Amateur hour

Thrilling as the race was, last week’s Cheltenham Gold Cup will leave an even more remarkable legacy: the winning jockey, Sam Waley-Cohen, did it as an amateur. Being a jockey isn’t his day job — he is the CEO of a dental business — and he races for love, not money.

It’s not supposed to happen these days. According to the logic of professionalism, it is impossible to compete at the highest level, let alone win, unless you sacrifice all else. The word amateur has gone from being an accolade to a term of abuse. When coaches get seriously angry they call you ‘amateurish’, meaning sloppy and inept. When they are impressed they call you ‘a real pro’. The Gold Cup was a delicious snub to that simplistic view of excellence.

In 13 years as a professional cricketer, I was often told to give up distractions, to narrow my life, to pursue one professional goal and only one. The idea that you could have another job — or even other passions — and still play at your best was out of fashion.

But my experience suggested otherwise. Though I never won cricket’s equivalent of the Gold Cup, my two best seasons were 2003, when I was writing a book, and 1997, when I was studying for my Tripos exams at Cambridge. The writing helped the batting. I was less anxious, freer, more instinctive — more amateur, if you like. By contrast, one winter in Australia I gave up all distractions apart from batting. The results were striking: I didn’t get any runs.