Thanks, AP. The Last Day.

They cheered him on the way out of the weighing room. They clapped him into the paddock, and out again. They cheered him onto the course, down to the start, and round the first circuit. The fairytale didn’t happen, but it didn’t matter. In some ways, perhaps it was better that way. Racing is not really about fairy tales. It’s too real for that. He finished third each time, giving it all the old drive and verve and knuckle, but just, as on so many occasions, having a horse under him who wasn’t quite good enough on the day. Nobody really cared. The crowd went wild as he came back into the enclosure, and young Box Office, who had never heard such a noise in his life, lifted his dear, honest ears to the throng and must have thought he’d won the Gold Cup.

A seventeen-year-old conditional jockey called Sean Bowen won the first race in style. He was not even born when AP took his first championship. The future, with its flags flying, had arrived. Just in case anyone was in any doubt, Bowen won the big race too, the last great chase of the season, the one that will always be the Whitbread to me, the race that still recalls that glittering sunny day many years ago when the bright white figure of Desert Orchid danced over that emerald turf with his head held high, putting them all to the sword. McCoy’s last ever race was won by Richard Johnson, another great horseman and true gentleman, who has run second to him for almost all of those twenty years of triumph.

All the jockeys came out and formed a guard of honour, clapping the slender figure in the green and gold as he went past. When he was awarded his twentieth Champion Jockey trophy, he was hoisted up onto laughing shoulders, holding his cup aloft, a smile of achievement and regret on his wistful face. The cup was decommissioned on the spot. Nobody else has ever won it, and it was right that AP should take it home. They’ll make another one for next year.

Twitter went insane. Everyone, from the humblest punter to the greatest trainer, wanted to say #ThanksAP. At one point, I thought The Champ had broken the internet. Nick Luck, natty in very sharp suiting, led the Channel Four team, who captured the occasion with perfect pitch. Paul Nicholls and Nicky Henderson and Jonjo O’Neill and JP McManus and Ruby Walsh gave eloquent tributes. Everyone was crying. Chanelle McCoy, who, with quiet grace, has watched the man she loves risk his very life, was in tears; Richard Johnson was in tears; AP himself, the toughest competitor I ever saw, a man they carved out of granite and then threw away the mould, was in tears.

I, as you may imagine, was in pieces. At one point, a lone voice of dissent piped up. Don’t be so pathetic, said one cross gent on Twitter; he hasn’t died.

No, thank the racing angels, he has not died, although there was one dark day in an ambulance when they thought his heart was going to stop.

It did make me think, though, as I heard that rather British crossness, why there was this great outpouring. I’m not sure I ever saw it for any other sportsman in any other discipline. In some ways, I think it’s very simple. AP McCoy has taken being the best to unprecedented heights. He’s smashed every record, put every other competitor in the shade, set benchmarks which shall probably never be surpassed. That deserves applause. Along with that there is another very, very simple thing. It’s that everyone loves him. He’s a really, really nice man. Sure, people say he can be occasionally grumpy, and he admits to being obsessive, and he has said he had to teach himself to get better at losing because he really did not take it well in the early days. In recent interviews, with a wry grin, he has said his one regret is that he wished he had smiled more. But he is a proper human being and everyone likes him. He embodies quiet, unfashionable virtues – he is humble, and stoical, and industrious. He does not showboat, or save it for the big occasions. He’ll give a novice at Stratford the same ride he’ll give to a superstar at Cheltenham.

I thought too about the nature of racing. Great sporting stars are often unreachable. They perform in an arena, away from their public. They are paid huge salaries and live in gated mansions. Jockeys walk through the crowds on the racecourse, every day. If you get to the Festival early, as I do, you’ll run into Barry Geraghty or Ruby Walsh or Tom Scu in their overcoats, with their Racing Posts under their arms. There’s a democratic element in racing which you don’t see in other sports. You can be an ordinary owner, who has scrimped and saved to join a syndicate, and you can get AP McCoy up on your horse just as if you were a mighty tycoon.

