Champion jockeys may retire but the will to win never dies. “What might expose them a bit is if we can get them to put the jumps up a bit higher,” Tony McCoy says, as he looks ahead to a show-jumping competition against a team of Flat jockeys, including Frankie Dettori and Ryan Moore, at Olympia in December. “When you get the jumps up good and high you have to think about it, and hopefully we can play some mind games with them beforehand.”
For a driven man like McCoy competition could never mean simply having fun. He was at the London International Horse Show last year when, in the second annual jump-off between National Hunt and the level, the Flat riders came out on top. “I was a bit disappointed that our younger jump jockeys got beaten by the Flat jockeys,” he says. “I said: ‘That’s it. I’m going to get a bit of experience in.’ Hopefully it will pay dividends.”
A “bit of experience” is one way to put it. Richard Dunwoody, Peter Scudamore and John Francome joined McCoy at Graham Fletcher’s show-jumping yard in Oxfordshire on Tuesday morning to launch the Markel Champions Challenge, which raises money for the Injured Jockeys Fund. Between them the four jockeys took the National Hunt riders’ championship for 35 unbroken seasons between the 1980-81 season and 2014-15, when McCoy retired after 20 years at the top.
Their opponents in London on 15 December will also be a team of champions, most of whom are still riding professionally. Dettori, who has won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe and the Champion Stakes in recent weeks, expects to be joined by Richard Hughes, Jamie Spencer and Jim Crowley, all of whom have ridden winners over jumps in the past, as well as Moore, who will be riding at Hong Kong’s International meeting just five days earlier.
For the current jockeys it may feel like an evening when the pressure is off after a long season, but for former riders such as Dunwoody and Scudamore it is rekindling the competitive urge which made them champions.
Dunwoody has walked to both the north and south poles as well as the 2,000-mile length of Japan since his enforced retirement in December 1999 because of a long-term neck injury and he has scarcely sat on a horse at all. “I’ve ridden very rarely. I played polo last year in a charity match and after I got off, I couldn’t walk for a week. When I’m travelling I’d sometimes ride, but I’ve not done much. I like walking and running, and I’ve no desire to ride out.
“I’ll probably be feeling it a bit tomorrow, but I did a 16-mile run up Exmoor the other day and I’m training for a marathon in April. It will be competitive on the night, especially against Frankie and Ryan Moore, and we’ll need to be on the top of our game, but we should have the advantage in that we’re a bit more used to jumping things.”
All the riders will jump one circuit of a course which will revealed only on the day itself, and do so against the clock. “It’s about the stride pattern,” Fletcher said, as he watched the jumping team practising on Tuesday. “If they pump them in [towards an obstacle] on what would be a normal, long stride for a racehorse, and they get there a bit quick, then they will get the jump down.
“When you’re racing, they’ll see a stride and pump in on it. What you’re doing here is to balance them up, and take a check to set them up a bit. You’re trying to compress them so that when they get to the jump, the spring is coiled a bit more than it would be in racing.”
Speed over the obstacles also needs to be judged to perfection to avoid taking an extended turn around to the next one. “David Broome was always the absolute master against the clock,” Francome, who rode to a high level over show-jumps in his teens, says. “He made it look effortless. Flat-out is fine over smaller fences, but over the big ones you need to be more accurate, and into a rhythm from the word go.”
Francome rides out regularly for the leading Flat trainer Clive Cox but Scudamore had been out of the saddle for several years before starting to ride out to get into shape for December. “I don’t like riding in those old-timer races because that’s like going back to school, and it’s gone,” he says. “But this brings back the love of the horse and it brings back your instincts. Richard Dunwoody hasn’t ridden like the rest of us do but he was straight back in and it’s fascinating to watch. The muscle memory comes back very quickly.
“You can never replace the buzz of race-riding, and it’s addictive. You still look in the paper and think: “What might I have been riding?’ In some ways I wish I’d got out of it completely because then you wouldn’t look back and you might appreciate what you did more.
“But I still get dreams that I’m in the weighing room and I can’t find a boot, and all the other riders are rushing out, and Martin Pipe is standing there. It’s still in the subconscious. Fourteen or 15 years as a jockey is only a small fraction of your life, but it’s what you are.”
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Wednesday’s tips, by Greg Wood
Newmarket 1.15 Lady Al Thumama 1.45 Left Alone 2.20 Letsbe Avenue (nb) 2.55 Elwazir 3.30 Song Maker (nap) 4.05 Knight To Behold 4.40 Jeremiah 5.15 Gold Eagle
Sedgefield 2.00 Tor 2.35 Chain Of Beacons 3.10 Vancouver 3.45 Kalondra 4.20 Imperial Eloquence 4.55 Buy Mistake
Worcester 1.35 Dawnieriver 2.10 Baraza 2.45 Pickamix 3.20 Smuggler’s Blues 3.55 Robin The Raven 4.30 Springtown Lake 5.05 Landin 5.40 David’s Phoebe
Kempton Park 5.50 Desert Path 6.20 Blanchefleur 6.50 Clock Chimes 7.20 Zilza 7.50 Di Fede 8.20 Mandarin 8.50 Lady Kaviar 9.20 Raashdy
