I spoke; they listened. And with that I overturned a decision, described rather prematurely by the Kempton stewards as a ‘cut and dried case’. The three-man Disciplinary Committee upheld my appeal and I walked out of the inquiry having been fully exonerated.
Anthony Mildmay-White, chairman of the Disciplinary Committee, speaking at a specially convened press conference after the hearing, said, ‘We had the benefit of ample time to consider the appeal whereas the Kempton stewards were under great pressure with another inquiry stacked up behind them.’
Nothing more needed saying.
The episode attracted significant industry-wide interest. There were those who considered I had done more for the good of racing than I might have realized. I made history by becoming the first jockey to dispense with legal counsel and represent myself, and to this end I received letters from several trainers, jockeys and owners across the country, congratulating me on a ‘very brave decision that had resulted in an important victory for racing’.
Little did I know at the time that it would be this conviction of mind, this innate ability to weigh the risks and make non-consensus calls, this confidence to stand alone, even against respected minds with formidable reputations – and be proven right – that would later serve as my greatest strength and save me in my darkest hour.
Howard Wright said about me, ‘Anyone who has spent more than five minutes in Murphy’s company discussing life in general and his riding career in particular will testify that he knows his own mind. Confident and articulate, he is his own man, nobody’s fool. He will not waste a dozen words when half as many will do the job as well. Not more than a handful of jockeys would be as capable of facing the inevitably intimidating atmosphere of an inquiry bereft of assistance, but Murphy is, and did.’
David Pipe, director of public affairs for the Jockey Club, sent me a letter thanking me for my ‘constructive and sensible remarks to the press’.
For my part, I took out of that inquiry not only a success but a friend in Anthony Mildmay-White.
My two-day ban was lifted. My conscience clear, I announced to the press that I would be taking the two days off anyway …
The Fall
Citius – Altius – Fortius
Faster – Higher – Stronger
The Olympic motto: the essence of an elite athlete.
They are born with this, this inherent need for speed, for strength, for fortitude; it is ingrained in their DNA. They spend their lives in the relentless pursuit of ultimate performance. They are consumed by the desire to extend human limits, to break barriers, to push the frontiers of physical and mental capability. They go out looking for a challenge and when they find it, they absorb it, they inhale it, it flows in their bloodstream. And then, when against all odds they manage to beat it out of their bloodstream, they go looking for more.
Jockeys are racing’s elite athletes. On that one Saturday in November in the year 1993, Cheltenham’s weighing room was exploding with the mighty force of the DNA of over thirty such elite athletes.
I was privileged to be one amongst them.
It seems only fitting at this point to explain the significance of Cheltenham to racing – the momentousness of the venue. This, in fact, sits at the heart of what is to follow in my story, it contextualizes why I did what I did, why I had to do it.
Cheltenham, very simply, is the Mecca of racing. I would ride there for nothing. It is what Wimbledon is to tennis or what the Tour de France is to cycling. It is the Olympics for horses and riders alike – where the best of the best ride to win. Nestled against the magnificent backdrop of Cleeve Hill, the 350-acre racecourse sits in a natural amphitheatre with a capacity of nearly 200,000 spectators. It is unsurprising, therefore, the enormous sense of occasion one experiences at Cheltenham. Technically, it is a difficult course, highly demanding in the natural contours of the track, which makes it unlike any other racecourse in the country. For a jockey, it presents perhaps the greatest test of horse and rider – of the dynamic union of the two. This is why racing fans love Cheltenham; because, if performed well, what they witness is pure poetry in motion. So, for me, as for most jockeys, Cheltenham is the capstone venue for jump racing – a place where dreams are made, reputations are forged and history is written.
It is here, in Cheltenham, that this story is set.
It was the Saturday of The Open, the second Saturday of November. My first ride of the day was in the ironically named Murphy’s Handicap Hurdle, a big prize-money race, on 2/1 favourite Arcot. It was the first time I was riding the horse, but I was there to win.
