In a well-appointed shed-office behind a sleepy street here in rural Cambridgshire works one of the most influential and successful men in British Flat racing. Tony ‘Bony’ Hind has made his way from mucking out horses at Shergar’s stable more than 30 years ago to become the dominant jockey’s agent in the game, responsible for the champion in seven of the past 11 seasons.
This year’s success by Jim Crowley, a huge achievement by the jockey himself, is also the crowning moment in Hind’s career. He received little public acknowledgment for his efforts in helping Ryan Moore and Richard Hughes to become champions three times each, the manifest excellence of both men making them unsurprising victors, but Crowley’s case is different. As a 38-year-old who spent the early part of his career riding over fences, his credentials for stardom were less clear and he was on offer at 66-1 for the title when betting began 10 months ago.
Hind is not the type of agent to sign up everyone he can and play a numbers game; he is comfortable with 10 riders and would rather have fewer than more. But a gap in his stable opened up when Hughes retired last year and, from those jockeys who clamoured to fill it, he picked Crowley. “I thought, there’s something about this fella,” Hind reflects, swivelling his chair away from the TV and the computer screen with the reluctance of a man whose working day, without interruptions, can sometimes last from 6am to 10pm. “What I saw in him was guts. He’s a horseman, not scared of horses.”
For Hind, Crowley’s background in jumping was a positive. He notes that both Moore and Hughes were born to fathers who trained jumpers and both rode over hurdles in their early days. “It’s very rare, very rare, you get a horseman and a jockey at the same time. You usually get a jockey but not a horseman. Some of them, you get a horseman but not a very good jockey. When you get both, that’s when you’ve hit the button.”
Persuaded, Hind told many friends to take the big odds about his new signing becoming champion, including a large number of his fellow Spurs fans. “They know more about horse racing from the last two and a half months than they’ve learnt all their lives. They were going in the bars where there was football on, going ‘Put At The Races on!’ Some of them went racing, never seen a racecourse in their lives. I thought, ‘Jesus, I can’t believe this. I’m enticing people into racing.’”
At the root of Hind’s success is his ability to judge form, guiding his jockeys onto the right horses from Ayr on Monday to Ascot on Saturday. He is helped by a piece of handicapping software he wrote himself and shows no one else. For fun he tried it out on the Coral Cup at the Cheltenham Festival, one of the spring’s trickiest puzzles to solve. It has given him the last two winners and paid for his daughter’s first car.
At 57, his situation is extremely comfortable and he is happy to lock up his office for three months from mid-November and spend the off-season with his family, letting others worry about all-weather action in the frozen months. But there was nothing inevitable about this pleasing outcome.
Hind was a lad with Barry Hills at Manton when he stumbled backwards into what has proved his calling. Darryll Holland, then an unknown teenager, emerged from the office one afternoon, complaining that he had tried to book rides for himself and could not do it. Someone called out: “Bony’s got the gift of the gab. He’ll get you rides!”
Before he knew what was happening, Hind says, Holland was hustling him into a phone box with a tin of 10p pieces. “I rang this first trainer up and I remember saying to him, ‘I’ve got Darryll Holland’. He said, ‘Who’s he?’ I said, ‘He’s the best apprentice in the country. He claims 7lb. He’s brilliant.’ Well, it just came out. I didn’t know what I was saying. He said, ‘Yeah. Put him on it.’”
Another trainer responded: “Give me a ring when I’ve heard of him.” “No,” Hind replied, “you’ll call me.”
Hind used the names of Hills’ assistants, Peter Chapple-Hyam and Joe Naughton, when he booked. “I couldn’t say I was Tony Hind, the stable lad, could I?” The system fell down when Naughton wanted to know who was getting Holland so many outside rides. “Darryll said: ‘Bony’s looking after me from a phone box. I’m giving him a fiver a ride.’”
Hills’s secretary took over but Hind was back in business some months later after relocating to Newmarket. Somehow word of his phone manner had leaked out and the jockey Allan Mackay talked him into having another go.
Now that he is firmly on top of his profession, Hind hopes to stay there. He and Crowley plan to retain the title next year, though the agent’s rule is never to look at the jockeys’ table until the day after Glorious Goodwood in early August, at which point, if his rider is in contention, it is time to buckle down and give up all thought of sleep. His rallying cry to Crowley at that stage of this year was: “Put your pyjamas in the wardrobe, we’re going for it.”
The general thinking is that Moore is focused on quality and not sufficiently interested in riding lots of winners to make him a title contender again but Hind does not accept that. “I can see him doing it next year,” he says.
“It’s a bit different with him because he’s the type of jockey who can get four or five winners a day. So he wouldn’t need to [cover hundreds of miles and work long hours]. It’s not something I bring up with him.
“If, say, next year I look at that jockey table the day after Goodwood and he’s 12 or whatever clear, I’ll just say to him, ’Well, let’s not sit in bed, eh? Let’s have another one.’ But no, he wouldn’t be doing Wolverhampton on a Saturday night.”