The racing world itself is a tight world. They see each other a lot, because racing goes on every day. The champion trainer will bump into someone who has ten horses in training on a dour day at Plumpton, and might be beaten by her, too. They are levelled by the marvellous and mysterious nature of the thoroughbred. No matter how much money they pay for their equine stars, how many facilities they have, how many vets and physiotherapists and jumping coaches they employ, they are still prey to the stone fact that even the most brilliant horse will sometimes have a bad day. They all know the risks, the disappointments, the disasters. They know that what goes up will, literally and metaphorically, come down. That’s why they stood tall and saluted their Champ, because they know what he’s been through and they know what it takes.

Through this gaudy carnival, as the sun beamed down on Sandown, and it seemed that the whole racing tribe was united in love and admiration, stalked the ravishing thoroughbred beauties who make it all possible. They have come in their coats now spring is here, and they blossom and bloom with the sun on their backs. They have given joy to thousands since the fine weather of October, through the rain and mud and dreich of the hard winter months, and are still galloping in a bright April. Now, they will go out to grass for their summer holidays, and get to be just horses again, in a field.

AP has said it’s all about the horses. I love the horses, he has said; I could not do it without the horses. I’ve heard him state, with quiet indignation in his voice, when he’s been congratulated on one of those improbable, last-gasp victorious rides, ‘I don’t think the horse ever got the credit he deserved.’ In some ways, I suspect he would rather that it was the equine stars who got the laurel wreaths, not him. His great friend, Mick Fitzgerald, said yesterday, laughing: ‘I think he’s probably a bit embarrassed by all this.’

Watching AP, I thought that he was surprised, too. He is the professional’s professional, and he has had his head down for so long that I’m not sure he knew how much he was appreciated.

Yesterday, at last, he got to feel the love.
 
Here he is at Aintree, on Jezki, one of his last winning rides. I’m so glad I can say – I was there:

The Champ.

Imagine, for a moment, that this is what your job involves.

You get up every morning at the crack of dawn. Some days, you eat a piece of toast, some days you do not. You may sit for an hour in a boiling hot bath to get the flesh off your bones. You may go out to the gallops, on a frigid November morning, and ride a piece of work on a raw novice, who does not yet know her job. You may school an old friend, or you may have your first sit on one of those young horses who feels like he might be one of the great ones, get the electric crack of talent and promise, and dream a dream of how high he might one day fly.

You get in a car and drive sometimes hundreds of miles. You arrive at the racecourse and perhaps allow yourself a cup of tea. You put on your gaudy silks and go out and get up on a half-ton flight animal. This may be a horse you know well. You might have educated her since she was a baby, showing her how to find a stride, how to contain her excitement, how to harness her wild herd instinct. You may have taught him balance, and maturity, and trust. You may have nurtured her will to win. He might be a best beloved, a loyal compadre, or she might be a horse you have never met in your wide life.

That horse could be a shining star, a top class athlete who glitters at the highest level. Or it could be a mundane selling plater, whose owners clubbed together and got it on the cheap, and hoped, against all the odds, that they might live the dream.

The horse might have been beautifully schooled, by a storied trainer, so that it knows its job better than you do. Or it might come from one of those now rare sorts who think that schooling at home is for sissies and that horses should learn their job out on the racetrack. And you think bitter thoughts as it puts its feet into the bottom of the open ditch.

You set off, at around thirty miles an hour. You face anything from nine flights of whippy hurdles to twenty-two fences of stiff birch, five foot high, with a twelve foot stretch. There are other horses around you. One may veer off course and cannon into you, squeeze you up the rails, do you out of running room. Loose horses are the great unknown unknown. Your fella may miss his stride; your brave girl may take a false step on the flat. The hot favourite you are riding might have got out of the wrong side of the bed that morning, and the crowd will boo and hiss as you labour into an undistinguished fourth and disgusted punters tear up their betting slips. Now, in the new age of the internet, people will break out the slanders, say that the race was fixed, that the bookies greased your palm, that you can’t ride a rocking horse. All those armchair jocks, who have never so much as sat on a fighting fit thoroughbred, will tell you exactly where you went wrong.

There are tactics to think of. Your bosom friends, the ones you laugh with and cry with and go on holiday with, are fierce competitors out there on the green track. If one of them can force the pace, or keep you off the rail, or suddenly kick for home off the last bend, leaving you flat-footed, they will. But even as they are trying to sink you, and you are trying to sink them, you love them still. Theirs are the first hands that are held out to you when you pass the finishing line. You might watch one of them go down, and lie still, and even as the giddy shouts of the racegoers die in your ears, you think – what happened to Ruby, is Dickie all right?