As the race progressed, Arcot and I travelled and jumped like a winning combination, my body following the rhythm of his stride pattern, the horse in tune with my cues. Then, at the second last hurdle, when the race was at its tightest, fastest and most competitive, Arcot made a costly error – he grabbed at the hurdle instead of jumping over it.
Balance was broken, momentum was not; our rhythm snapped short, and I was eating dirt.
The physical construction of hurdles – three and a half feet high, angled out to about seventy-five degrees – allows for horses to flick over them in the stride that they are galloping in. Fences are slightly different. About a foot and a half higher, horses have to get back in their hocks to jump them; they have to elevate themselves to clear a fence. Purely because of the physics of this – height, weight and momentum – statistically, the severity of a fall over a hurdle is much greater than one over a fence.
A mistake at a hurdle for good hurdlers usually involves a horse travelling at 35 mph, clipping the top of the hurdle, and falling over at 30 mph – there is nothing to break the momentum of that fall; you contend with 1,200 pounds of horse flesh at 30 mph on impact. Fences tend to be more forgiving, relatively speaking, of course. A mistake at a fence still involves a horse crashing into it at 35 mph. However, the height of the obstacle serves to break the momentum of the fall. When the horse falls, he falls over at a kinder speed – you only contend with 1,200 pounds of horse flesh at 10 or 15 mph, on impact. Piece of cake. In all seriousness, however, as a jockey, the fall that you fear most is at speed over hurdles.
This was exactly how I fell.
And if that wasn’t enough, when I fell, I fell at the seminal second last.
In any National Hunt race, at any racecourse in the world, the second last hurdle takes on particular significance; riding over and past it involves arguably the most intense few seconds of the entire race. The second last serves as a crucial marker, where how you jump can determine whether you win or lose, where everyone is jockeying for position and no one is willing to give an inch. And there I was, in the middle of it all – in a winning position on the inside, twenty galloping horses around me vying for advantage – when my horse clipped the top of the hurdle. Such was the speed and intensity at which we were going that Arcot did a double somersault, fired me in the air and then crashed to a halt, throwing me to the ground like a spurned lover.
My prize from the first somersault was a kick in the head, so hard it split my helmet. My consolation prize from the second was a kick on my right wrist. Fully conscious on the ground, I curled up into a ball, as instinct dictates when we fall, but I was trapped in the concertina effect coming into the turn at the bend. Every horse that was behind me caught me in their stride, hooves striking the ground with as much as 3,000 pounds of force.
Prophetic? I didn’t think so at the time.
Eventually, Arcot got to his feet. And so did I.
Was I in pain?
My God, I was in pain. I was white with pain.
But you don’t give in to pain.
You get up and you get on with it.
I was lucid, I hadn’t been knocked unconscious, the Mackeson Gold Cup was in thirty minutes and I was going to ride in it.
You do not give in to pain.
This I learnt in the most natural of ways when I was barely five or six years old. We were never mollycoddled as kids – you got on a p
ony, you fell off, you got back on again. Nobody came running to your aid, you just picked yourself up and got on with it. That was precisely what I was going to do on that day.
Arcot threw me off – it was bad luck, it was a bad fall, I was in bad shape, but it wasn’t enough to deter me. I wanted to ride, I was going to ride. This wasn’t any old racecourse. It was Cheltenham. This wasn’t any old race. It was the Mackeson. And if I wanted to win it, I had to ride it. That’s all there was to it. This was race-riding; there was no ‘Play it again, Sam’. This was real time, the real deal. I had one shot and I wasn’t going to give it up. The Mackeson Gold Cup was in thirty minutes and I was going to win it.
