Tales from the Turf

by Robin Oakley

  When he retired from the saddle I asked Mark Perrett about the difference in the weighing room atmosphere between Flat and jumping jockeys. He replied, ‘They’re a great bunch, the jocks, all game for a laugh. But the jump jockeys are much more so. It’s the money. On the Flat there’s so much more at stake. It’s big business. Jumping jockeys are more down to earth.’

  Ah yes, it’s only their lives they are risking over jumps …

  Don’t marry a jockey

  Back in the mists of time I proposed to Mrs Oakley in the rather naff Caribbean bar of a fashionable London venue patronised by a set we couldn’t afford to join. I prefaced my question with a long preview about the perils of marrying a journalist. Fortunately she did not take me seriously. Since then she has stuck with me through a train-wreck life of cancelled dinner parties, curtailed holidays and mortally offended ex-friends with more predictable occupations. I have come to realise since that she could have done worse: she could have married a jockey.

  Every time I pick up a rider’s biography there is harrowing confirmation. You wouldn’t find a more affable, intelligent and considerate guy than former jockey Mick Fitzgerald. Not out of the saddle. But in his autobiography Better Than Sex (the title deriving from his famous comment to Desmond Lynam about what it was like riding Rough Quest to win the Grand National) he was entirely candid about his priorities. The book was a red flag warning to any lady not to become involved with a rider over obstacles. The day he rode a treble at the Cheltenham Festival Mick’s wife wasn’t there and he reflected: ‘She just wasn’t a factor. She was largely irrelevant. I was going to Cheltenham with four good rides on Gold Cup day and that was massive. What my wife did that day was simply not even a green dot on my radar’ – even if he did later feel guilty and leave the celebration party early.

  The warriors who day after day throw half a ton of horse at obstacles at speed know in their rational moments that they face the possibility of paralysis or even death. To push that thought to the furthermost recesses of their mind they have to convince themselves that they are immortal and invincible. The best way of obliterating a worry that might otherwise intrude or hinder performance is to persuade themselves that nothing in life even climbs on the other end of the scales when balanced against their need to win.

  Having spent a little time on the book promotion circuit with Richard Dunwoody I can confirm how charming and rational he is out of the saddle, even if he can rarely bear to go racing since injury forced a premature retirement. But in Richard’s unsparing biography Obsessed he revealed how his all-encompassing desire to win destroyed all perspective in his life when he was riding. Mistakes in the saddle turned into an extreme form of self-loathing that made him a danger to himself and those around him. After a fall at Newbury when he was tussling for the title with Adrian Maguire he had a row with his wife ‘who didn’t have a mean bone in her body’ in which ‘all the malice and the anger came from me’. He played the video of the fall more than a hundred times: ‘There was no excuse that was acceptable, no way that I could allow myself even one mistake.’ He raged about the house, battering himself against door-frames and walls in self-reproach. Later that month he saw a photo of himself coming in on a winner, sporting a lurid black eye. That injury was not down to a previous fall: it was self-inflicted in another rage after he had been unseated at a fence in front of Huntingdon’s stands. A sports psychiatrist once told Dunwoody that he was addicted to speed and danger.

  In Tony McCoy’s autobiography, the bravest jockey we have seen is chillingly honest about how he became a control freak and engineered endless fights with his wife-to-be Chanelle, driving her frequently to tears or walkouts. He was not, he admits, fit for a relationship:

  All I wanted to do was to ride winners, to ride big winners, ride more winners than anybody, be champion every year and I felt that in order to do that I had to remain focussed, I had to devote everything I had to horses and riding and racing. In my head I wasn’t talented enough to be better than everyone else, so I had to work harder than everybody else. There really wasn’t room for anything else, there certainly wasn’t room for a partner.

  He once told a friend: ‘It’s all right for you, you don’t have to live with me.’

  Like Dunwoody, McCoy would wear out the rewind button on his video control, constantly replaying the races in which he had not ridden the winner. He convinced himself that he had to do that to see what he could learn. Never mind that the horse might not have been up to it: it had to have been his fault as the rider. He had to go back and back to analyse what his mistake might have been. In what was to me the most revealing comment, McCoy says, ‘I did decide that I would ride particular horses a little differently but I think I was punishing myself by watching the tapes as much as I was. I think I felt that if I watched the race again and again I would have served the appropriate penance for getting beaten and then I could move on.’

  It was Dessie Hughes, Richard Hughes’s trainer father, who pointed out to me as we talked about Cheltenham Festivals past what a significant change the video recording has wrought in riders’ lives. To me, some riders’ obsessive use of them has become akin to the self-flagellation of medieval monks obsessed with their supposed sins. Yes, the videos have improved overall standards in race riding but how good are they, you sometimes wonder, for the state of mind of the perfectionists at the top of the jockeys’ tables? Former jump jockey Warren Marston, somebody who always gave a horse a decent ride without ever expecting to reach the highest echelons of his profession, put it into perspective for me one day when he said:

  Lads come into the weighing room, a horse has fallen with them and you’d think their world has ended. I say, ‘Watch the football tonight. Someone will miss a penalty but they’ll be on the field the next day …’ You’ve split-seconds to make a decision and sometimes horses do go on the floor because of a rider. Too many people think every jockey can ride every race and never make a mistake. But you mustn’t be frightened of making a mistake.

