Luminaries interviewed in the Racing Post are often asked to name four people they would most like to have dinner with. Lucky enough to enjoy a pub lunch last week with three who would certainly qualify for my dinner-table four — Henrietta Knight, Terry Biddlecombe and Mick Channon — I felt something of a fraud as I limped in and eased myself carefully into the most comfortable seat. They are used to sympathising with those who have injured themselves falling off horses: your columnist had managed to injure himself rather more prosaically — falling off a wheelie bin. Yes, a wheelie bin.
Having stripped large chunks of ivy off our walls and stuffed it into our green bin for collection it seemed a good idea after a late-evening whisky to mount a stepladder, jump into the top of the bin and compress it to make room for more ivy. Unfortunately the bin toppled and I was deposited with some force on to one of two large stone balls which, in a moment of enthusiasm in a scrapyard, I had purchased with a view to mounting them on our gate pillars. They proved too big for that task (‘Delusions of grandeur,’ said an unkind friend) and so now sit on the grass verge in front of the pillars. The only consolation was that they were balls, not something sharper like an eagle. As it was, although I have never simultaneously bruised so many parts of my anatomy, nothing was broken: only my dignity was deeply harmed and that, too, should recover.
By the time I had managed to get to my feet, no neighbours were visible and unless they were maiden ladies shocked indoors by some ripe language there should be no stories circulating about the late-night antics of the idiot at No. 24. Mind you, what I said was mild compared with the terms employed by Mrs Oakley, known to all publicly as a restrained and sensitive soul, when I staggered back inside. ‘Bloody idiot’ was about the nearest she came to a term of endearment. Sympathy was there none.
Two days later at Ascot my small accident was swiftly put into perspective. After the third race, we crowded to greet the rider of J.P. McManus’s winner My Tent Or Yours. No racegoer would normally fail to recognise 17 times champion jockey Tony McCoy. But on this occasion they could have been excused for doing so. AP was 30 shades of grey, his normal pallor heightened by the bandaging all across his nose and upper lip. Twenty-four hours earlier at Wetherby, a horse had lashed out with its legs and caught him full in the face. As trainer Nicky Henderson said, ‘A few inches closer and he would no longer have been on this planet.’
Hearing of the accident, Nicky had started making plans to put AP’s friend and rival Barry Geraghty on his Ascot runner instead, especially when McCoy’s agent Dave Roberts had told him that nobody could possibly be riding the next day after the injuries he had suffered. But McCoy, the original iron man, is different. A plastic surgeon in York had applied 20 stitches inside and outside his mouth and nose, his dentist had fixed him up with a couple of temporary teeth and he reported for duty the next day, telling us through swollen lips that his injuries were ‘superficial’. He was even joking as the photographers waved him into the frame with the horse, ‘You don’t want a picture of me,’ although there was a flicker of memory across his face as he recalled, ‘they were a little time doing it’. Even Nicky Henderson, who has seen plenty of brave and determined jockeys in his time, had been shocked when he saw the man about to ride his horse. He told Jonjo O’Neill, McCoy’s most regular employer, ‘I wanted a jockey, not the Phantom of the Opera.’
It was hardly a case of a fading jockey riding the gaff tracks desperate to find another winner. With most of us only now switching our attention from the Flat to jumping, McCoy had already ridden a hundred winners this season before the success of My Tent Or Yours. He was already 25 winners clear of Richard Johnson, his nearest pursuer in the championship. He could easily have afforded to give himself a few days off to recover, but that would not be the real McCoy. He just wouldn’t have considered it. He may drive his horses hard when they need it, but there is nothing he ever drives as hard as himself.
Barry Geraghty, Nicky Henderson’s main rider for all but J.P. McManus’s horses, may have lost an opportunity there but he didn’t have a bad day, riding a double for Henderson on Hadrian’s Approach and Roberto Goldback and scoring also on Oliver Sherwood’s exciting prospect Puffin Billy in the bumper. He had advised Simon Munir to buy Roberto Goldback as a Grand National prospect and that is exactly what he looks like. That race is a long way off but 25–1 looks good value.
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