There was prestige in the Mackeson Gold Cup; it heralded the start of the season, the first big race. And if Cheltenham was the crown of jump racing, the Mackeson Gold Cup was one of the jewels in the crown. My teammate would be Bradbury Star, and with six wins from eight starts, his record at Cheltenham was unrivalled. More than that, this was personal; it was the confidence I had in my relationship with this horse. I had learnt right from my pony-racing days that no matter how skilled a jockey you may be, you cannot win if you don’t have a horse that wants to race for you. Bradbury Star was a legend and I knew he wanted to race for me. Our dialogue was congruent; we were in harmony. I knew I could win.
I have always considered success in professional sports – my sport or any sport – to be possible only if there is a contribution from the mind that is stronger than the contribution from the body. You have to be blessed with a very particular mindset where you ‘feel’ every situation, every curveball that gets thrown your way, and you challenge yourself to beat them all.
You have to see victory in the mind, you have to feel it, and you then have to believe it.
See it, feel it, believe it.
This was what fuelled my fire. This was what allowed me to ride as naturally and as fearlessly as I did. On the big day, I could perform. And this resolve only ever comes from the mind. If you haven’t already executed it in the mind, the body will not follow through. I had already executed it in my mind. It was just my body that needed to follow through.
So I picked myself up, determined mind ignoring broken body. I was ready to ride.
After my fall, the correct protocol to follow would have been to get into one of the ambulances on site and be taken to the doctor in the medical room. I didn’t follow protocol.
It’s odd, you might think, but as a jockey riding a race, you don’t see the ambulance following a hundred yards behind, of course you don’t; you don’t even imagine it. Yet every time you sit on a horse on a racecourse, it’s there. (In fact, there are three of them: one in reserve, two following you around.) But you never even think about it, even though you come incredibly close to needing it. That day, I noticed it. And I needed it. And I deliberately avoided it.
I knew that if I had got into an ambulance full of paramedics, I would have had no chance of riding the next race; they would have caught me out in a second. I was playing an elaborate game of wits; one wrong move and the game would be up in a heartbeat. I couldn’t afford to get found out.
Instead, I got myself up off the ground and, as quickly as I could without being noticed, I jumped into a trailing maintenance jeep and asked to be taken to the medical room, allowing myself enough time to regain composure without being under medical observation. Once in the doctors’ room, I pulled off the charade like an expert, managing to delude everyone – most of all myself. I mustered up enough wherewithal to answer all the questions they asked – what race was I riding, what had I ridden the day before, what day was it, what car was I driving – and somehow or other got myself passed fit to ride. I was not fit to ride. But I got away with it.
Before anyone had a chance to change their mind, I went quickly into the weighing room, changed into my colours and then I went to weigh out at the scales. By this point, if truth be told, I was in so much pain, I was losing focus. My brother Pat, standing by the weighing-room door, watched in total disbelief as I handed my saddle over to the trainer, Josh Gifford. My eyes were glazed over, I was staring into nothingness and frankly I had absolutely no idea who was taking the saddle from me – it could have been John Wayne for all I knew! Pat saw this clearly. Later he would tell me, ‘I couldn’t believe it. You just weren’t with us. I promise you, you were not with us at all. And thinking, just for the minute, as a brother and not a jockey, as I watched you hand that saddle over, I said to myself – this isn’t right, this just isn’t right.’
This same voice of reason was echoed by my valet, Johnny Buckingham, when I went back into the weighing room to put my helmet on and have my cap tied. Halfway through tying my cap, he stopped, put his hands down by his side, looked at me and said, ‘Ya, I’m not tying it, your eyes are not right.’ The fact of the matter was that my eyes told the whole story, and in my eyes all these people could see the pain, they could see the distance; the eyes don’t lie.
I tried to reason with him – I can be very articulate – but Johnny Buckingham would not budge one way and I would not budge the other. So, Johnny’s assistant, Andy, who happened to be my friend, finally tied my cap because I had started tying it myself, so determined was I to ride. Johnny Buckingham would claim, years later, that he had never, ever seen anybody who was on a ‘completely different planet’ go out to ride in a race. And yet within me, I felt secure enough to pull off the task at hand.
