Jonjo & A J O’Neill

Everyone who has anything to do with racing knows who Jonjo O’Neill is. He has been successfully training racehorses for 3 decades, and was a champion jockey before that, winning 900 races and taking part in a whole lot more.

He trained horses on his own license from 1986 onwards, with more than 2,400 wins to his name, but it was when he moved to his state of the art yard, Jackdaws Castle, in 2001 that he really began to fly. In 2024, he brought someone else onto his license. His son, AJ O’Neill.

AJ was an amateur jockey, but training horses is where his real interest lies, and he had been working as his father’s assistant for three of four years before the pair announced the joint venture. Jonjo called it a “natural progression”, and since he was 72 at the time, it seems AJ was being lined up to take over rather than just become a partner. Initially, his job was to bring ‘new energy and new ideas’ to the stable, and since he trained his first Cheltenham winner in the year he started, you could probably say he did a good job.

Their first Grant National attempt as a pair was a bit of a damp squib. Their horse, Monbeg Genius, was always behind and jumped awkwardly, eventually pulling up at the 28th.

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