Tales from the Turf by Robin Oakley

Author:Robin Oakley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sport, horseracing, Gold Cup, Grand National, Ascot, Dettori
Publisher: Icon Books
Published: 2013-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

Are jockeys masochists?

Wincing through the bludgeonings and knifings suffered by the heroes of Dick Francis’s racing novels it struck me one day that his leading characters rarely survive a book with their bodies intact. Just as James Bond will never get through a film without being dangled from a window, thrown into a shark-filled pool or strapped to a table with his manly assets threatened by an advancing laser beam, so each Francis hero gets a going-over by thugs in a racecourse car park, a deserted stable yard or a horsebox parked in a lay-by.

The Queen Mother’s former jockey clearly became inured to pain during his years in the saddle and I sometimes wonder if all National Hunt jockeys aren’t born masochists.

I once had permission to spend a winter day in the jockeys’ changing room at Newbury. As muscular, painfully thin young men joshed and rushed about in the ladies’ tights they use to keep warm under their breeches, some still pink from the sauna, you could see livid scars on their backs and strange protuberances on the shoulderblades and collarbones exposed by their wasting. There were the puckered scars of surgery and vivid lines down one rider’s back as if he had been run over by a harrow. As Mark Perrett, who rode on the Flat as well, emerged from the shower as spare as a coat hanger, he would have been an ideal model for a medical class: there wasn’t a bone in his body you couldn’t see.

Mick Fitzgerald had one eye all but closed and the other bruised, and was dabbing at a nose still bleeding from a resetting operation the day before, but he was smiling: he had just learned he was to ride Remittance Man at the following week’s Cheltenham Festival.

John Kavanagh, then Nicky Henderson’s dependable number two, who was recovering from a broken leg, limped down the passage to be pummelled by the Jockey Club’s ‘flying physio’ Rabbit Slattery on her treatment table. Had an old man left the betting shop walking like he did you’d have laid odds on him not making it to the pub next door; John Kavanagh came out and coaxed and drove half a ton of horse athletically over fences for three miles and then rode a stirring finish.

Jockeys loped in with their barrel-bags amid the gentle scuffing of brush on boot, the slap of saddle soap on well-worn leather as the valets – the talismans and father confessors of the weighing room – prepared their kit. One of them, Tom Buckingham, told me that Hywel Davies never went back to Doncaster after a horrific fall in which his horse cartwheeled on him and he literally ‘died’ for two minutes on the way to hospital.

One well-known figure was sleeping, his head on a heap of towels in the corner as he fought to mitigate the flu which had dogged him for two days and which had not been confessed to his retaining yard. When I commented on the number

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