Born on March 22, 1948, William ‘Bill’ O’Gorman is a former racehorse trainer, latterly of Seven Springs Stables, on the Hamilton Road in the Newmarket. After 30 years in the training ranks, O’Gorman effectively ‘retired’ in 1999, at which point he said, ‘I’ve been getting increasingly disenchanted with the direction that racing is taking, catering for bad horses at the expense of good ones.’ However, he retained his training licence to campaign just his own horse, the lowly-rated filly Be My Wish, who had her final outing in a claiming stakes race on the Rowley Mile at Newmarket on September 16, 2000. Reflecting on his decision to carry on, O’Gorman said, ‘I should have retired a long time ago. I probably wouldn’t have bothered if this filly wasn’t a pleasure to do anything with.’
In his earlier years, O’Gorman was an accomplished amateur jockey, winning the Moet & Chandon Silver Magnum, a.k.a. the ‘Amateur Riders’ Derby’, at Epsom twice, in 1966 and 1968. He also had the distinction of riding the first ever winner trained by Henry Cecil, Celestial Cloud, in an amateur riders’ race at Ripon in 1969. In June that year, his father, William Snr., better known as ‘Paddy’, died and he took over the training licence at Graham Place Stables in Newmarket, thereby ceoming the youngest trainer in the country.
As a trainer, O’Gorman is probably best remembered for his handling of precocious two-year-olds. In 1984, he saddled Provideo to 16 victories in a season, thereby equalling the all-time record set by The Bard nearly a century earlier and, following his move to Seven Springs Stables in 1990, did so again with Timeless Times. Other highlights of his training career included Group 1 victories for Superpower and Mac’s Imp in the Phoenix Stakes at the Curragh, in 1988 and 1990 respectively.