Racing brings in all sorts. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie came by the family route. He used to help his blind father write out his bets every Saturday and the family would be shushed into silence as the racing results were read out on the radio. One Saturday the results were delayed for a broadcast address by the then Archbishop. ‘Turn him off, unctuous old bugger,’ said Runcie’s father, clearly having no clue what direction his son’s career would take.
My father didn’t bet and nobody took me racing, but I was hooked early too. We lived next to the long-defunct Hurst Park racecourse near Hampton Court. I used to prop my bicycle against the fence, stand on the saddle and peer over the wall to watch the fields thunder past, the whip-cracking jockeys in their vivid silks shouting for room. The thrill I got from the sheer colour, pace and buzz of the scene endures to this day, but it was when I went around to the racecourse entrance that I discovered gambling, the salt in racing’s soup. Then it was typified by ‘Prince Monolulu’, a huge black man with an incongruous feathered headdress, throatily shouting ‘I gotta horse’ as he sought to sell his tips to punters. In fact, Peter Carl Mackay wasn’t any kind of prince, although it didn’t stop him from walking unchallenged among the royals at King George VI’s funeral.
What I didn’t know until I read John Samuels’s Down the Bookies, a history of the first 50 years of betting shops (Racing Post, £18.99), was that The Spectator’s own beloved Jeffrey Bernard claimed to have killed Monolulu. When the old tipster was in hospital Jeffrey took him a box of Black Magic chocolates. Monolulu chose a strawberry cream and promptly choked to death. There have to be better ways to go.
Samuels’s anecdotal volume, full of the scams attempted by punters and betting-shop staff, will amuse gamblers and intrigue social historians. It is one of a good bunch of racing books this year. Two practical volumes will benefit serious punters far more than Monolulu’s tips ever did. One is Chasers and Hurdlers 2010–2011, Timeform’s indispensable summary of every horse that ran over jumps the previous season (Portway Press, £75). Then there is the updated Betting on Horses (Racing Post, £16.99). Edited by the meticulous Nick Pulford, it guides the reader deftly through the intricacies of handicap and speed ratings, paddock assessments, spread betting and gambling on new media.
If those two volumes are for serious racing folk, Edward Whitaker’s Beyond the Frame (Racing Post, £30) reaches more widely. Whitaker is a lensman who captures the sport’s agony and the ecstasy but whose witty eye for detail can transform the humdrum, too, into a significant picture — Ascot ladies queuing for the loo, a steaming horse in silhouette after exercise, a treescape beyond a strung-out field, a snap of champion jockey Tony McCoy seemingly imprisoned behind the bars of a weighing-room window.
McCoy: The Autobiography (Orion, £20) is A.P. McCoy’s own take on his life after several biographies. Books by other top jockeys such as Mick Fitzgerald, Richard Dunwoody and Timmy Murphy have revealed how risky it is for a girl to love or live with men whose competitive spirit so dominates their lives, and though he was romantic enough to propose in a Venice gondola, McCoy too acknowledges how hard he made life for his Chanelle before she taught him that it isn’t only winning races that matters.
Trainer Jonjo O’Neill helped with perspective, too. In one Grand National McCoy had a winning chance on Clan Royal, but was taken out of the race by a loose horse. Distraught, he moaned as he unsaddled, ‘This is the worst day ever.’ ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Jonjo. ‘When you are lying in a hospital bed waiting for a doctor to come in and tell you if you are going to live or die, that’s the worst day ever.’ Jonjo, of course, had recovered from cancer.
There are no surprises about the kind of horses A.P. likes best, such as Wichita Lineman, on whom he produced one of the rides of the decade to win the William Hill Chase in 2009. ‘He was hard, tough; he was like one of those boxers who wouldn’t lie down no matter how hard you hit them.’ No surprise either at McCoy’s behaviour after a spinal operation. Desperate to ride at the Cheltenham Festival, he opted for cryotherapy, using very low temperatures to aid recovery. What was the lowest temperature any of her patients had endured, he asked his therapist. A footballer had managed minus 145 degrees. In that case, said McCoy, he would manage minus 150. He acquired frost burns all over his body, including those parts a man least likes to have scorched, but he did it. There was a certain irony in his cryotherapy because A.P. boils himself like a lobster in hot baths every day to keep down his weight. It has permanently damaged his sperm count, so he and Chanelle had to seek IVF treatment to produce a child.
Fortunately, it succeeded and daughter Eve — along with Chanelle and the public who voted him in as BBC Sports Personality of the year in 2010 — has made a whole person of Tony McCoy. There isn’t anybody in racing who doesn’t respect this driven man. After reading his book you can’t help but rather like him too.
Comments