When they present themselves there are certain experiences you simply have to undergo to make life complete, like rounding Cape Horn, watching the waters cascade over the Niagara Falls or flying on Concorde (although Mrs Oakley, I felt, rather overdid that last one when it was still possible by dancing that night with the captain in Cairo). I would add to the list, in the five months or so while it is still possible, the absolute must of seeing Frankel in action on a racecourse.
Owner Lady Beaverbrook once declared, ‘I have all the art I need but nothing makes my heart beat like a horse.’ And while in one way it is hard to think of something as muscular, mighty and masculine as a work of art, Frankel certainly is one. When jockey Tom Queally told him to go two furlongs out last Saturday, half a ton of horse quickened away from the second-best miler in Europe with an instant supercharged acceleration that was totally sublime.
The 14,000 of us who flocked to Newbury to see this racing phenomenon needed reassurance after the recent injury scare that could have ended his career. What we got, as he recorded his tenth victory from ten starts, was not just reassurance but also a polished, controlled, yet dominant display that was truly life-enhancing. How we are going to report his future appearances I am not quite sure: cricket-writers said of W.G. Grace in his time that he had exhausted the language of superlatives and Frankel has done that to racing-writers already.
Frankel’s trainer Henry Cecil is a steel-stemmed poppy who combines outward diffidence with inner certainty of purpose. Watching him struggle to contain his emotions after Frankel’s success was a reminder of the huge strain that is imposed on those who handle quality in sport, particularly when they are tending talents that have become public property. As Tom Queally said of Frankel before dismounting, ‘He belongs to racing.’ One small misjudgment on Cecil’s part and the whole magic story could be over.
The pressures are just as intense for jockeys and I was at Newbury, too, to listen to jockey Richard Hughes, for me the best rider in this country today. Particularly intriguing was to hear him say of his fondness for riding hold-up races, when he swoops from the back to grab first place on the line, that one reason he does it is that nine out of ten horses will only battle with the pain barrier for a hundred yards. One burst is enough to ask. Illuminating, too, was his reply when he was asked what he has on his breakfast toast. You and I might have toast, marmalade or jam. He has salt and pepper.
I knew Richard Hughes had suffered problems with his weight and with drink. What I didn’t know until I read A Weight Off my Mind: My Autobiography (Racing Post, £20), a book penetratingly crafted by his ghost-writer Lee Mottershead, is just how far into the alcoholic’s pit he had sunk. I have often warned impressionable young ladies in racing never to marry a jockey: thanks to the starving, the travelling and the necessary will to win they are nearly all obsessives, and most in their autobiographies reveal themselves to have been unliveable-with. Richard Hughes is no exception. How his wife Lizzie married and stayed with the character he admits to having been beats me.
The bachelor days were one thing: the story of how his respected trainer father Dessie Hughes found him in bed one morning dressed only in a pair of cowboy boots instead of out riding work is a classic. But the 5ft 9in jockey spares no one, least of all himself, in his relentless revelations of how riders like him, and the equally talented Johnny Murtagh, have first taken to alcohol for its dehydrating effect and then become dependent both on the booze and on diuretics (or ‘piss pills’ as they call them in the weighing-room) in their efforts to mount the scales at a riding weight. In Richard’s case the crisis came when, after a bottle and a half of champagne followed by 14 piss pills (most jockeys would stop at three), he passed out in an Ascot toilet shortly before the biggest race of the year.
Read this book for fun — for the racing insights, the interchanges with top trainers such as Richard Hannon, Mick Channon and Sir Henry Cecil. Those are just as good as you would expect from the jockey whose regular Racing Post diary last season was the best read in racing and he makes a typically intelligent contribution to the whip debate. But read it, too, for the scary picture that it gives of how easy it is for young riders, faced by near-impossible pressures on their bodies, to go down the wrong trails. Richard, now dry for seven years and an ambassador for Alcoholics Anonymous, has climbed out of the pit, thanks to AA, to the Hughes family he was born into and to the Hannon family he was lucky enough to marry into. Sadly, many others don’t.
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