Long before I could afford to go racing I began collecting racing books, my first jumble sale acquisition the marvellously entitled Sods I Have Cut On the Turf by 1920s jockey Jack Leach. Leach, who was friends with Fred Astaire and Edgar Wallace, kept his weight down by jogging wearing four sweaters and three long johns under a rubber suit but always had a good steak dinner with wine. ‘If possible I used to take off an extra 3-4lb so that I could have a small sandwich and a glass of champagne before racing started. This made me feel a new man – and if I had a few ounces to spare I had another glass for the new man.’
The book I have reached for most often simply to re-read passages for pure pleasure is The Best of Alastair Down
Although a few back-pages scribes like Hugh McIlvanney could make any sport stand up and sing, racing has attracted more good writing than any other. Its participants – human ones rather than the horses – are around with us for longer. Its anecdotage is richer and the gambling tales in which it is enveloped add extra layers of raffishness, risk and intrigue. My shelves are filled with celebrations of great races and the horses who have won them like Arkle, Best Mate, Red Rum, Phar Lap, Frankel and Seabiscuit. There are classics like Men and Horses I Have Known by the Hon George Lambton, who should have added moneylenders to that title. There are meticulously researched studies of racing dynasties and betting coups at historic training centres like Beckhampton and Manton. The biographies of owners, trainers and jockeys vary from simplistic cuttings jobs to serious psychological studies.
Of the two volumes I most frequently take down to check recollections, one is Oaksey on Racing, which includes the then John Lawrence’s sublime description of how Fred Winter drove the brave little Mandarin to victory in the Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris at Auteuil in June 1962 without brakes or steering after the bit had broken in his mouth. The other is Peter O’Sullevan’s Calling the Horses, for ever a reminder of Dawn Run’s victory in the 1986 Gold Cup ‘…And the mare’s beginning to get up!’ For the past ten years, though, the book I have reached for most often simply to re-read passages for pure pleasure is The Best of Alastair Down: Cheltenham Et Al.
Unique is a word journalists instinctively avoid but when Alastair died at the end of October, just days after Cheltenham’s hack headquarters was most appropriately renamed the Alastair Down Press Room, we lost the ultimate wordsmith: a man who conveyed atmosphere, drama and sweat-stained endeavour with a humour, humanity and transcending love of his sport which was genuinely a one-off. Digesting Alastair’s Sporting Life or Racing Post pieces the day after a memorable event you realised that you had attended something altogether more noble and affecting than it had appeared at the time. He wasn’t afraid of emotion: he embraced and rode it like a champion surfer.
One example of his craft must suffice: snatches of his description in October 2009 of the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe: ‘For the sixth consecutive month with the sort of reliability that makes the Greenwich Time Signal look over its shoulder here was Sea the Stars doing what he does best – winning a Group One… by the time he was on an even keel Sea the Stars was in a bad place in a race in which location, location and location are usually all-important… the last bloke in France to find himself in such an uncompromising position was the Count of Monte Cristo…’
Jockey Mick Kinane said afterwards he hadn’t been worried and Alastair’s report continued: ‘Despite Sir Mark Prescott’s maxim that “whenever a jockey opens his mouth it is time to let your mind wander elsewhere”, these were not the silly spoutings of some young jockey who needs to meet his razor only twice a week. Kinane sets the benchmark for grizzled and at a seen-it-all 50 is more seasoned than a seaside fence…Sea the Stars put the race to bed with a furlong to run and nothing got near him… and here distilled into one horse, in one race, on an imperishable afternoon, the whole magnificent madness of racing not only made sense but, so much rarer, felt completely worthwhile.’
I was not one of Alastair’s intimates but on the racecourse we were friends. He was generous in passing on tips from his many Irish friends and admirers (had he applied for citizenship over there it would surely have been granted instantly). One day when I was BBC political editor he confided that he would like to have been a political commentator. Thank God the five times Racing Writer of the Year never followed that path. In the wasteland that politics has become with its PR-led ‘principles’, counterfeit campaigns and manufactured outrage even his sublime gifts, above them all an instinct for the authentic, might never have flowered as they did. Seeing the plaudits after Cheltenham’s Press Room renaming, Alastair was in the rare position of reading his own obits. He must have chuckled to see how much we all loved him.
Comments