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. ‘I’d fallen off a few and at Christmas-time 1995 Kim tried to sack me. I said, “You can’t sack me because I’m not going. I’ll change your mind.”’ And so he did. Thornton listened to his father and girlfriend, went to jumping guru Yogi Breisner and dropped his irons a few pegs. ‘I’m 5ft 11 and I was trying to do something impossible.’ He remembered, too, W.A.’s advice: ‘If you’ve got legs, use them,’ and made a virtue of riding longer by using his leg strength to drive horses home.
The cattle-ranch positioning didn’t make Andrew Thornton the prettiest rider on the circuit — he has long endured the John Wayne jokes — but he proved his point to Kim Bailey and was given his better horses to ride again before heading off to join Robert Alner. Andy shrugs aside, too, the jokes about his eyesight: no, he doesn’t ride with a white whip. There have been days when he has forgotten his contact lenses and ridden without them. ‘I got a double at Towcester one day without them and I won on Lancastrian Jet for Henry Daly without them too. But I didn’t tell him until after the race.’ Now Andrew jokes, ‘As long as there are white running rails, I’ll be OK.’
The only subject on which Andrew is a touch sensitive, as an elder statesman of the weighing room, is that of his age. The trainer Venetia Williams, asked for hers one day, refused to say, citing the writer who had declared, ‘A woman who would tell you her age would tell you anything.’ Andrew contents himself with emphasising, ‘I’m not much older than A.P. McCoy,’ and I happily agreed to be non-specific because, like TV commentators, jockeys tend to be mentally ‘retired’ by potential employers if too much stress is laid on anno domini.
What matters is attitude and energy, and Andrew Thornton remains not only one of the fittest in his trade, running four or five times a week, but crucially one of the happiest, too. Look at the owner/trainer groups in the parade ring. If Andy is there, they will be smiling. So will he, because he is still in love not just with his florist girlfriend in the north but with the racing life. He rides less now for the multi-horsepower Saturday winner yards and more for the less fashionable though equally effective Caroline Bailey and Seamus Mullins, but Andrew remains determined to reach the target total of 1,000 lifetime winners. He had 450 rides last season, he says, and he still enjoys it as much as ever.
The evidence supports him. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen in the sporting press the headline ‘Thornton due to return from injury next week’. There have been broken legs, broken arms and collarbones, a broken jaw and a badly dislocated shoulder, but every time he comes back. As he said to me at Newbury the other day, ‘As soon as you have an injury, what you want to know (from the medics) is the target date for getting back. The day when I have a fall and don’t set a return date is when I will draw stumps.’
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