Some of the horses you love, and some you admire, and some you don’t especially get on with. You understand they are individuals, with characters and hopes and quirks and minds of their own. Some of them show pride when they win; some are shy of the crowd; some bask in the glory. You admire them all, because you know what it takes. Some of them don’t come home. You know, with the stern rational part of your mind, that when they go, they go quickly, with adrenaline stopping the pain. You know, better than anyone, that you can’t make them race if they don’t want to. You know that they lead a better life than half the horses in the land, that they get the incomparable feeling of being gloriously fit, cherished, honed, attended to. You know that a horse can die on the road, in the field, in the box. You know that there are poor, misunderstood, shut-down equines out there, whose twilight existence is worse than death. But all the same, where there was flashing speed, mighty power, a fighting heart and a bright eye, there is now nothing. You can never hear the names Synchronised or Darlan without regret.

For twenty years, you have lived with pain. You know that every fall could be your last. Your body is a battlefield, scarred and broken. Yours is one of the very few jobs in the world where you go out to work followed by an ambulance. Some of your friends and colleagues don’t come back. You will always be haunted by the day when you saw the clothes of JT McNamara hanging on his peg and you knew he would not be coming to get them.

On some dazzling days, they will roar you up the hill at Cheltenham and you will know elation as fierce as arrows to the heart. On other days, you will be riding some dear, slow old plug on a wet Friday at Fontwell in front of four men and a dog. You ride in the wind and the weather, the sleet and the murk. You win, you lose, you fall, you fail, and sometimes, when you think all is lost, you ask that great animal under you for one, impossible, galvanic effort and even though the tank is empty and the legs are tired, it somehow finds something more, giving you every last drop of courage and determination and sheer, bloody-minded refusal to be beat, and you flash past that cherished winning post, in front by a short head.

You drive home. Sometimes you have dinner, sometimes you do not. Tomorrow, you will get up in the indigo dawn, and do it all over again.

Congratulations. You are AP McCoy.

When I write that hard life down, I wonder for a moment why anyone would do that to themselves. The pain, the risk, the hunger, even, sometimes, the boredom, when you are stuck in traffic on your way back from a blank day at Huntingdon – where does the mental and physical strength to deal with all those come from? AP has said that winning is everything. It is what drives him, and he is one of the most driven humans I have ever seen. You can pick him out in a shifting field of jockeys, teeth gritted, body crouched in wild determination. But, oddly, I think he is not quite right. I think he really does it for love. When he won on Uxizandre, at his last ever Cheltenham Festival, he did not speak of the winning, although it was a big race at the greatest jumps meeting in the world. He spoke of the thrill of riding a horse like that, who tears off in front and jumps for fun. He spoke of the exhilaration of those mighty leaps, the joy of flying over that famous turf.

I understand that love. The thoroughbred is one of the most beautiful, graceful, brave and powerful creatures on this green earth. The moment you get on their backs, you can feel the purring power under the bonnet, the Aston Martin hum, the extraordinary result of three hundred years of breeding, going back to the day when Captain Byerley brought his Turk back from the wars and put him to stud. As well as being magnificent physical specimens, they are intelligent and kind and honest. I swear that some of them even have a sense of humour. Of course the winning is the thing, but it would mean nothing without the love.

There are many extraordinary things about AP McCoy, and they’ve all been written in the last few weeks. No sportsman or woman has remained an unbeaten champion for twenty years. Just think of that for a moment. Twenty years. It’s one of the hardest sports in the world, the most unpredictable, the most demanding. But, like clockwork, there is The Champ. His guts, his talent, his stoicism, his brilliance, his determination, his horsemanship, his never-say-die are beyond compare. But perhaps even more extraordinary is that in this keenly competitive discipline, there is not one person who has a bad word to say about him. He’s had the same agent for those twenty years, and they’ve never had an argument. He is, famously, the first person in the weighing room to offer to take someone to hospital. All the young jockeys look up to him, not just because he is so damn good at his job, but because he is a gentleman. He is tough as teak, and yet he is a gentle man. To be the best and to remain a proper human being is an achievement for the ages.

