Frost now a man of many talents
Cheltenham Festival winner’s diverse interests range from poetry to rodeo bulls
The name Hadden means ‘man of the moor’ but a couple of years after retiring from the saddle we are beginning to find out there is considerably more to the man. Former – I use the word in its loosest sense – jump jockey Hadden Frost, principal cheerleader for little sister Bryony when she won the Foxhunters at Cheltenham in March, is having the time of his life.
A gifted horseman – he won a Pertemps Hurdle on Buena Vista for David Pipe and was Henrietta Knight’s jockey for a while – these days Frost, 26, whose forte was always making young horses, is bringing on a couple of potentially smart show-jumpers at his father’s Dartmoor yard.
Academia never troubled too many jockeys, but since ‘retiring’ he has also found his inner bard, specialising in Edward Lear-esque nonsense poetry. As far as I know Anthony Webber is the only other former professional jockey to have dabbled with iambic pentameters.
Frost’s Pullum – a part of which reads: A Pullum bird/a bulbous big beak/ Too large to sneeze/too large to sneak/a Pullum bird/with bright feathers glistening /Never sings if someone’s listening – has already been performed by a primary school and he hopes to get some of it published beyond the cultural reach of this column – which can be measured in inches.
Last month, ironically, given his status as ‘former,’ he came within half-a-length of the biggest winner of his career when, riding Drift Society, he was narrowly beaten in the 121st Maryland Hunt Cup. He and the winner, Derwins Prospector, were the only two horses to complete the famous course of five-foot timber post-andrail fences.
Frost had three winners and a couple of seconds from 10 rides over timber during his five-week holiday in America and qualified to ride in what is essentially an amateur event because he had not ridden as a professional for more than two years.
On the trip he also rode four rodeo bulls – for some reason that was on his bucket list – and his luck on a trip to downtown Baltimore, where there were no fewer than 316 homicides in 2016.
After straying off the tourist track, on one street corner he found himself offered cocaine, marijuana, a free voucher to Hustler’s Strip Club and “something else which could only be gesticulated” – all from the same man. “I’ve still got the free voucher as a souvenir of the encounter,” said Frost.
Call me naive but I assume he would be hard-pushed to get that little four-timer up on a single street corner in Ivybridge.
Mike Allsopp, a huge player in the City and hunting worlds, has died aged 86. He and his wife, Pat, owned and bred some extremely average horses. These invariably only put their best foot forward when he had given them away to his daughter, Kykie, or when they had retired to the hunting field.
His two biggest winners, therefore, were not courtesy of his own horses. At the White’s Grand National dinner before the 1993 race, instead of buying a horse he astutely cleaned up by buying the ‘void’ outcome and, a great friend of John Oaksey, he also backed Coneygree at 66-1 for the 2015 Cheltenham Gold Cup.