Richard Hughes, the champion jockey on the Flat for the past three seasons and the second-favourite to retain the title this year, said on Friday that he will retire from the saddle after the Glorious Goodwood meeting on 1 August to prepare for his new career as a trainer, concluding an outstanding 27-year stint in the saddle.
Writing in his column in the Racing Post, Hughes apologised to punters who had backed him to retain the championship, saying that “things haven’t panned out as I expected”.
He added: “It’s only recently things started to change in my head. I began to realise the enormity of what I was trying to take on. While at the July Sales at Newmarket it became obvious how much time, care and attention I must devote to the upcoming yearling sales.
“I honestly feel my first full year training will be the most important year in my training career. If you are a trainer or jockey, you need to put in 100% effort to do the job well. If I try to do both, I won’t do either justice.”
Hughes is married to the daughter of Richard Hannon Sr, a former champion trainer, and has taken the majority of his rides for the Hannon stable, now run by his brother-in-law Richard Jr, since the end of his contract to ride as first jockey to the leading owner Prince Khalid Abdullah in 2007.
Hughes had been gradually scaling down his association with the leading trainer since announcing in March that the 2015 Flat season would be his last as a jockey and he highlighted potential conflicts of interest if he is buying horses at the sales while continuing to ride as a high-profile jockey.
“Another reality is I’m going to be bidding on yearlings against trainers and owners that, if I carried on as a jockey, I might be riding for the next day,” Hughes said.
“The thought of that does not sit right with me. In all probability I’ll be outbid for most of those yearlings but as a result of bidding I’ll be influencing the sale price, which means I’ll have left a mark on the process.”
Hughes paid tribute to his colleagues in the weighing room but added that he knows the time is right to end his riding career.
“The weighing room is a very special place,” he said. “In some ways it is like a classroom full of spoiled kids. Once you go inside it, you can hide. That’s a nice feeling. Whether you get yourself a cup of coffee or go for a sweat, you know you’re protected from the outside world. You end up being much closer to fellas than you realise.
“But I am stopping because I want to stop. The most important thing to me now is training. For that reason I am completely at ease with the decision that I have taken.”
Hughes is the son of the late Dessie Hughes, the winner of many major National Hunt races as both a trainer and a jockey. Always tall for a Flat jockey, he has also ridden winners over hurdles but managed to keep his weight in check for a quarter of a century to record many victories at Group One level.
His first success in an English Classic did not arrive until Sky Lantern took the 1,000 Guineas at Newmarket in 2013, when Hughes had already taken the Flat title for the first time.
He then won the next Classic, the Oaks at Epsom, on Talent, and enjoyed Group One victories on outstanding performers including Oasis Dream, Canford Cliffs and Paco Boy.
Hughes’s decision to retire after Glorious Goodwood, a meeting staged at a notoriously difficult track where he is an acknowledged master, leaves Silvestre de Sousa as the long odds-on favourite to win the Flat jockeys’ title for the first time.
De Sousa had 53 winners at the end of Friday’s racing, two ahead of Ryan Moore, who is currently sidelined after suffering a neck injury when unseated in the stalls at Newmarket on 9 July. Paul Hanagan, the champion jockey in 2010 and 2011, had a double in the afternoon to move to 45 winners in the current campaign.
Moore emphasised on Friday that he will return to race-riding only when he feels he is “100%” to do so.
“It is frustrating to be on the sidelines,” Moore said in a blog for the Betfair betting exchange. “There is never a good time to be out injured but we are into the height of the summer now, the King George and Glorious Goodwood and the Irish Oaks this weekend, and you never like to miss good rides in good races.
“Everything is fine, though. I am recovering well. There were reports in the last few days that I felt like I had been in a car crash but that isn’t so. I really am fine. I just need to take it day by day, week by week.
“When you are talking about your neck, everybody starts to get very cautious. It’s understandable. All I want to do is to get back riding but I realise that I have to give it the time. I have to be 100% before I can go back riding. I don’t know how long it will be before I can come back but I will do all that I can to speed up the recovery process.”
