Will you take a picture of my son’s first ride? He might not get many more
WHAT AP McCOY’S DAD SAID AHEAD OF HIS DEBUT RACE
THEY are proud words but ones spoken with relief coursing through them. They are a mother’s innately protective words. AP McCoy’s mother.
‘We are all going to Sandown on Saturday,’ says Claire McCoy. ‘It will be emotional in one way and a relief in another. I’ll be glad and I will be sorry, too. He has had a great career.
‘Twenty five years. It is the end of an era. I would not say I enjoyed every day of it and it is great he is hopefully coming out in one piece. But in the last few weeks, since he announced his retirement, I have been more nervous. You are thinking, “Please God get out of this without getting hurt”.’
There may appear to be a perfect symmetry about how McCoy has decided to end his peerless career this weekend when he is once again crowned champion jockey after two decades at the top of his sport. But the timing is even better than it seems.
It was exactly 25 years ago that a 15-year-old AP left his home in the Northern Irish village of Moneyglass, County Antrim, to head for a life as an apprentice jockey at the stable of Jim Bolger more than 2000 miles away across the border inn County Kilkenny.
Claire says seeing ‘ Anthony’ leave broke her heart, and shehe admits she still can’t believe her boy stuck it out at Bolger’s academy for four and a half years.
But the steely determination that enabled her son to not just rewrite racing’s history books but tear them up and start again was already in evidence.
Claire said: ‘It was 25 years ago this week that he left to go to Jim Bolger’s. He wasn’t even 16. It was a beautiful day, like today, and I was heartbroken.
‘I can assure you there were many tears that day. Kilkenny seemed so far away, and it was. The roads weren’t as good as they are now. He and his father went withith the late (trainer) Billy Rock in his horsebox. They were meeting Jim Bolger’s horsebox. I could hardly wait until his father came home and part of me thought Anthony would maybe not go and would come back.
‘You couldn’t do that now — can you imagine a 15-year- old going away? We had been down there before and left Anthony for a couple of weeks. I thought, God he will never stay here, but he was very determined.
‘Jim Bolger’s gallops were 1,500 feet above sea level — it was the wilds of Ireland and the most beautiful setting for animals you ever saw in your life, but I would not hhave said that for the apprentices. They weren’t living in luxury. The horses were living in more luxury than them.
‘There was one public phone box and maybe 30 apprentices. It was a tough time. He was there for four and a half years and, believe it or not, when he went to England he was much closer to home.’
Derby-winning trainer Bolger is a mellower model these days. In his autobiography, McCoy wrote of ‘b******ings that made grown men cry’ while he was there. Mass every Sunday was compulsory and smoking and drinking banned. But it was Bolger who gave McCoy his first ride — seventh-placed Nordic Touch on the Flat at the now defunct Dublin track of Phoenix Park on September 1, 1990.
It was a moment captured by Irish photographer Pat Healy.
Healy recalls: ‘I knew AP’s father Peadar. He had bred Thumbs Up (winner of the County Hurdle at the 1993 Cheltenham Festival) and I knew him from point-to-points. He asked me would I take a picture because it was his son’s first ride and he might not have many more.’
The prediction turned out to be wrong, but only by about 16,500 rides! It had been at Rock’s local stable that the McCoy jockey bug had really struck. The young AP spent every hour he could at the stable 11 miles from his home.
Much as she tried, Claire could not get her son to concentrate on school. She says: ‘I might as well have tried to persuade a cat — he was never, ever going to stay at school. He would huff and puff because he didn’t want to go with me fighting with him.
‘Anthony was very determined. He stuck it out. We speak a lot on the phone — not about racing, just everyday, normal things.
‘We certainly don’t talk about his falls because I don’t believe a word he tells me!’
At Sandown with Claire and Peadar will be their other son Colm and daughters Anne Marie, Jane, Kelly and Roisin.
Claire adds: ‘I don’t go racing that much, but I went to Leopardstown (the day after he announced his retirement in February). It was that day I realised what people think about him and I think it has been the same in Britain. I think he will cope fine with retirement. He is very strong-minded.’
Twenty five years on and nothing has changed.