Book review: Winner: My Racing Life
Or to retire at the top of your game, and look for new ways of passing the time?
These and many other questions are answered in AP McCoy’s fourth autobiography.
The title, Winner: My Racing Life, sums up the man who has raced through 20 British jockey championships in-a-row for riding the most winners over jumps — and still found the time to wrote four autobiographies and a novel — and he is still only 40 years old.
He has wasted no time in filling the void left after riding in 3,305 races over the past five years alone, nearly all of them on the punishing national hunt circuit over jumps, racing over at least two miles each time. He won an astonishingly impressive 833 of those 3,305 races, bringing his wins total to 4,357 in a 23-year career (plus one win in a charity fundraiser flat race last September).
Having agonised over his retirement decision, McCoy doesn’t underestimate the challenge of giving up the thrill of racing over the jumps.
“I’m coping Okay, but there’s no replacing the buzz,” he says.
The danger that any of his countless rides could be the last must have brought its own kind of buzz.
McCoy sums up that danger by admitting he’d be happy to go 800 rides without a bad fall.
So it isn’t surprising that page nine of his autobiography finds him lying beside a fence on the Worcester racecourse, unable to move, and spitting blood.
It’s one of several passages (and pictures) in the book describing injuries which may not be for the squeamish, but which the mildly hypochondriac will find interesting.
In the Worcester fall, in October, 2014, he had dislocated his collarbone, broken two ribs, and punctured a lung.
But four days later, he rode three winners.
The following day, another jolt to the injured collarbone left him experiencing “electric shock-like” pain, but he still got the horse home in front, and took only three days off to recover, such was his determination to reach the fastest ever 300 wins.
But he had come back too early, and gave into the inevitable (not without tears of frustration, he reveals), jetting off on a Barbados holiday-cum-convalescence.
Back a week later, he started 11 days of race riding which yielded only two winners — and retirement started to dominate his thoughts.
Not only was he giving up the buzz, he was stepping back a little from the world of horses, animals with which he has been ‘besotted’ since his youth in Moneyglass, Co Antrim.
The obsession with horses must have somewhat insulated the youngster from “a drip-feed of bombings, shootings, and checkpoints”.
He says enduring the Troubles was easier for his generation, because they never knew different.
He moved south in 1992 to perfect the jockey’s trade at the stable of trainer Jim Bolger (but not before qualifying as a bovine artificial inseminator, a career he jokingly says he can always fall back on).
A hard taskmaster, Bolger even accused McCoy of being too soft as he lay in agony on the ground with a broken leg after a schooling fall.
Such was the school of hard knocks which goes into making a champion jockey.
In one 2013 fortnight of “constant pain”, he rode 16 winners. But he says he has very few aches and pains now.
The highs made up for such setbacks, especially in big races like the Aintree Grand National and Cheltenham Gold Cup, each of which gets its own chapter in Winner: My Racing Life.
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