Robin Oakley

The turf | 20 July 2017

A woman I once encountered at the dining table whose prime years were clearly behind her described herself as ‘approaching fifty’. Noting our raised eyebrows she added, ‘Look dears, I don’t have to say from which side.’ Suddenly the weighing room too seems full of veterans. Lightweight jockey Jimmy Quinn is certainly approaching 50 from the wrong end while Frankie Dettori and Franny Norton, both still in their riding prime, are 46. It was, though, the 49-year-old John Egan, who recently shrugged off a chipped vertebra in a Kempton fall with a teenager’s resilience, who had me comparing. I noted lately the remarkable coincidence that both he and his talented apprentice son David, the only father-and-son team currently riding, had secured exactly 16 winners each from an identical 140 mounts this season.

At Ascot last Saturday John told me that he began partnering winners on the Irish pony racing scene at the age of seven in the 1970s. Around 500 followed before he entered full-scale racing with Noel Meade and then Mick O’Toole. The former champion Irish apprentice in 1986 among such rivals as Charlie Swan and Johnny Murtagh, Egan senior looks back with special pleasure on the Golden Jubilee and July Cup he won on Les Arcs, trained by Tim Pitt and owned by his friend Willie McKay. The former middle distance horse took up sprinting and ran in his first Group One at the age of six.

Les Arcs’ Golden Jubilee came at 33-1, but punters may remember too, amid a colourful career including a few brushes with authority, the Ebor Handicap John won on Jane Chapple-Hyam’s Mudawin at 100-1. With support from trainers like Mark Johnston and Mick Channon he has had plenty of success at Ascot while Egan Senior and Franny Norton are rated by many too as the canniest riders around the tricky Chester circuit.

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