Many words were used to describe Tony McCoy and his extraordinary, unrepeatable achievements at Newbury on Saturday after the most successful jump jockey the sport has seen, or will ever see, announced that the 2014-15 campaign, the 20th he will conclude as the runaway champion, will also be his last.
Incredible, astonishing, brilliant and driven were just a few of the words used to describe him. Another, which sums up both the man and the remarkable things that he has done, is unbroken.
McCoy has spent more than two decades engaged in one of the most demanding and attritional of all sporting professions, riding not just more winners but also more horses than any National Hunt jockey in history. He has, like every jump jockey, suffered broken bones and head-scrambling, concussive falls, with the chance of a more serious injury – career-ending or even life-changing – ever present whenever he climbs into the saddle.
Yet McCoy will emerge on the other side not just as an undisputed, unbeaten champion of his sport, the title-winner in every one of his 20 seasons as a senior rider, but he will also do so on his own terms. He chose the moment to announce his retirement with the same sense of timing and theatre that marked some of his best rides, like the Grand National victory on Don’t Push It in 2010 that arrived just when everyone had started to think that it never would.
McCoy’s wife, Chanelle, and his agent, Dave Roberts, were at Newbury and knew what was coming, but everyone else was momentarily stunned by the jockey’s announcement. Even Nick Luck, Channel 4 Racing’s normally unflappable anchorman, was visibly trembling when the cameras cut away after McCoy had climbed down from his 200th winner of the season and immediately announced that he will hang up his boots at the end of April.
It is no coincidence that McCoy has been ever-present for the two decades when National Hunt racing has grown significantly from its roots as a country sport into a major sporting industry. He epitomises the new professionalism of the winter game, a man prepared to go anywhere for a winner, and test his body to the limits when recovering from injury and wasting to do a low weight. Nothing seems to stop him, and his constant presence at the top of the National Hunt championship has been familiar and reassuring since he arrived from Ireland and immediately won the conditionals’ championship in 1995.
At times, McCoy has broken records with such regularity, reaching and then extending landmarks that many thought would stand forever, that it has been possible to take him a little for granted. The stunned silence that greeted his announcement at Newbury was the sound of several thousand racing professionals and fans coming to terms with the thought that an established part of their everyday lives was about to disappear.
Everyone knew it would happen eventually, and that given the risks attached to every ride, it could happen at any time, but it was not something anyone wanted to think about.
The first National Hunt season without McCoy will be a strange one for sure. Richard Johnson, a rider who would have been the champion many times but for McCoy, is the early favourite to inherit the title, but there is no chance at all that Johnson will ever approach his many achievements. In that sense, McCoy is irreplaceable.
No one in National Hunt racing seriously expects that McCoy’s career total of winners, which is nearly 1,500 ahead of Johnson’s career total, will be beaten. Ruby Walsh, the next jockey in the list, has yet to reach 2,500 winners, which means McCoy has ridden almost two for every one that Walsh has booted home. And if there is anything to match the sheer size of McCoy’s career total in its capacity to astonish, it is the fact that he has compiled it in a sport that can wipe out its participants with such instant and unexpected brutality.
Somehow, McCoy has faced up to sheer chance and stared it out. Had anyone suggested, back in 1995 as he set out on his first season as a senior jockey, that McCoy would still be riding in 2015, then it would have seemed certain that somewhere along the line, he would have had the odd bad year. A nasty fall, a serious injury or even just a poor run of form from his main stables, but something, somewhere to keep him out of action long enough for someone else to grab the championship. It never happened. Despite all the falls and setbacks, the myriad of moments when his career was in the balance and bad luck was ready to step in, McCoy has emerged unbroken and unbowed, but also with the modesty and humility of a true champion, one who knows that it takes luck to make the most of an exceptional talent.
When McCoy rode his 4,000th winner, at Towcester, in November 2013,, he said he felt “proud for the first time” of what he had achieved. Racing, though, has long since been proud of McCoy and in awe of his sheer, all-consuming commitment and drive in the business of riding winners. He has inspired a generation of young jump jockeys, who know that whatever they might achieve in the game, McCoy has done things they can never hope to equal.
Mere numbers can never fully sum up what McCoy has achieved and how much he has meant to National Hunt racing and its followers, but here are a few more. In his 20 seasons as a senior jockey, he has not only been the champion by a wide margin, but he has also recorded a strike-rate above 20%, better than one winner in every five rides. This season he has defied the ageing process still further by nearly one winner in every three, and had it not been for an injury earlier in the campaign, McCoy might well be closing in on 300 winners in a season, a total that would be unthinkable for any other jockey in Britain, either on the Flat or over jumps.
McCoy has won more than £1m in prize money in every one of those 20 seasons, and in addition to the Grand National – a race that has eluded many other top National Hunt jockeys down the years – he has also won almost every other major race in the calendar at least once.
All that remains now is for jump racing, which, thanks in part to McCoy, is much bigger and better established now than it was 20 years ago, to say goodbye. The next two-and-a-half months will give everyone a final chance to witness one of the greatest sportsmen Britain has seen doing what he has done better than anyone else in history, and see it up close for themselves.
Next week, he is due to ride at Ayr, Kelso, Chepstow and Catterick. Make a date if you can because never again will Britain’s racecourses see a jockey like Tony McCoy.
