Ted Walsh maintains he was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, after being present during the raid of a farm in Kildare last Tuesday.
The farm in question, located near Monasterevin, was under investigation by Gardaí as well as Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board authorised officers before they raided the place last week. It was a terrible coincidence for Walsh that, on the same day and at the same time, he showed up at the farm with the intention of getting one of his horses treated for a tendon injury.
As it turned out, animal remedies which are banned for use in racehorses were seized at the farm and as Walsh says himself, it could make him guilty by association.
The officers’ suspicions were raised before they questioned Walsh about the reasons for his presence, which he explained in an interview with his RTÉ colleague Hugh Cahill on Sunday afternoon.
“It’s a bad old thing for racing. I’m sorry that someone as high profile as me in racing was even there. To cast a shadow on the game. I can’t do anything about that now. I drove in, I was there,” Walsh said.
“I rang the man in question a week or 10 days ago to ask the man when he was coming to Ireland again and he said he’ll be there the next Tuesday, in the usual place.
“I drove down Tuesday. The horse had a slight tendon injury and he had done similar job on horses for me before, most notably Seabass, who was second in the National, who got a tear on a tendon. That normally means rest, a lot of rest, but if you want to get a horse back a bit quicker… this guy scanned it and lasered it and got him back in six months rather than 12 months.”
“I put him back in the box and came home. I knew, as the fella says, ‘wrong place, wrong time’. I knew there was plenty of action going on. It would have been a lot easier if I wasn’t there…. You’re always half guilty by association if you’re in somewhere, aren’t you?”
“I wouldn’t have had a lot of contact but no one ever said to me, ‘you’d want to be careful of him’. Usually in the game someone would. I never heard any bad words about him.”
Walsh was scrutinised by his RTÉ colleague Cahill, who didn’t shy away from the hard questions.
"I'm fully convinced. I think I've stood the test of time for 71 years and I think I'll stand the rest of it as well."
Ted Walsh believes it will be shown he has done nothing wrong after admitting he was on the premises raided by Department of Agriculture officials on Tuesday. pic.twitter.com/SqKxs222WH
— RTÉ Racing (@RTEracing) November 14, 2021
“I have never in my life, nor my father before me, had a horse come up positive for anything.
“We’re old fashioned a bit that way. I often wish I had something to make them go f***ing quicker. Slow horses are slow horses.”
