Ruby Walsh: Professional sport is not about taking part, it is about winning
Deams Of Home gave jockey Brian Hughes his 200th winner of the season when scoring at Perth on Thursday, a feat previously achieved by only AP McCoy, Peter Scudamore, and Richard Johnson. Picture: Healy Racing
The most straightforward article or column in the world for me to write is one about my former profession and those who partake in it. As the season draws to a close in the UK today, leaving only next week’s Punchestown extravaganza to conclude the Irish one, I should be writing about the latest man from the north of Ireland to reign supreme in the UK.
Instead of just writing about Brian Hughes, my words and thoughts are also with his English counterpart Josh Moore, who is now travelling a polar-opposite route to Hughes, having started out on the same journey 12 months ago.
When the 2020/2021 season drew to a close, both men had the room to be optimistic for the season ahead. Brian set off at full steam to regain his jockeys’ title from Harry Skelton, and Josh had just had the best season of his career with 40 winners and would have been optimistic about bettering that total.
However, that's where their journeys split, as the only certainty in a jump jockey’s life — injuries — took hold of Josh.
Brian stormed through a summer of winners in AP McCoy-like fashion and, from September, was on course to become only the fourth jockey in UK racing history to ride 200 winners in a season.
Regaining his title was a foregone conclusion once he avoided injury and, from halfway through the season, it was a matter of how many winners he would ride.
Concussion had curtailed Josh's summer, but he was back to start the better class racing in the autumn, only for Botox Has to crash out in a Plumpton novice chase, leaving him requiring surgery on his T4 T5 vertebrae. He spent six days waiting in a Covid-packed hospital before six hours of surgery which saw him sidelined until the end of January.
Being a National Hunt jockey and therefore an eternal optimist, he must surely have felt that a new year would bring new fortunes and his return looked like it had. Botox Has delivered in Fontwell's National Spirit Hurdle and when your home is the south-east, winning the south-east's biggest race is sweet.
Meanwhile, Brian's relentless pursuit of winners showed no signs of abating as he hustled around the north of England and Scotland, clocking up the miles and ticking off the winners.
Champions, of which he is one, have that streak. Professional sport is not about taking part, it is about winning, and he showed his ruthlessness at junctures in the season.
The big spring meetings passed him by but only because of the lack of top-class horses housed in the stables he rides for. Those yards must cut their cloth to measure. That might mean being at Sedgefield where he could ride winners rather than being a participant at Cheltenham. In that case, that's where he was: Working, winning, maximising opportunities with ambition, consistency, and talent.
Champions should set the standard, and the rest should admire it and see what they have to do to achieve it. AP McCoy set a standard each and every one of my generation had to follow, Richard Johnson carried it on, and Brian Hughes is setting it now.
This afternoon his final total will be decided, but I love seeing someone work relentlessly through a season, totally focused on a target.
Nobody can control the luck you need, injury-wise, to achieve your goals in horse racing. You hope you get that. So, as Brian chased his 200th winner this week at Perth, his mind will have been drawn to Aintree, not the racecourse but the University Hospital, because Josh’s luck ran out last Saturday at Haydock.
The Moores are the kind of people every community needs, and Josh Moore is reminiscent of his dad, Gary.
Last weekend, a crunching fall in the Veterans’ Chase at Haydock left Josh with a broken femur, a punctured lung, broken ribs, and damage to his back. A team at Aintree University Hospital operated on his leg, but complications with a chest infection now see him ventilated and in critical care.
His history with injury shows me he is as hard as his old man, and I know him to be kind, polite, and accommodating, just like Gary. For the first time this season, he needs to catch a break, and it is one everyone would give him if they could. The news and reports suggest he needs every bit of his resolution right now, and Lady Luck needs to find her way to Josh's side.
The Moores will be hoping a son, brother, uncle, and brother-in-law — just your regular person - can pull through the biggest fight he has ever faced, and Josh Moore's shadow will linger in every National Hunt fan's mind today at Sandown.
The Hughes family will rightly travel to Esher, proud of their son, husband, and dad. From his apprenticeship on the Curragh with Kevin Prendergast to a championship won in front of nobody two years ago, Brian has worked his way to where he is now.
He will thank more people than he needs to today and deflect many of his thoughts to Liverpool. There has been no trumpet blowing or moaning — pomp and ceremony aren't his things — but there will have been plenty of low days and self-doubting that will make today feel like it was all worth it.
An average man will stand on the podium and take all the applause, hoping another average man, just like him, will return to being his colleague soon.
It is a day of celebration and fear: The extremes of what a jockey’s life can be.