  The will to win and the ability to transmit that to a horse is admirable, crucial perhaps. But some just can’t help themselves from taking it to a dangerous degree. When Tony McCoy broke his back in January 2008, most people would have chosen three months in plaster followed by a slow recovery. He opted for the fast track, the insertion of metal plates in his vertebrae, in the hope of getting back in action by the Cheltenham Festival in March. As AP looked for ways of speeding the healing process following his operation, former trainer Charlie Brooks recommended cryotherapy, the use of a cold chamber subjecting the body to extremes of temperature. Taking the treatment, Tony McCoy inquired what was the lowest temperature anybody had endured and was told that the footballer Shefki Kuqi had managed to get down to a temperature of minus 145 degrees. McCoy of course had to beat that: despite the fact that he already had burn marks all over his body, including his testicles, he managed a three-minute session at minus 150 and he was, of course, back riding seven days before the Cheltenham Festival. After such a massive operation the consequences of a fall could be serious, but the thought of not riding at Cheltenham never occurred to him – and that despite his reflection: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever ridden at a Cheltenham Festival and not got buried – you have to take risks at Cheltenham.’

  It is no wonder that riders become obsessives. British jockeys both on the Flat and over jumps face two added strains compared to other sportsmen. Cricketers, cyclists and footballers don’t have to torture their bodies to get down to riding weights which are totally unnatural for their frames, nor do they have to travel the length and breadth of the land daily to around 50 racecourses, often after having risen at an unearthly hour to ride work for a trainer who needs them to familiarise themselves with particular horses. Both those added strains – and perhaps the regularity of champagne-fuelled celebrations where tongue-tied country boys can find themselves mingling with the rich and famous – increase the possibility of alcoh
ol or drug dependence. And in what sport would you find large numbers of its participants as smokers: jockeys smoke as an alternative to food, as an appetite suppressant.

  Again, many riders’ life stories reveal the strains. Blessed with the softest of hands in the saddle, jump jockey Timmy Murphy is a shy man to whom social exchange does not come easily. Off the course he used to fuel himself with booze to counteract that, and the alcoholism to which he finally admitted reached its most disastrous point when he got drunk on a flight back from Japan early in 2002. Amid other offensive behaviour, little of which he could recollect, he molested a female flight attendant and earned himself several months in Wormwood Scrubs wondering if he had a future. Fortunately the racing community, without condoning the offences, kept things in perspective. While he was away serving his sentence, fellow jockey Andrew Thornton refused to allow anyone else to hang their silks on Murphy’s peg. Alcoholics Anonymous, leading owner David Johnson and the trainers who continued to use Timmy Murphy when he came out have enabled the talented rider to rebuild his career. Good for them and good for him.

  A comeback I thrilled to particularly was that of Irish jockey Bobby Beasley. A series of bad falls, difficulty controlling his weight and the drink forced his early retirement. He ballooned to fifteen stone. But AA and his friends helped Beasley restore his mental and physical fitness and as he started scratching for rides, Pat Taaffe was looking for an experienced jockey to handle the talented tearaway Captain Christy. In 1974, with a couple of wins in novice chases and a couple of falls behind them, Beasley and Captain Christy took on stars like Pendil and The Dikler in the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

  A canny instinct had Beasley move out from behind the leader High Ken just before that horse fell three out, bringing down the luckless Pendil. Captain Christy jumped the second last well but then hit the final fence with his chest. Crucially, Beasley gave him a few strides to settle before setting off up the hill after The Dikler, who always stayed on well. They caught him and went away on that merciless run-in to win by five lengths. Although many in the crowd had lost their money on Pendil and The Dikler, Beasley and Captain Christy were given a hero’s welcome. The grateful Beasley reflected, ‘As the crowd gave me three cheers I was thinking less of the actual victory than my gratitude to Alcoholics Anonymous and the others who had helped me to knock the booze and use racing as a means of rehabilitation.’ When he retired again from the saddle Beasley showed how far his recovery had come by running a pub. Friends say he was in the habit of coming down in the morning, eyeing the optics behind the bar and saying, ‘You little bastards thought you were going to get me, but you didn’t.’

  It isn’t only jump jockeys who face injuries that can sometimes trigger other problems. In April 2008, for example, I talked to Flat race jockey Robert Winston who at only 28 had already been through as many ups and downs as a fever victim’s temperature chart. The jockey, who started his racing life riding ponies bareback around burnt-out cars on the council estates of Finglas near Dublin, had three years before been leading the jockeys’ championship in August. With 98 winners already in the bag he seemed likely to become champion. Then he suffered a fall at Ayr in which he smashed both his upper and lower jaws. His title hopes ended that afternoon and months of enforced idleness saw him spiral into alcoholism. He was, in his own words, in a big black hole drinking himself to death.

