inappropriate" to be associated with excess in a time of harsh financial worry for so many.

So ended the golden era of the Galway Races, though the Ballybrit festival is now thriving once more, with some extra restraint and a bit less bling than in day gone by.

The King of Ballybrit

© Photo Healy RacingDermot Weld was, for a generation, the King of Ballybrit. The trainer prioritised this meeting above most others, at a time when some of his peers frowned in the direction of the great Galway gathering in high summer.

Weld has enjoyed well over 500 winners at Galway in his time. He was crowned leading trainer at the Galway summer festival on 30 occasions and won races at the course with subsequent Classic stars such as Grey Swallow and Go And Go.

Weld first tasted success at Galway as a 15-year-old rider when partnering Ticonderoga to win the big amateur race at the festival in 1964.

Galway gambles recalled

The Galway betting ring has seen more than its share of major coups landed - and plenty thwarted - down the years.

'Strong word' for a horse in Galway can spread like wildfire and it seems to carry more credence in Ballybrit than it does elsewhere.

The Jessica Harrington-trained Oh So Grumpy (1994) was heavily punted before scoring a landmark hurdles win for the Moone-based handler in the early stages of her career, while Cloone River bagged the Galway Hurdle for Paul Nolan in 2004.

Second to Sabadilla in 2003, Nolan resolved to protect the eight-year-old's revised 6lb higher handicap mark by not running him over hurdles for a year.

In that time he improved on the Flat and having traded at 12/1 ante-post, the money flooded in on raceday and he returned the 7/2 favourite. He nearly got brought down early on but survived to win well.

The aforementioned Weld was another that knew how to land a Galway touch. Ansar won a handicap on the opening day of the 2001 festival and the 12lb penalty incurred was enough to snare him a place in the Galway Hurdle.

Paul Carberry partnered him and he won at 6/1, with Weld confirming after that he had devised the elaborate plan to win both races far in advance.

Ansar won seven times at the Galway Races, on the Flat, over hurdles and over fences, and twice managed to snare two races in the same year.