Hewick’s storybook run ended with a third-place finish over hurdles at Cork, and the 11-year-old retired having raced 51 times and won 12. Shark Hanlon said the horse was sound and that the decision had already been made before Friday evening’s run, bringing down the curtain on a career that crossed Ireland, Britain and the United States.
For most jumps fans, the defining image will always be Kempton in 2023, when Hewick won the King George VI Chase at 12-1 and turned a rugged, dependable campaigner into a Grade 1 name. The Jockey Club’s result shows he beat Bravemansgame by 1½ lengths, with Allaho another head away in third, while Racing Post recorded that he touched an in-running high of 550 on Betfair before coming from the back to land the race. That was not just a surprise winner. It was one of the most unlikely showpiece victories in modern National Hunt racing, the kind that drags casual sport fans into the conversation.
Hewick had already built the sort of résumé that creates followers in the first place. He won the 2022 Galway Plate, the 2022 bet365 Gold Cup at Sandown Park and the 2022 Grand National Hurdle Stakes at Far Hills in New Jersey, then went on to finish sixth in the 2025 Grand National and remain a fixture at Cheltenham Festival meetings. The Jockey Club’s 2025 Randox Grand National results list him among the finishers at Aintree, another reminder that he kept showing up in the sport’s biggest, most punishing races.
What made him resonate was the contrast between the scale of the achievements and the size of the original outlay. Racing Post reported Hewick was bought for just €850 by Rachel O’Neill in 2017, then raced for T. J. McDonald and trained by Hanlon. Before his final Cork run, he was nearing £800,000 in career prize-money, a return that turned a bargain purchase into one of the best-value stories the sport has produced.
RTÉ’s description of Hewick as a “little warrior” stuck because it fit. He was not a sleek, pre-packaged superstar; he was a grinder who travelled, took his chances and kept finding a way to matter. National Hunt racing still produces winners, but it does not often produce horses who can make a Galway Plate, an American chase, a Sandown handicap and a King George all feel part of the same unlikely rise. Hewick did, and that is why his retirement lands like the end of a era.
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