I love AP McCoy. I’ve never so much as shaken his hand, but I love him like he was a brother. When I’m feeling beaten and doleful, I ask myself ‘What would AP do?’ The answer always is: pick himself up and ride another winner.

It’s been a rare privilege to watch him, over these glory years. Today, he rides his last race and thousands of racing fans will salute him as he goes. We shall not see his like again.

Magnificence, AP, and the kindness of strangers.

Be magnificent, said the voice in my head as I woke up this morning.

Actually, that was not the first thing it said. The first thing it said was: ‘Why are you dreaming about Kind?’ Kind was Frankel’s dam, and reportedly one of the best-named broodmares ever, as sweet and gentle as the day is long. She was the star of my dream last night and the voice in my head thought that was quite peculiar.

Then the voice moved swiftly on to the magnificence.

The Be Magnificent thing is because I have had quite a lot of angst and fret lately, about a variety of matters too dull to bore you with. These are matters with which I must deal. In times like this, my instinct often is to try and explain myself. I forgot that or neglected this because I was working to a crazy deadline or my brain went phhhtt or I’m desperately trying to wrangle my career back on track after a professional setback of fairly shocking proportions.

I wish always to be understood, which is why exposition is my default. But the problem with explanations is that they often sound like excuses, and in a way they are. I decided that that magnificent thing to do was not to twist on a pin but to apologise with grace, and correct the omission, and leave explanations for the birds. It did, I freely admit, go against all muscle memory.

The next thing I asked myself, in my drive for magnificence, was: ‘What would AP do?’

(For those of you new to the blog, or who have no racing interest, AP McCoy is the most champion of champion jockeys Britain has ever seen.)

This is a novel thing for me, but it’s been cooking for a while, in the echoing back corridors of my mind. In America apparently there are some very religious people who always ask themselves What Would Jesus Do? Sometimes, to remind themselves, they abbreviate it to WWJD and put it on t-shirts. (This may be apocryphal.) Since I do not have a deity, I decided to ask myself what The Champ would do. He is a man of stoicism and steel. He buggers on where lesser humans would throw up their hands. He does not brag when things go well, and he never complains when things go wrong. I also suspect that he may be in possession of a most excellent Occam’s Razor.

I told my mother this at breakfast. She put her head on one side and regarded me quizzically.

‘What would AP do?’ she asked.

‘Ride another winner,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ she said.

‘I mean,’ I said, ‘he would not give in to angst and navel-gazing and midnight fretfulness. He would never make excuses. He would just go out there and ride another winner. You see?’

I’m not quite sure she did.

Up on the hill, with the sun pouring down like honey, and the red mare at her most glorious beneath me, I gazed over the blue landscape between her pricked ears and thought: you are my winner. As she gave me, with all the sweetness of her generous heart, the most beautiful, collected, smooth sitting trot I’ve ever felt in my life, I thought: this is that winner. And I am riding her.

Then I went home and wondered if I could be magnificent. It’s so much easier to be chipped about the edges and a tiny bit second-rate and messily ordinary. It is easier to make excuses and point to reasons and demand exculpation. I would have to pull myself up to my full height and draw on all my resources.

And then, at that very moment, someone else did the magnificence for me.

A person I know only through the internet recently asked for my address. I usually would never give out this information, despite being surrounded by fierce guard dogs and neighbours who go out lamping half the night, but this particular gentleman seemed so intelligent and kind and funny that I decided to err on the side of trust rather than caution. You get out what you put in, after all.

The thing he wanted to send me arrived today. I opened it. I stared. I laughed and laughed and laughed.

It is a little book by US Cricket Guy, the funniest spoofer on Twitter by a country mile. He galvanises the Ashes by referring to decision timbers instead of wickets and cries ‘Let’s play CRICKETBALL!!!’ when things are getting tense. He makes me collapse with laughter.

A complete stranger had gone to the trouble of tracking the book down, buying it, packing it, addressing it, and sending it all the way to Scotland, just because he knew from my intemperate Ashes tweeting habit that I love test cricket with the adoration of a true believer.

That is magnificence.

It makes me smile and smile, even as I write it. The kindness of strangers never gets old for me. Each time it takes me by surprise; each time it is as keen and new and lovely as the very first. Each time, it restores my faith in human nature. I doggedly believe that most humans are mostly good, and sometimes this rickety faith has to be held together with baling twine. Today, it was bolstered with Corinthian columns and flying buttresses.

