Winter reading

While you don’t have to be a masochist to be a jump jockey it surely helps. You can expect a fall, on average, every 13 rides and it is the only profession in which you are followed round by an ambulance. Self-flagellation, too, seems to be part of the picture.

Former champion jockey Richard Dunwoody detailed in a brutally honest biography how impossible he became to live with thanks to his obsession with winning. Now we have Timmy Murphy’s Riding the Storm (with Donn McClean, Highdown, £18.99), a cathartic confessional of the alcoholism that put the jockey in Wormwood Scrubs after he became hopelessly drunk on a flight back from Japan, assaulting a stewardess and urinating on the fuselage.

Murphy, a painstaking artist in the saddle, chronicles, too, his sackings by Dermot Weld, Declan Gillespie and Kim Bailey, dismissals which resulted from his drinking, poor timekeeping, cockiness and a temper sometimes then taken out on his mounts. He paints himself as such an ‘eejit’ (his own word) that you wonder why so many good people, like Mark Pitman and Jim Old, Henrietta Knight and Terry Biddlecombe, trainer’s daughter Kay Hourigan and rider Sean Curran, have over the years helped to rescue him.

Murphy was, it seems, a rarity among Irishmen in having a communication problem and he tried to let the drink do the talking. ‘If I could have gone out and just had a pint or two, I would have been grand, but I couldn’t. I had to do the dog on it every time I went out. Be the big man. If I could have stood back then and saw where I was heading I might have stopped. But when you are in it, you can’t see it.’