AP McCoy: a once in a lifetime game-changer
People will long remain curious about Tony McCoy and will search for the essence of a man Aidan O’Brien once described as “every racehorse’s worst nightmare.”
Paradoxically McCoy was at once one of the most accessible and elusive athletes of our time, but these among his character traits are incontestable.
Spring 2008. McCoy is desperate to accelerate his recovery from a back injury and be fit and ready for the Cheltenham festival. He’s found a promising unturned stone – cryotherapy – endurance of ultra-cold temperatures said to speed the healing process. Even this becomes a competition. He’s always needed to be as tough as the toughest guy, now it’s time to be as cold as the coldest guy. “I asked Renata (technician) what was the coldest anyone had ever done,” and she told me that the Shefki Kuqi, who was playing for Newcastle at the time, had got down to minus 145. So I told her that before I left I would get down to minus 145.”
Not a horse to be seen, no prize money, no fences, no Ruby Walsh or Barry Geraghty lurking in the undergrowth. Just an extremely cold room and one last-ditch roll of the fitness dice.
Soon he’s persuaded poor Renata to dial it down to minus 150, scoffing at her insistence that it will burn his body badly. “If Kuqi can get down to minus 145, I can get down to minus 150,” he reasoned. “I did get burned, frostbite all over my body, it wasn’t pleasant, I was suffering for days. But I was happy that I had set another record.”
The outcome? He won the Sun Alliance Chase that year on Albertas Run.
McCoy could probably enjoyed a choice of rides in the valuable featured handicap chase at Sandown on Saturday, but JP McManus didn’t have a runner and he was happy to wait for Box Office and the warm familiarity of green and gold silks. “JP doesn’t have a runner”, he said, “and I wanted to finish out riding for him.”
His mood becomes visibly fraught through the wait, the day enveloping him in an anxious cocktail of emotion and shy embarrassment, whipped to an emotional frenzy by the Lady Di requiem treatment on Channel 4 Racing. The race is over and he turns his horse for one last long walk to unsaddle. His agent Dave Roberts appears at his side, gently supportive. Roberts has booked all of his rides for the last twenty-one years only stands aside when he had delivered him safely back to Jonjo O’Neill and JP McManus for the last ever post-race debrief.
Those last few minutes were emblematic – JP, Jonjo, Roberts — the triumvirate from his sporting life that mattered to him exactly, and loyally, where they should be.
McCoy still insists that it was Martin Pipe who infected him with his viral obsession with numbers. If Pipe had been in retail his strategy would have been ‘stack ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap,” a policy McCoy followed for two decades, knowing well that when he chased a number he would stand stronger against his biggest enemies, complacency and lethargy.
Even on the morning of his last day at the office he’d worked out that next Thursday, on the official first day of the new season, he’d have ridden the first five races at Sedgefield and then taken a helicopter to Towcester for the last four there.
It’s revealing that he considers beating Sir Gordon Richard’s single season record with 289 winners in 2002 as his greatest feat by far of his career, much more important than winning Gold Cups or Grand Nationals which is why Worcester, Newton Abbot and Uttoxeter are the three courses where he has won most races. This is why not riding 300 winners this season remains a lingering black spot. “I let myself get injured. This is the one thing I have failed at.”
Perhaps this was AP McCoy’s greatest characteristic and most important legacy to his sport – personal restraint and athletic professionalism. An ardent teetotaller, his rigorous self-discipline has transformed the ethos of a jockeys’ room once dominated by the raucous roguery of the likes of Terry Biddlecombe and Josh Gifford and their regime of pub, nightclub, Turkish bath, racecourse, with little sleep and even less exercise between bouts.