Everybody told me not to do it – my brother, my valet, my girlfriend, my colleagues. In fact, everybody expected to hear an announcement of a change of jockey. But there I was. And as I sat on that horse in the parade ring, and cantered down to the start, I had already established my state of mind. Even though I was only semi-conscious, I was going to ride the most perfect race. So I went through the motions, almost on autopilot. I sat on my horse: heels down, toes up, knees bent, thighs tight, back straight, shoulders back, chin up, eyes forward, elbows bent, wrists in, fingers tight. And I was ready to start.
Every race can be won or lost at the start. Despite the fact that I knew I was not going to be contesting for the lead or even to be in the first quarter, I knew exactly how I was going to start. I jumped off as if I was going to make the running but all I was doing was ensuring that I was able to establish my horse’s cruising speed quickly and not give away any ground in the process.
Inside my helmet, my head had started throbbing, the pain radiating from the base of my skull, with a grip so strong I had to take a sharp intake of breath. My out breath forced away the pain.
I was second in line to jump the first fence. This race had fourteen runners and by the time we had jumped one fence, the horses around me had dictated the speed they were going to run at. I got a feel for the pace of the race, and I knew what I needed to do. Approaching the second fence, the two front runners – Guiburn’s Nephew and Egypt Mill Prince – had established the lead. I found myself shuffled back, in fourth position, riding at Bradbury Star’s cruising speed, comfortable and confident. Ride the race to suit the horse and not the horse to suit the race.
From this point onwards, I had one goal and one goal only: to ensure that my horse got through this race as economically as possible without expending any more energy than he needed to. I knew that if I could sustain this, the horse would have the finish in him to win the race for me.
Tactically, it worked out beautifully as Jamie Osborne on Egypt Mill Prince in the lead had ensured a good gallop. My head was thumping now, slowly and excruciatingly, a power tool grinding mechanically against my skull. I noticed the horses around me jostling for position, afraid that the leader was going to get away from them. I was content where I was – in fact I was exactly where I wanted to be. My position changed only as a result of the horses around me; I was very much still maintaining my pace, giving myself plenty of space at the fences.
The important thing riding over fences at Cheltenham is this: you need to get a horse to jump off its hocks and bend over the fences
, you can’t get in deep into those fences and get away with it too often, because they can be unforgiving. You need a horse to respond to your command, to be able to come up on the right stride, and to do that you have to be riding the right race. After the fourth fence, I knew I was riding the right race. I knew I was going to win.
As we approached the end of the first circuit, having ridden the first third of the race, I had dropped from fourth position to nearly seventh. The grinder was now a hammer, sharp and heavy and unrelenting, banging away through the middle of my skull, forcing my eyes shut. I willed them open. Halfway down the back straight, I could see Jamie Osborne up front, tactically trying to fill his horse’s lungs with air. He slowed down to do this, and being the leader, in doing so, he eased the pace of the race. Because I had maintained my horse’s cruising speed throughout, this now worked to my advantage – the others had slowed while I had stayed steady. Exactly as I had predicted, this propelled me forward.
Going into the last open ditch, four from home, Jamie Osborne had picked up speed again. The pain flashed hot and hard and out of control – almost, out of control. The horses behind Egypt Mill Prince were desperately trying to close in, and again I found myself pushed back to fifth position, convinced completely by the decision I had made to hold my pace right from flag-fall.
It was a chainsaw now, slicing into my temples. The blood roared behind my ears; my vision blurred.
The contours of the track at Cheltenham can affect jockeys as much as they can affect horses – you get to ride past the grandstand, not once but twice in every race. And even when you’re as far as halfway down the far side, you can hear the cheers of the crowd. Very often this can get jockeys to commit sooner than they should; it’s easy to get caught up in the wave of exuberance. That’s another reason why Cheltenham is different to any other racecourse, that’s why it’s so demanding. It was a classic mistake and I was not going to make it.
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