LockerRoom: Forget Seabiscuit. Surely the movie of Kieren Fallon's life will be the definitive horse racing story. More ups and downs than a National Hunt racecourse. More scandals, more wins, just more of everything.

For those of us who follow the gee gees with just enough interest to wager and then lose some money three or four times a year, and to meet people who claim to wager and then win some money three or four times a year, Fallon is one of the great stories in sport.

He is one of those figures whose personality and irascibility spills over the edges of his sport and into the consciousness of passers-by. The more you learn about him the more you root for him.

If you stop to think how amazing it is that the current hurler of the year hardly held a stick in his hand before he was 12 and the family moved to Cork, well then it is just as astonishing that Fallon never rode a horse before he was close to 18 years of age and his family dropped him off at Kevin Prendergast's yard in the Curragh to give him the chance to see what he could make of himself. He had £8 in his pocket.

Last week he signed up as the retained jockey for Coolmore. On a clear day in Crusheen you can see the piles of the money in Ballydoyle. For a man who was 40 just last week life begins again.

School had added little to the breadth of his knowledge and the greatest enthusiasm in his life in Crusheen was evident when they'd bring in the cows in the evening. Instead of hooshing them along wearily young Fallon would hop up on a bovine back and ride Daisy to the Derby. By the time he was 18 he weighted just over five stone and was afraid of nothing. The family put two and two together. Maybe they had a jockey in the house.

He might be mucking out stables till this day if his natural talent hadn't been spotted from the outset. He's one of those people for whom the horse is an extension of the human body, sharing the same rhythms and pulses. Six times champion jockey.

Five double centuries since 1997. Yet it never seems enough. He leads one of those lives that serves as a lightning rod for scandals and hangers-on and gossip-mongers.

He has struggled with drink. Rumours about women dog him. Last year he managed to win the Derby and the Oaks while entangled in an alleged fixing scandal which has prompted a libel action against the News of the World, a clearing of his name by the Jockey Club and an ongoing police investigation which requires Fallon and others to report to a police station en masse in April as part of their bail requirements.

Like all the best anti-heroes, he's his own worst enemy. You must have seen that infamous ride of his last March on Ballinger Ridge at Lingfield a hundred times since last March.

Seventeen lengths clear at one point he appears, depending on what you believe, to give up or to begin showboating, and gets caught and beaten by a short head. You look at it and scream at him. 'What were you thinking?'

Ditto when engulfed by scandal or required in court. You think to yourself that sobriety of appearance and modesty of demeanour would be the best weapons and ones which might be reached for naturally by a man from Clare who is, they say, essentially shy.

Instead Fallon will emerge with the hair hanging down to the shoulders, with the sunglasses obliterating half his face. He might as well wear a T-short carrying the word 'Hellraiser'. Again you scream. 'What were you thinking, boy?'

He never gets periods of unbroken sunshine but his talent saves him in the end. He once used the whip on another jockey at a race in Thirsk. A year later at Beverley he pulled Stuart Webster from his horse to ahem, explain what he thought of him.

You were writing him off as a wild card back then but he was only a season away from his first century and by March 1997 he was signed up as stable jockey to Henry Cecil.

Big occasions and good horses bring out the best in him and his best is better than anyone else's. Still. Scandals follow him like stray dogs following a butcher's bike. He had to sue the Sporting Life for the way they reported a victory in 1995. He split with Cecil after a high profile scandal involving Cecil's wife and "romps" in a shower. Fallon has always denied it was he who did any of the romping.

He's had bad falls, a period in a clinic, great rivalries and the dubious pleasure of being one of those sports figures whom the public either loves or hates. The tabloids feed off him like piranhas. In the last year, apart from the "race fixing" business he has "debauched" in Spain and woken up one Sunday to the News of the World headline "I'm having baby after rides with ace Fallon." The mother-to-be, Sam Wallin, denied Fallon's involvement within 24 hours. Another day in the life.

And that's what is so interesting about last Friday's discreet announcement from Coolmore. Only somebody of Fallon's extraordinary talent would be invited, baggage and all, on to the pastures of Ballydoyle where the business interests and playthings of the uber rich go about their business.

The lessons which John Magnier and JP McManus drew from the Rock Of Gibraltar business are private to them but for the rest of us came a reminder that where money is concerned bad publicity is a secondary concern. Nobody would have gone broke or to a neighbourhood anywhere near broke, placating Alex Ferguson and mending an old friendship. Money is money though.

And so the nabobs of Coolmore have turned, as Henry Cecil and Michael Stoute did, to Kieren Fallon. He'll be visiting a police station on April when work on the flat season is in full swing. His case with the News of the World and their "extracts" from a covertly taped conversation is still pending and still attracting exonerating refutations in other papers.

Yet Fallon isn't merely the most glamorous and the most controversial. He is the best and after a year of only modest achievement for Coolmore, Jamie Spencer has been made to vanish and Fallon rides into town.

It will be a fascinating relationship, a wonderful coalition. The bling amidst the blue chip. The plasterer's son from Crusheen amidst the whispering bales of money. The tabs waiting and wondering how it will end or how they can make it end.