The only problem is that it sets the magnificence bar very high. My kind internet friend has raised the stakes with his immense generosity. I shall now have to leap as if I have springs in my heels. But then, that, that is what AP would do.

 

Today’s pictures:

Apologies to the polymaths. It’s late and I still have not finished my work so there is only time for the rampant loveliness that is my furry, muddy, scruffy, magnificent red mare:

Despite this season of fretfulness, when I am on her back, everything is all right. It is as if I have come home.

Scotland, and AP.

Scotland looked so beautiful today that she made me catch my breath. I think that I never forget the beauty; I think that I am all about the love and trees; I imagine that I wander about in a perpetual haze of hello clouds, hello sky.

In fact, sometimes I do not stop and look closely enough. To be surrounded by this much beauty is a privilege indeed. The fact that at least a quarter of my day’s work, with my mare and with HorseBack, takes place in the open air, so that I may feel the breeze on my face and observe the indigo hills and watch the colours of the changing landscape, is a greater piece of fortune still.

Today, I really, really looked.

It made my heart expand. It reminded me why I came here in the first place. It was because I fell in love with the hills like you fall in love with a person. Everyone thought I was nuts, and quite a lot of people still do. I don’t care. I have these hills and that is all that matters.

And now, I’m going to recklessly take the whole afternoon off, and watch the racing from Towcester, a course my old dad loved, and see if the mighty AP McCoy may ride his four thousandth winner. No human has ever come close to such a number. Even as I think of it, I can feel the blood rushing faster through my veins. I always become galvanised when I am in the presence of greatness, and this jockey is greatness indeed.

It is not just that he has talent, or that he has honed his skills. Many jockeys do that. He is brilliant in a finish, but he’s not the only one. On a rather rare occasion, you may see him be beaten by another rider.

It’s another quality, something to do with steeliness and drive and desire; something to do with pushing himself harder, seeing the peaks more clearly, wanting them more. The thing he says that he has had to try and teach himself is how to lose. He never taught himself that lesson very well. He minds each defeat; he takes it as a personal insult. I’ve seen him lift horses over the line, convince them half a mile out that they really don’t want to give up. He never says die. He is a titan, and I salute him, and when he reaches his magic number, I shall throw all my hats in the air.

 

 

In which I take a life lesson from The Champ.

Warning: it is late, and I’ve only just finished work, and I am tired. My brain sputters and fails. This may not be the finest piece of prose I have ever written. But it does have a good life lesson in it.

 

1137 words of book. Into a bit of a rhythm now.

At one point, I felt so ahead of the game, I naughtily allowed myself to watch some racing from Carlisle. In the glorious northern sunshine, the maestro who is AP McCoy won an astonishing five races, with a combination of finesse, determination, shining talent and sheer belief.

He should be held up as a model for the young people, for all people really. He does not win more races than anyone else by magic: it is from toughness, hard work, relentless drive, and never, ever settling for second best.

Before that, quite by accident, I reminded myself of something I had forgotten. I went out to run an errand, took a goofy wrong turn, and ended up deep in Aberdeenshire farming country. It was the kind of place where the valleys are deep and the hills high, so only one tiny little road can wind its way through the land, and because of this I had to go the long way round.

And that was when I remembered the power of driving. I’ve been battling with sorting out the last act; wrangling and wrestling with intricacies of plot. All at once, as the incurious Aberdeen Angus cows gazed at me and the indigo hills slid past the car window and Stanley the Dog stared beadily into the blue distance, it all fell into place.

I think it’s something to do with having the area of the brain which deals with motor skills engaged. Then the creative part can roam free. So, if I were to be giving writing advice, I should say: when you are feeling a little cribbed and cabined, get in the car.

And, as I finish the day, tired but satisfied, I look back on it and think: it’s not just the young people who can learn from Tony McCoy. It is this middle-aged person, too.

McCoy is one of the very best we’ve seen for many reasons. He has great tactical skill. He has a driving finish like almost nobody else. He does a lovely thing of really holding a horse together. But a lot of it comes down to sheer grit.

