Owner, trainer, sponsor: Who is Luke Comer, the billionaire businessman hit with three-year ban from racing?

He had hoped that his passion for racing may eventually see him sit top of the equine tree, but billionaire businessman-turned-trainer Luke Comer now finds himself at the centre of a major doping scandal.

A nine-day Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board (IHRB) hearing in May found that 12 of Comer's horses had breached regulations, having tested positive for anabolic steroids, with the Meath-based trainer ordered to pay a whopping €840,754 in fines and legal costs.

Comer has also had his training licence suspended for three years, with the ban commencing on January 1, which means that the Dunboyne handler can proceed as normal and run horses in his name until the end of the calendar year.

The Galway native first became fascinated with horses during his younger days as a plasterer when working on a stable for legendary trainer Vincent O'Brien and the accumulation of extraordinary wealth through property development, along with his younger brother Brian, brought him back to the sport of kings.

Their company, The Comer Group, is an international commerical property company as well as an award-winning developer of luxury homes, while the pair own 500 companies worldwide, including a four-acre development site in Galway's Eyre Square.

The Comer Group International is Galway FC’s main sponsor, while they are also heavily involved in racing sponsorship. Only as recently as last Sunday, they sponsored the Comer Group International Irish St Leger at the Curragh with the Classic contest boasting prize money of €600,000.

Getting involved in racing as an owner/trainer involves investing large amounts of money, often with minimal return, and Comer has certainly struggled to make his mark since turning some of his attention to training a decade ago.

The first seven seasons of his career went past without a winner from 211 runners while there was some controversy along the way as the IHRB hit him with a €50,000 fine for a string of regulation breaches in 2017.

They included IHRB officials being refused access to his yard (then based in Dublin's Kilternan), failing to arrange adequate supervision of his horses, his medicine register not being up to date and his representatives providing false and misleading information about the whereabouts of some horses.

That led to Jim Gorman, a well-known trainer based in the Curragh, being employed to oversee affairs on a day-to-day basis, given that Comer spends most of the year in his Monaco base.

Results still took some time to turn, however, but Comer did turn some heads in 2020 when He Knows No Fear scored at Leopardstown at odds of 300/1 to become the biggest-priced winner in British and Irish racing history - as well as being his first winner on the Flat for nine years.

Racing is clearly a hobby, although the 65-year-old did have aspirations of rubbing shoulders with the game's biggest hitters before this monstrous setback.

“I don’t want to go down and win small races around Ireland because for most of the small trainers in Ireland, to win a race is a life and death situation," the media shy Comer told the Business Post in a rare 2021 interview.

"When they win, it saves their business. I don’t want to go robbing them. We just want to be very successful and win a lot of the bigger races.”

That hasn't materialised with a disappointing 31 winners from 893 runners in the past four seasons and it will be fascinating to see what becomes of Comer's crumbling racing empire.