INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Pato O'Ward learned this week that it behooves Indianapolis 500 drivers to take part in the rookie tradition of milking a cow if they ever want to drink the stuff in victory lane upon winning “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing.”
Problem is that O'Ward never got that opportunity — until Friday.
One day after lamenting that his Indy 500 debut occurred amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indiana Dairy Association and his Arrow McLaren team came through for him. The folks at Silverstone Farms in nearby Greenfield, Indiana, loaded up a cow named Rihanna and trucked her to the track on Friday, where she was waiting for O'Ward at the crack of dawn.
O'Ward, one of the most charismatic and popular drivers in the paddock, was udderly amazed.
“Woke up for some morning milking, and it was a really cool experience,” he said, flashing a big smile. “Very warm. You know, gotta warm her up. Yeah, she was fabulous. Did you see a video at least? You'll see. First try.”
Yep, first tug and there came the stream of milk.
Perhaps that's a good omen as O'Ward chases his first Indy 500 win. He has finished second twice in the most important race of the season, and has talked candidly about how Indianapolis Motor Speedway has repeatedly broken his heart.
Maybe the fact that he hadn't milked the cow was the karma keeping him from victory lane.
The high-steaks effort to get a cow to the speedway before Sunday's race came after O'Ward sat for a press conference Thursday with Robert Shwartzman, who earned the pole as an Indy 500 rookie. Shwarzman dutifully took part in the traditional milking earlier in the week, and as he explained: "The woman, she came to me and said, ‘The people who didn’t milk the cow, they never won the Indy 500,’ and they were like (did not finish). It’s bad luck.”
Shwartzman pointed out that Alexander Rossi milked the cow when he won as a rookie in 2016.
“You have to milk the cow,” Shwartzman said, describing his personal experience with a “very calm, cute” cow named Indy.
To which O'Ward declared: “I’m going find a cow, and I’m going to milk it tonight."
“We know some farmers who know some cows who can make that happen,” the Indiana Dairy Association responded on X.
It only took them a day.
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Pato O'Ward, of Mexico, drives through the third turn during qualifications for the Indianapolis 500 auto race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Indianapolis, Sunday, May 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)
Ewan McGregor, for a fleeting moment after “Trainspotting” came out, felt like a rock star.
It wasn’t his first significant project; it wasn’t even his first film with director Danny Boyle. And he was, in his words, fairly arrogant and cocksure at the time. But that kinetic film about four heroin addicts in late-1980s Scotland was and, 30 years later, remains defining — in his career, in the culture and in his understanding of what true artistic satisfaction can feel like.
“It’s very much in that early part of my career, and of course, even today, probably the most important piece of work that I was involved in, just because it had such a massive effect on my life. Not only because of what it did, but because of how it felt to make,” McGregor told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “It set the bar unknowingly high because it’s been quite hard to match ever since.”
Both McGregor and Boyle are a little wistful about the time, and what they made, on the eve of its 30th anniversary re-release. Starting Friday, a 4K digital restoration will be in theaters nationwide. Though “Trainspotting” was very much of its moment with its Britpop soundtrack, its Thatcher-era grit, its darkly comedic tone and shrewd blend of giddy highs and tragic lows, it’s also one that has stood the unforgiving test of time.
“You get kids coming up to you who are 17 who said they’d just seen it,” Boyle said. “I could be their grandfather … yet it still spoke to them.”
Boyle was a hot commodity after “Shallow Grave,” a 1994 black comedy about flatmates in Edinburgh starring McGregor, and Hollywood was calling. Literally. A peak-famous Sharon Stone cold-called him and asked if he’d want to come make a film with her. But he had his sights set on Irvine Welsh’s buzzy debut novel, teaming once again with screenwriter John Hodge and producer Andrew Macdonald.
The budget would be small, 1.5 million pounds or about $1.9 million, and the shoot would be quick and local. They didn’t know what they didn’t know: Boyle remembers asking his cinematographer, the late Brian Tufano, if they could use an anal probe camera for the “worst toilet in Scotland” scene.
“I remember him saying, ‘Well, Danny, yes, you can get that. But I’m not sure how Ewan and his family and agent will feel about that,’” Boyle said with a laugh. “He tempered my kind of extreme way of approaching this material.”
And somehow it all worked, driven by youthful energy, a bit of arrogance and a passionate commitment to the material.
“‘Trainspotting’ had to be made that way,” said McGregor, who was 23 at the time. “It would have been a disaster if it had been done differently.”
For McGregor, at least part of the vitality came from the fact that they were shooting on film; money was going through the camera on every take.
“We shoot on these cards now, and it just doesn’t matter anymore,” McGregor said. “There’s no natural sort of like rhythm to filmmaking like there used to be then. … I think back to ‘Shallow Grave’ and ‘Trainspotting’ and it feels almost like a different job.”
Boyle too has been chasing that kind of innocence ever since. He said he might have come close on his upcoming film “Ink,” with Jack O’Connell.
“It was liberating not having enough money because you don’t have that limitation of thinking, oh, that’s going to be too extreme for the studio or for the audience reach we’re meant to have,” Boyle said. “You could make it so that if it didn’t work, you just, you know, sulk away with your tail between your legs and call back Sharon Stone and say ‘I was wrong.’”
Like any film about drugs, there was a fair amount of discourse around its release. U.S. presidential candidate Bob Dole even denounced it, unseen, for romanticizing heroin during his campaign. But the film was in the conversation — and it had an enviable group of supporters, including Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and Blur’s Damon Albarn, both of whom provided songs for the film.
After “Trainspotting” became a hit, life changed profoundly for McGregor. In London, he said, “it was madness.” At the time he was sharing a flat with his co-star Jonny Lee Miller, Jude Law and Sean Pertwee. When they’d go out to clubs, they felt like rock stars.
“There was a real energy around it,” McGregor said. “We were part of that, you see, the Blur and Oasis and Pulp and The Verve and all of that amazing music that was happening then. We were the sort of movie version of it, I guess, because Danny knew what he was doing with the soundtrack and because the novel was so huge and current and … and maybe because it was ours. It was British and it wasn’t pandering to America. We didn’t make it for America.”
Boyle hopes that audiences take a chance on “Trainspotting” in the theater, whether they're revisiting it or seeing it for the first time. It was, he said, made with an absolute love of cinema.
“It’s very indebted to ‘Goodfellas,’ which also has that feeling of: You are here to be absolutely assaulted by an experience,” Boyle said. “You know, you have given us your money and you’ve given us your time to be here for 90 minutes, two hours, whatever it is, and we promise, we promise to deliver everything to you that we can.”
FILE - Director Danny Boyle poses in Beverly Hills, Calif., on March 6, 2017. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File)
FILE - Director Danny Boyle poses in Beverly Hills, Calif., on March 6, 2017. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File)
FILE - John Hodge, screenwriter for "Trainspotting," left, director Danny Boyle, center, and producer Andrew Macdonald appear during a music video shoot in London on June 26, 1996. (AP Photo/Louisa Buller, File)