  What made the Ayr accident especially hard to take was that it was the second time Winston had broken his jaw. His reins had broken and he had gone ‘out the back’ in an accident at Haydock: it was during the three months lost then that his alcohol problems had begun. He had worked his way out of that but by the time of the Ayr accident things were going awry in his personal life – ‘Everything seemed to catch up with me’ – and he had made a mistake in a race by dropping his hands too soon. Those of us who don’t have to steer horses at speed and do their thinking for them forget what a precious commodity confidence is. It only takes a couple of worries to start nibbling away at it.

  In February 2007 Robert Winston’s problems were compounded when he was banned for a year for passing information, although it was a lesser sentence than those meted out to others because there was no suggestion that he had ridden any horse to lose. Robert Winston too has battled back and has ridden for plenty of top trainers since his enforced absence, but his story is symptomatic of the pressures and potential pitfalls faced by today’s jockeys.

  The most spectacular example of redemption we have seen recently is of course that of 2012 champion jockey Richard Hughes. The 5ft 9in jockey has always had to watch his weight. Asked one day at Newbury what he had on his breakfast toast, he replied, ‘Salt and pepper.’ Having read the biography he put together with the Racing Post’s Lee Mottershead, most people would wonder how his wife Lizzie ever came to marry him, even more why she stayed with the character he admits to having been until he kicked the booze.

  Hughes charted in relentless detail how riders like him and the equally talented Johnny Murtagh have first taken to alcohol for its dehydrating effect and then become dependent both on the booze and on diuretics (or ‘piss pills’ as they call them in the weighing room) in their efforts to mount the scales at a riding weight. In Richard’s case the crisis came when after a bottle and a half of champagne, followed by fourteen piss pills (most jockeys would stop at three), he passed out in an Ascot car park toilet shortly before one of the biggest races of the year, the King George VI Stakes.

  Riding, he said, was easy. Controlling his weight was the hard bit. He drank champagne as if it were fruit juice, using its dehydrating effect to keep his weight down and to help suppress his appetite. He wrote:

  The more you drink, the more dehydrated you become. Not only does it dehydrate, it slows the rate of rehydration while also increasing the need to pee. Given that up to 60 per cent of a person’s weight is water, getting rid of that water will inevitably trigger weight loss. For a jockey that is bingo.

  Among the downsides of this lifestyle was the fact that ‘Piss pills make you feel nauseous, woozy and weary. They could leave you with severe cramp. They could suck out every last jot of energy from your body. But they also made you lighter, albeit not for long.’ Come the morning and a drink of water, and the weight was back on again.

  The other problem was that Richard Hughes’s excesses designed to keep down his weight turned him into an alcoholic. ‘I thought alcoholics drank from bottles concealed in brown paper bags,’ he recounted. ‘It turned out that they came in all shapes and sizes. One of them was a 5ft 9ins Irishman.’ Every aspiring young jockey should read Richard Hughes’s book, not just for his race-riding advice but much more for the lifestyle advice he has to impart.

  The jockey’s life is one of quite unnatural strains. More medical and dietary help is available these days and the Jockeys’ Association does much to warn riders of the potential perils. But it was intriguing to hear the highly successful trainer Mark Johnston in 2006 state his belief, ‘I’ve always believed that if I wanted to give up training horses and instead train jockeys I could create a champion jockey … I think there’s a desperate lack of lifestyle coaching and management where jockeys are concerned.’

  But there is pressure and pressure. Keith Miller, the Australian fast bowler had flown Mosquitoes over Germany in the Second World War, an experience, he said, that gave him perspective. He said, ‘When athletes these days talk of pressure they only reveal what they don’t know of life. They’ve never had a Messerschmitt up their arse. That’s pressure.’

  Dean Gallagher

  Keeping your weight down to improbable levels and forcing your body back into physical action too soon after injury imposes formidable strains on jockeys. But their lifestyles sometimes bring challenges of a different kind too and I encountered jockey Dean Gallagher several times as he met some of those.

  Life is really about how we recover from our mistakes. The best example I ever heard was provided b
y the tenor Lauritz Melchior. Singing in Lohengrin he was supposed to conclude an aria by jumping on a giant swan and gliding off the stage. Unfortunately he was too late and the swan had gone, whereupon he turned to the audience and inquired, ‘Anybody know the time of the next swan?’

  Dean too didn’t do too badly recovering from mistakes, some made by others, others which he made himself, and I remember the special quality of the cheers when he rode Teaatral into the Sandown winners’ enclosure after winning the valuable Tote Hurdle in February 1999. The racing world was enfolding one of its own to its collective bosom and showing once again that it cared for the gutsy 29-year-old with the cherubic grin.

  ‘For more than a year now,’ I wrote, ‘Dean Gallagher has lived with a nightmare’:

  In January 1998 police officers came knocking at his door before dawn. Along with two other jockeys he was arrested in connection with an investigation into alleged doping and race-fixing. Since then the other two have been released from the investigation but though no charges have been brought against Dean or anyone else, he has to report to the police yet again on March 10.

  Race riders are under relentless scrutiny for every minute they are on the course and living under the kind of scrutiny he has supported for a year would have broken a lesser man. Instead, in this test both of Dean Gallagher and the racing fraternity, both have emerged with real credit.