Should we cheer him or shun him? There was nothing special about the race on Wolverhampton’s all-weather track last Friday night, a 12-furlong handicap won by Paul Howling’s Our Kes, nothing special except for the fact that the jockey on board had ridden his last winner in Britain back in July 2006, at which point his licence was suspended because police believed he was involved in a race-fixing conspiracy.
The day after that case collapsed we learnt Kieren Fallon had for the second time in two years tested positive in France for cocaine use. An 18-month worldwide ban from riding followed. Fallon has in his time lost a retainer with Britain’s two most outstanding trainers, Henry Cecil and Sir Michael Stoute, in the former case after allegations about a ‘top jockey’ (whom Fallon has always denied was him) having an affair with the trainer’s wife. He was once banned for six months because, in temper, he dragged another jockey out of the saddle after a race. It is the same Fallon who has had to sort himself out in drink and drug addiction clinics, also the same Fallon who was injured so badly in a fall in 2000 that he was minutes from losing the use of his arm and still carries a scar from his neck to his elbow to prove it.
If racing had a naughty step it would by now have moulded to fit the Fallon backside. The jockey who so often finds himself in the headlines for the wrong reasons jumps with unerring aim from the frying pan into the fire. A man who can enter a room of 40 people and, by his own admission, somehow end up talking to the dodgiest character there, he could almost list hara-kiri as a hobby.
When the last drug offence was revealed, one headline summed up the rest: ‘Fallon: no way back’. Some of the best judges in the sport wrote his racing obituary: ‘He will be yesterday’s man by the time his suspension expires in the late summer of 2009.’ Yet now Fallon is racing again. The Racing Post devoted a week of special features to his return. The Lingfield gate nearly doubled on the day he started riding again. And the racing authorities, who could have gone on pursuing him over matters revealed in the failed court case, have instead agreed to his resuming riding, albeit subject to random drug tests and with his acceptance that he has in the past been ‘reckless’ in his attitude to passing inside information.
They are right to do so, partly because a man who has served his time must be allowed the chance of redemption but also because his is a sublime talent. Andrew Longmore’s well-crafted and insightful new biography (Racing Post, £18.99) reveals the insecurities that have dogged the plasterer’s son from rural Ireland, who left school barely able to read and write. But it reminds us too how, after a slow start, he rode 15 British Classic winners and won the jockeys’ championship six times, how a man whose life out of the saddle can be a disorganised shambles is so utterly controlled when riding, how a man who has such trouble coping with his own demons is a sympathetic genius at sorting out the minds of difficult horses.
Fallon is the strongest, most focused jockey I have ever seen. Ice-cool rides like that on Kris Kin in the Derby and Hurricane Run in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe will live in my mind for ever. He owes racing, but he deserves one more chance. Let us pray the demons don’t get at him again.
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