The Turf: Ladies’ tights in a jockey’s pocket

The first time I met the jockey Andrew Thornton, at a hotel dinner, he had a pair of ladies tights sticking out of his pocket. No, he hadn’t just been interrupted in an amorous encounter in the car park. Nor does he have an eyebrow-raising secret taste in underwear. The tights were part of the equipment he had brought along to demonstrate to the audience we were both addressing that night just what a jockey’s life involves. Tough as the saddle gladiators look, those all-enveloping lightweight garments are essential under their breeches to help keep out the cold as they coax and coerce half a ton of horseflesh for two or three miles over fences and hurdles in every kind of weather.

Andrew talks as well as he rides and there can be few better guides to the racing life. Jump jockeys, statistically, should expect a fall every 14 rides and only a true lover of the sport would go on flogging his body round the nation’s racetracks for as long as he has done. He rode his first winner Wrekin Hill for the legendary W.A. Stephenson at Sedgefield in 1991 and won the amateur riders’ championship in 1992–3. Since then, ‘Lenzio’, as a weighing-room colleague dubbed him on account of his contact lenses, has taken his total of winners into the 900s.

Those winners have included some classy performers. Andrew won the Gold Cup on Cool Dawn for Robert Alner and the King George on See More Business for Paul Nicholls. He won the Hennessy (on a disqualification) and the Scottish National on my old favourite Gingembre for Lavinia Taylor and scored many victories on Ferdy Murphy’s ill-fated French Holly.

It wasn’t always easy. When, after Stephenson’s death, he came south to join Kim Bailey as the stable conditional, the tall Thornton shortened his leathers to look more fashionable and his riding suffered.