Grit is a good virtue, along with stoicism and buggering on, both of which he has in spades. He does not moan or complain when things don’t go his way. He has his share of falls and breaks and rotten rides. There must be days when he is in the car, not to look at the glorious hills and the splendid cows, but in the driving rain on a clogged motorway, only to find some hard-mouthed disappointment at the end of the journey.

Not every horse he rides is top class, and not every meeting is a Cheltenham or a Sandown, with cheering crowds and golden trophies. He, too, will have his wet Wednesdays at Huntingdon, in the fog and the murk, watched by one man and a dog. (Actually, I love Huntingdon; I used to go there with my old dad and drink whisky and meet ancient, weather-beaten old gents in flat caps. But it is not one of the glamour tracks, and mid-week in the weather, it can feel like the land that time forgot.)

I like to have a lesson for the day. Usually it is taught to me by my red mare, who is my most accomplished and elegant professor. (On this sunny Thursday, she was simply demonstrating a blanket masterclass in rampant loveliness.) Today, the lesson comes not from a horse, but from a human. It comes from The Champ. It is grit that shall get me through. I’m going to go away and practice it.

 

Today’s pictures:

This is some of what I saw, on my travels:

Her Loveliness, having a dreamy evening mooch in the set-aside:

Very muddy, and very happy:

The Horse Talker has brought us a thrilling new addition to the paddock. Stan the Man is beside himself:

Although this is in fact his deeply quizzical face:

And, at last, my dear old hill:

And I can’t resist adding that the glittering champion won me literally hundreds of pounds today. I’ve had a rotten couple of weeks, trying to be more forensic about my betting. I felt stupid and wrong as I returned some of my previous winnings to the flinty Mr William Hill.

Today, the odds said a McCoy five-timer was pretty remote, even though a lot of his rides were fancied. We’re back over the jumps, after all. All it takes is a stumble, a slip, something else falling in front. Despite all that, I wanted him to reach his hundred for the season so much, and to approach the magical figure of 4000 winners overall, which he is closing in on, that I backed every single one of them, several in accumulators. It was like he presented me with a suitcase of cash. I should send him flowers.

I’m not at all sure what life lesson I should draw from that.

A good Saturday

Exhausted after a tremendous afternoon’s racing. I had a wild accumulator which hinged on two of the tightest of photo finishes, so I was screaming ‘Get up, get up’ and my blood pressure was shooting through the roof. (Luckily, it is historically low, so this may count as an excellent medical intervention.) Stanley the Dog has taken to yowling in protest every time the commentator says ‘Photograph; photograph.’

It all ended well as my brave fancies stuck their dear, doughty noses in front and kept them there for the judge.

There was keen pleasure too in seeing AP McCoy back in the winning enclosure in the JP McManus colours, after their tragic loss of Darlan this week. AP is one of the toughest jockeys I have ever seen in my life. His will to win and his ability to drag himself back from injury are extraordinary. He puts himself through constant physical hardship of a kind difficult for an ordinary human to imagine. But even five days on, that man, who appears to be composed of iron filings, was too distraught to speak of the tragedy.

I must admit, it made me weep. It’s always the most moving when the really strong ones find their voices cracking under the weight of emotion.

Tired too because I actually did social life last night. This almost never happens. It was a tremendous evening, and I roared with laughter and shouted about politics and waved my hands around in the air. I do sometimes wonder what it would be like to be one of those calm, composed people, who speak in quiet sentences and do not shriek and bellow. If anything, it’s getting worse as I get older. Quite soon, I shall not allow myself out of the house at all.

So now I am going to keep old lady hours and stump upstairs very soon with a fat slice of ginger cake and a nice, soothing book.

No time for pictures today. Just this most beloved face:

Last night, one of the interesting people I met was a proper, serious horseman. He is a seasoned professional. Imagine my delight when I discovered that he has a colt he adores so much he actually keeps a picture of the fellow on his telephone. I spend a lot of time feeling rather idiotic about the wild love I have for Red the Mare. It seems I am not alone. Even the hardened pros may succumb. Nicky Henderson, who has been training since I was a little girl, was in inconsolable tears after the loss of his champion on Monday.

There is something about horses. It is a combination of authenticity, beauty, bravery, even mystery. The good ones, the kind, intelligent, bonny, bold ones, can gallop into your heart like nothing else.