RACING books can often make for dull reading, but Michael Clower's biography, Mick Kinane Big Race King, is fast moving and well researched. Indeed, the list of his big race winners in the book's appendix is hardly less interesting than the accounts of his background, his character and the people he has been and is closely associated with.
Kinane, 10 times Irish Champion, has ridden more than 1,900 winners in 14 countries and four continents between 1975 and 1996 and of this imposing tally no less than 159 were Group or Stakes races - including more than 50 Group One events.
Kinane rode the first European trained horse to win America's prestigious Belmont Stakes and his own accounts of his historic triumph on Vintage Crop in Australia's greatest race, the Melbourne Cup, make for riveting reading. He is the only jockey in history to have won the Melbourne Cup, the Belmont Stakes, the Epsom Derby and the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe.
Clower gives a good insight into Kinane's character which to those who do not know him intimately appears to be of an aloof nature. But perhaps Lester Piggott himself gives the answer: "Whenever I see Mick Kinane, he is thinking. He is going through the next race, or races, in his mind. He does this over and over again, and he's always doing it: He's what I call a thinking jockey and it's his greatest asset.
Mick Kinane Big Race King is published by Mainstream Publishing and costs £15.99.
