AP McCoy: ‘Going out at the top is very important to me’

It’s the ultimate paradox. For AP McCoy, serial winner, the great motivator remains the fear of failure, writes Liam Mackey

“If you go a few days without a win,” he says, “you start to think, ‘this is it, I’m on the slide’. In a big way. And, to be fair, I’ve always thought like that. Even last week I only had nine or ten rides and, after having Monday off — my first day off in over two months — I didn’t have a winner by Friday and so, for three or four days, the demons start setting in again and you start thinking ‘this is the end, my career is gone.’

“You look forward to the next day, of course, to having another go and hopefully getting all that out of your system by having a winner, but when that day ends and you haven’t had a winner, the fear is there and would nearly keep you awake at night.