Tony McCoy will always push it
It had been an extraordinary day in the life of AP McCoy. The sun was starting to dip in the sky but the smile that had been a permanent decoration of those sometimes mournful features looked like it could not be removed short of a hammer and chisel.
Then someone asked McCoy about his chances in the last race at Aintree on Saturday. That should have been cue return of the machine, the man who has taken a wrecking ball to every record on record and put most of them in places that other jockeys will take decades to find. But nothing happened.
The smile did not waver and McCoy simply said: “For the first time in my life – ever - I thought ‘who cares?’”. Amuse Me actually finished a distance last but even that did not appear to put too much of a dampener on the day.
Winning the John Smith’s Grand National on Don’t Push It should have been the days of days but what has always set McCoy apart is that insatiable hunger – not for the food that he has denied himself ever since he made the pact with his body to bend to his will to win – but the need to ride that next winner. To hear McCoy even joke about not regarding his next ride as the most important of his life was revealing of how much winning the National had meant to him.
Wind the tape of his career back 10 years to an April fixture at Cheltenham. His face was the same pale, ghostly pallor of a man how had forgotten what the sun looked like. His unbuttoned racing silks hung loosely on a frame so spare that it would take three square feasts before you could call him thin. The sorry effect was completed by a bandage wrapped around his right wrist, the legacy of the most recent fall.
Looking more in need of a day in bed, he had just spent another purgatorial spell in the sauna followed by four rides around Prestbury Park, which is not the recommended cure for a dose of the flu. By four o’clock he was muttering about giving up his last ride of the day. Why not? After all, when you have already ridden 1,000 winners in half the time it has taken anyone else, what does one more ride matter?
It did to McCoy, more than most of us could even begin to contemplate. He stiffened the sinew, summoned up the blood, went out to ride Country Store and returned with the most cherished possession in the Irishman’s life; yet another winner.
Now fast-forward 10 years and another 2200 winners to Sandown Park last month. Qaspal was favourite for the Imperial Cup partly because he had only 10st 3lb but mainly because McCoy was going to ride; not just ride but get down to the correct weight. McCoy had not ridden so light for nearly three years but everyone one knew that he would make the weight. As he pointed out: “I’ve never put up overweight and I’m not going to start now.”
Again this was the man who sees no further than the next winning post, whatever prize may be at stake. As he explained in an interview earlier this season: “The most important thing for me is still to be champion jockey. I’ve won 140 times so far this season and I still enjoy holding my title more than anything. I would love to retire as champion jockey having ridden more winners than anyone. As long as I can do that how can I be anything but happy?”
However, Saturday took McCoy to a high, quite literally, that he had never known before. To hear him speak in the hour after race was to listen to someone who was intoxicated on nothing more sinister than sheer joy. Not just for himself but trainer Jonjo O’Neill and owner JP McManus. “The whole emotion of it was unbelievable,” McCoy said the morning after a teetotaler’s night before. “The noise and the atmosphere, the whole place just suddenly takes over everything. It’s honestly something I can say that words cannot describe. It’s the greatest thing that’s happened in my racing career, I don’t know if it’ll ever sink in.
“I had this funny feeling early on in the race that the horse was really enjoying it. And he is the sort of horse that, when he is like that, he’s very, very good. Luckily, for some bizarre reason, he really took to Aintree and I kind of had a feeling all through the race that this horse could win the Grand National.”
McCoy was the obvious figure of this year’s National but the man himself prefers to think in terms of the team ethic as when he explained how he came to pick which horse to ride in the race. “Jonjo asked me Thursday morning which horse I was going to ride and I said ‘I haven’t got a clue’ and I jokingly said to him to ‘toss a coin’ and, apparently, he kept tossing it until he got Don’t Push It. But I was quietly happy with that because he’s got a bit of class and the Grand National is now a race where you need a horse with a bit of class.
“Jonjo never gets the credit he deserves. He pretty much throws you up and leaves you to it. He probably knows I’m not great with instructions - not intelligent enough to remember what he’s told me to do - so he just lets me get on with it.”
McCoy is always happiest when he is just able to get on with the job but, having been seen at his most emotional on one of the biggest stages in British sport, he might just find himself in the running for the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award. Doubtless the spin doctors behind the Racing For Change group will be keen to harness the marketing potential of that footage but the most candid advice came from closer to home.
“My daughter, Eve, was at home watching on the television,” McCoy explained. “She’s only two-and-a-half and she’s just about at the stage when she can talk to you on the phone and all she kept saying to me was ‘don’t cry on the horse Daddy’. It’s a bit embarrassing that my daughter can remember me winning the National by crying on a horse.”
Today will be spent in Ireland and celebrations with McManus but yesterday it was three rides on a nondescript card at Southwell. McCoy’s concession to the jet-set life was to travel there by helicopter but why go there in the first place?
Silly question really. “I’ve won the Grand National but let’s be realistic, I have to do what’s got me there in the first place.”
Because there were horses to ride and winners to chase. And because he does care.
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