RACING/Tony McCoy, record breaking NH jockeyA tall, white-faced figure comes down the weighing-room steps, lean as a junkyard dog, his wide shoulders hunched in his silks against the wind.
After pausing to sign a few autographs on the way to the parade ring, he swings into the saddle and takes his mount on to the course. The leathers are up high, at Flat jockey length, seemingly making it impossible to maintain the balance needed to drive half a ton of horse over the big fences ahead.
They jump off in front and the mount feels the strength of his rider's clamping legs. Decisions are made firmly for him, allowing the horse a little breather round the final bend.
With two to jump, a rival looms and the rider's legs squeeze harder; he gets down further into the horse's neck, keeping a firm hold of his head and imparting momentum. As the two tired horses come into the last fence, the leader is asked to stand off for a big one. It is a demand, not request.
The horse lands two lengths clear of his rival, who has taken the safety-first approach. The rider's iron legs and remorseless will ensure the margin is maintained to the line. Tony McCoy has ridden another winner. The hunger that drives him has been satisfied for a few more minutes - until he gets back into the weighing room and begins concentrating on the next ride . . .
In A P McCoy, racing is blessed with its own Tiger Woods, Carl Lewis or Steven Redgrave. The man who has rewritten the record books of National Hunt racing has the strength of Fred Winter and the all-round canny horsemanship of John Francome, the relentless energy of Peter Scudamore, the cool-headed professionalism of Richard Dunwoody.
There seems to be no chink in his armour, so much so that the former jockey turned trainer Christy Roche says: "It's not his horses but McCoy himself who should be handicapped."
First the statistics. When the Andover trainer Toby Balding signed him from Ireland (after stints with Billy Rock and Jim Bolger) as a 20-year-old conditional (apprentice jumps jockey) in August 1994 to replace Adrian Maguire, McCoy had ridden only 13 winners, not one of them in a chase.
At the end of that season he was champion conditional with a record 74 winners. By the end of the next he was champion jockey with 175 and he has been champion ever since.
In 1998 he beat Scudamore's jump record of 221 wins in a season. In April this year he beat the Flat jockey Sir Gordon Richards' record of 269 and in August he passed his hero Dunwoody's record of 1,669 lifetime winners.
McCoy is no braggart. But the comment he made on passing Scu's record on Petite Risk at Ludlow at the age of 24 was worth noting: "I couldn't imagine it would happen so quickly". The last two words tell us a lot.
Confidence is crucial in the saddle and McCoy has a confidence sustained by being first jockey to the remorselessly successful and equally dedicated Martin Pipe.
If there is a bad patch there is bound to be another Pipe-trained winner along in a day or two to stop any self-doubt creeping in. But riding for Pipe brings stresses and strains too.
Scudamore, Dunwoody and David Bridgwater all quit the job prematurely. McCoy somehow lives more easily with the pressure of riding so many short-priced favourites.
Courage is part of it. McCoy rides as fearlessly as a man with a spare neck in his pocket and he seems impervious to falls that would sideline others for weeks.
Balding, who hired McCoy on their first meeting as much for the character he detected as for what he had then seen of his riding, says: "He gets up and shakes himself and off he goes. He seems to get away with fall after fall, which for someone constantly starving himself and almost too tall (McCoy is 5ft 11in) is amazing." He attributes McCoy's durability to an amazing athleticism and to his dedicated single-mindedness.
At the end of their first hectic season together he told his young jockey: "Go off and have a holiday. You need a break. I don't want to see you for a fortnight."
The rider agreed. "Then I looked in the paper the next day and he had three rides booked at Kilbeggan. His appetite for winners is voracious."
Hunger is the key word in McCoy's life, hunger for winners and a very real, basic hunger. What makes him so special as the fittest and strongest sportsman in his field is that he achieves that while wasting a protesting 11st 7lb body down to a few pounds over 10st.
Day after day he boils himself in scalding hot baths like a lobster. Many days are survived on a single Jaffa cake, a small piece of chicken and mugs of sweet tea. Some days you see him on the racecourse with sunken eyes, sucked-in cheeks and a pasty white face that makes you wonder how he will survive the afternoon, let alone the season.
As the Jockey Club's doctor says, if horses were doing what McCoy was doing they would never run. So why does he endure it? "Because it would kill me to see someone else riding the horse if it wins."
McCoy neither drinks nor smokes and the only thing that has ever been up his nose is a decongestant.
But he is, he admits in his new autobiography (Michael Joseph, £18.99), an addict: "If I went to any meeting of the anonymous variety I could stand up, hand on heart, and say: 'My name is Anthony, and I'm addicted to riding winners."
Hunger can lead to greed. There have been clashes with trainers when McCoy has broken gentlemen's agreements and taken another ride he sees as having a better chance. He justified that to Claude Duval, author of an earlier biography: "I work hard, travel 70,000 miles a year and risk life and limb virtually every half-hour, every afternoon throughout the year. I feel very strongly that you have to get greedy while you have the chance."
McCoy's lifestyle is honed down as sparely as his frame. He has an agent, Dave Roberts, to book his rides, an assistant, Gee Armytage, to organise his life and a driver to take him to the races. Unlike many jockeys McCoy is not out schooling regularly in the early morning for his yard. "Tony comes down at the start of the season and he sits on them to finalise things," says Pipe. "But we have a good team to do the schooling."
McCoy's energies are conserved for what he and Pipe live for, to drive more and more horses past the winning post first.
The champion jockey is, he admits, a bad loser. He hates getting beaten and he is no fun to live with when he has been.
The ideal McCoy evening is at home watching a video machine with a worn-down replay button, analysing that day's rides for things he could have done better. In the past there have been some famous sulks, and a little more readiness to congratulate others on their successes would have been welcome.
But he came through a bad period of troubles with authority, over his use of the whip, by remodelling his technique and emerging an even better jockey, thinking more about how he could help as well as dominate a horse.
Some of the heaviest criticism that AP has taken, for his black moods after the Cheltenham falls of Gloria Victis and Valiramix, the first with a chance of winning the Gold Cup, the second ready to take the Champion Hurdle, was overdone.
Both horses had to be put down and McCoy's grief on those occasions was as much for the passing of two fine equine athletes who were willing to meet every call he made on them as for his own lost share of winning glory.
McCoy is not a hermit. Nor is he a sporting hero on a lonely pinnacle. Nursing his diet Cokes, he is often the last to leave a party and his success is not resented in the weighing room, where they understand his particular dedication.
He is a generous friend and landlord to his fellow jockeys. When I asked the equally voracious Pipe what makes McCoy special, his answer was: "He's got dedication, balance, determination and a racing brain. But above all he's a nice guy."
His relentless focus on the track makes McCoy less than cuddly. But punters have developed real regard for the professionalism of a jockey who they can be sure is always trying. And heaven help his competitors: the perfectionist McCoy reckons he is three years short of his peak.
Tony McCoy: "I work hard, travel 70,000 miles a year and risk life and limb virtually every half-hour, every afternoon throughout the year. I feel very strongly that you have to get greedy while you have the chance."
(Robin Oakley is Turf columnist for the Spectator).
Guardian Service
