JOE’STOP SPINNER
THe focus will be on 26- year- old jockey Joe Colliver when he faces the biggest test of his career riding Sam Spinner in today’s three-mile Grade One Stayers’ Hurdle.
The Sheffield-born rider’s success in restarting his career despite serving three months of a 10- month sentence in Teesside Prison after admitting paying a friend £ 2,500 to take responsibility for a drunken car crash has been a well-told story.
The mount on Jedd O’Keeffe- trained Sam Spinner will be only the fourth time Colliver has ridden at the Festival but there is no doubt about his horsemanship. Before he got into racing, Colliver represented Britain at Horseball, a fast and furious sport best described as rugby on horseback — and one which requires a high degree of skill and bravery.
He said: ‘ I competed in France, Portugal and Spain. Most of time you’ve got no reins, everything controlled by the legs. I got a few injuries. I once ended up upside down and back to front underneath. I got knocked out — that wasn’t pleasant.’
O’Keeffe has had too much to occupy his mind in the build- up to the Stayers’ Hurdle to pay much attention to the current diplomatic bustup between Britain and Russia — but he has had his own personal experience of the Cold War.
As a student O’Keeffe studied Russian. He spent a three-month placement at Leningrad University and there were times he realised he was the subject of suspicious eyes. ‘ We were definitely followed,’ O’Keeffe said. ‘You could see them!’
Like his jockey Colliver, O’Keeffe’s story of his fightback from being diagnosed with cancer and how Sam Spinner’s owners, Caron and Paul Chapman, stood by him when his Yorkshire stable lurched close to financial oblivion during his treatment, has also been well chronicled.
He admits he has become a Stayers’ Hurdle nerd and turned down an invitation to sit on a Cheltenham Festival preview panel because . . . ‘all I know about is that race’.
O’Keeffe has also had a constant reminder of Penhill, one of Sam Spinner’s main rivals this afternoon. The Willie Mullins-trained horse is named after the Wensleydale peak which looms over the High Moor gallops where Sam Spinner exercises most days.
And O’Keeffe joked: ‘every day I see Sam Spinner on the gallops, I am constantly reminded of that bloody horse!’