They played a medley of 80s pop classics before racing here on Friday. The jockey at the centre of attention both before and after the first race is old enough to remember them first time around. “What are you doing back?” an old acquaintance asks on the way past the weighing room. “You know,” Kieren Fallon calls after him, “I was thinking that myself”.
Around 15 hours earlier Fallon was riding at Belmont Park in New York at the end of a summer spent on a working tour of the States. One overnight flight later he is at Haydock for a single ride, his first in Britain since May. One of the most successful and talented jockeys of the last 25 years –and certainly, at times, the most notorious – is back, though he cannot say for certain that he will be here long. Fallon would not be Fallon if he could.
The six-times champion jockey, formerly the No1 rider to Newmarket’s knights, Sir Michael Stoute and the late Sir Henry Cecil, as well as to Aidan O’Brien at Ballydoyle, has had a nomadic, stop-start career in recent years. Fallon was, he says, one ride away from retirement two winters ago in Dubai, but the horse was a winner that persuaded him to keep going. A couple of months later he took the 2,000 Guineas on Night Of Thunder, his ninth success in a Newmarket Classic.
“I just wanted to come back to see the kids and take it from there, really,” the 50-year-old said after finishing fourth on Alan Swinbank’s Deep Resolve here. “Alan has booked me for all of his runners this weekend and the kids are only up the road, so I thought it was an opportunity. Churchill Downs had finished and Keeneland [in Kentucky] starts on 3 October, which is Saturday week, so we’ll see how we go from here. If I get the rides, I’ll probably stay. If not, I’m going to go back at some stage anyway.
“I enjoy America, I’ve ridden all over, travelled around from Santa Anita, Del Mar and Indiana Downs up to Keeneland. I just needed a change from here, going up and down the country every day. I thought a change would do me the world of good and I didn’t think I was riding well at the time, either.
“When you get to my age you don’t improve but it’s nice to get on nice horses and the best horse in a race, even if it’s a cheap race. It’s all about confidence, really. If you’re riding winners, you have it and, if you don’t, it’s more difficult.”
Four months away can be long enough to be forgotten in racing but six championships and 16 English Classic victories are an impressive aide memoire. Fallon has a full book of rides at Haydock on Saturday and hopes the momentum will continue for a few weeks at least.
“It’s been a great experience, going and riding all over America and I thought I’d better do it before I retire,” Fallon said. “I just missed the kids and now I can freshen up. I want to go to Australia as well. I was there years ago as an apprentice and I was over there twice to ride in the Melbourne Cup. That’s a country I really like but I think America is my favourite.
“I’d always wanted to go to Del Mar [on the California coast near San Diego], I’d heard a lot about it and it’s a beautiful place.”
Del Mar will host the Breeders’ Cup for the first time in 2017 but Fallon smiles at the suggestion that his experience of its tight turf course could prove useful for European trainers with runners.
“I don’t think I’ll be around that long, to be honest with you,” Fallon said. “I feel great and, thank God, I haven’t had many injuries, so I think that helps as well. But when you start getting older, you don’t get the same rides. We’ll just have to see how it goes.
“I have to keep busy. I love riding horses, I know nothing else and I know I won’t be doing it too much longer. If things take off [here], great. If not, I have options.”
Fallon’s winning totals for the 25 seasons since his first ride in 1991 tell the bare story of his convoluted career, both on and off a horse. There was steady progress in the early years, then several steps back in 1994, when he was banned for six months for hauling his fellow jockey Stuart Webster from his horse after a race at Beverley. Three years later, he won his first title with 202 winners, followed up with 204 and 202 in 1998 and 1999, then dropped to 59 in 2000 when a serious shoulder injury from a fall at Royal Ascot ended his season in June.
Three more championships followed between 2001 and 2003, but a riding ban in Britain in the run-up to Fallon’s trial on race-fixing charges at the Old Bailey, which collapsed in December 2007, was followed by an 18-month suspension for a positive test for cocaine. Even then, he returned to ride 154 winners in 2011 but has not reached three figures since.
“When you’ve won most of the big races and Classics, you need an incentive,” Fallon says. “It’s hard now, there’s a lot of good jockeys and you see really good jockeys getting just one or two rides [a day].
“A couple of years ago, when I was riding in Dubai, I was going to retire then,” Fallon says, “and I got on the right horse for Saeed [bin Suroor], we won the first round of the Maktoum Challenge and I thought he’d probably win again and so I’d hang around for another two weeks. Then he won the second round and I picked up some good rides at the World Cup [in March] and I ended up getting on Night Of Thunder, so you just never know.
“When Night Of Thunder won, that was nine [winners] between the two Guineas and I’d love to do it 10 times. That was my goal at the start of this year but it wasn’t to be. But maybe if I can hang around a bit longer. There’s always next year.”
