The “sold out” signs were raised at Sandown two days before Tony McCoy’s final afternoon in the saddle on Saturday. Officials at the Esher track said on Thursday that Premier, grandstand and hospitality tickets had all been snapped up and took the unusual step of advising racegoers to “use public transport where possible” because of the exceptional and possibly unprecedented strain which is about to be placed on the course’s car parks.
Sandown has arranged a train from Waterloo at 11.02am on Saturday which will be free to those who can produce a ticket for the races, on a “first come, first served” basis. The track’s capacity is only 18,000 but it will be enough to ensure that that and other trains to Esher on Saturday morning will have every inch of standing room taken up.
Rupert Trevelyan, the Jockey Club’s director for the London area, said McCoy would be honoured during the track’s end-of-season awards, held on this day each year, and also “throughout the afternoon”. “It is a real privilege for Sandown to be a part of this historic day,” he said.
One remaining question is how much of a part McCoy himself will play. He still has only a single booked ride, on Mr Mole in the Grade One “AP McCoy Celebration Chase”. It would be an apt final ride, since the same horse’s victory in February prompted the jockey to announce his intention to retire, but another win can hardly be taken for granted, with Sprinter Sacre, Vibrato Valtat, God’s Own and Somersby among the final field declared on Thursday.
Dave Roberts, McCoy’s agent, said decisions about the jockey’s final book of rides would be taken early on Friday morning. He has a potential mount, Box Office, in a handicap hurdle late on the card but Roberts says the horse is a doubtful runner unless rain arrives and there is very little in the forecast.
Channel 4 viewers can at least be assured that they will get to see McCoy’s final ride, whenever it happens to be. The broadcaster has announced an extension to its Saturday coverage until 4.40pm, while Box Office’s race has been moved to 4.25pm, an hour earlier than originally scheduled, so that it can be included in the live programme. It will still be shown, whether or not McCoy takes part.
It will be a surprise to many that the lauded McCoy is not busier on his final day, especially if he does not have a ride in the 20-runner feature race, the Bet365 Gold Cup. But there is a growing suspicion that he is determined to have his final ride in the colours of his main employer, JP McManus. If it cannot be Box Office, then it will have to be Mr Mole, half an hour before the Gold Cup, in which McManus has no runners.
McCoy has been in action only at intervals over the fortnight since the Grand National, having had nine rides in that time. “Unfortunately the racing from Aintree to Sandown isn’t great but it’s important for him to get to Sandown,” Roberts said. “He’ll have a ride in a Grade One and it would be a great way to go out.”
Jonjo O’Neill, the trainer most closely associated with McCoy for the past decade, had two winners at Warwick on Thursday and said the jockey could have been on both, had he wished. But O’Neill believes the importance of being in one piece for Sandown’s final day of the jumps season has been impressed on McCoy and the trainer accepts that as an appropriate priority.
Retirement is in the air in jumps racing, as Hilary Parrott announced that both she and Wayward Prince, the horse she trained to win Saturday’s Scottish Grand National, will now be bowing out of the game. “He’s 11 and he can’t do better than that,” she said of the horse.
Less happily, Davy Condon has accepted medical advice to give up horse riding, professional or recreational, after suffering a second spinal injury within the space of a year when he and Portrait King fell in the National. Among other major successes, Condon rode Go Native to win both the Fighting Fifth and the Christmas Hurdles at the end of 2009.
