Champion Crowley is now upping the ante
JIM CROWLEY sits in a small room next to racecourse reception at Lingfield Park. It is early on Thursday afternoon, more than an hour before he will ride a winner in the first on Mukalal and he has not yet changed into his silks. He looks slick and neat. His speech is quick and even. Except when he moves on to one subject in particular.
People say he is ‘no-nonsense’. Straightforward and straight-talking. It fits him. Polite and clear-headed. The photographer takes him on to the course and asks him if he will run towards the finish line like a sprinter. Crowley shakes his head. Like many jockeys, bright lights aren’t really his thing.
He talks about last season mainly. His annus mirabilis. He was the 66-1 long-shot to become Flat racing’s Stobart Champion Jockey for the first time at the age of 38 and he came in. He was the man who achieved a lifetime’s ambition when others had thought it would always be beyond his reach.
It was hard, hard work, an attritional battle with Silvestre de Sousa that went almost to the wire. He smiles wryly as he thinks about it. ‘Eat, sleep, race, repeat,’ he says of the long days and nights riding out, travelling, racing, travelling again and sleeping. He rode 148 winners from 759 rides. No one rode more. No one won more.
What made it even more special, he says, was he was the first jockey who had ever converted from a National Hunt racer and claimed the Flat racing crown. ‘The day you retire,’ he says, ‘you can look back and say: “I was champion. I was top of my sport”.’
But there was something else that happened last year. A sliding-doors moment. On the last day of October, a couple of weeks after he had been presented with his champion’s trophy, Crowley was involved in a terrible accident. It happened in the third race of the afternoon on the all-weather at Kempton when Nellie Deen, ridden by Freddy Tylicki, tripped and brought down three other horses including Crowley’s mount, Electrify. Early reports said only that Crowley and Tylicki had been taken to hospital, Tylicki by air ambulance. Crowley (left) was lucky. He was shaken, of course, and he suffered a broken nose but he was discharged that night. Tylicki, a former champion apprentice, whose career was starting to blossom, was paralysed from the waist down. Tylicki is a popular man. The racing world was stunned.
Crowley falters a couple of times when he talks about what happened. It is obvious the memories are still painful. There is something else, too. Sportstars can’t afford to dwell too long on the dangers of what they do or they would never saddle up or climb into a boxing ring or lower themselves into the cockpit of an F1 car again.
‘I had a lucky escape,’ he says. ‘Very lucky. When you fall on the Flat, it’s a lot worse than over jumps. It’s split second. Especially on the all-weather. You don’t bounce.
‘It’s almost like when you hit a golf ball down the fairway: it goes bom, bom, bom and bounces along. When you hit it in the bunker, it stops dead. That would be the equivalent of getting a fall on the all-weather. You hit the floor.
‘When you race, you have to block it out. It’s the worst part of the job that could happen to anyone. Racing’s a great game but it can have some bad bits with it. Like most sports, there are highs and lows. When you see someone badly hurt like that, it’s awful.
‘Having been a jump jockey for a good few years before the Flat, you are well aware of the dangers when you sign up for this job. It’s a bad thing when it happens to one of your friends. It’s awful. It could happen in any sport.’
Crowley’s priorities have shifted. He is still eager to retain his title but it is not his main ambition any more. Becoming a retained rider for an owner like Sheikh Hamdan means this season will be structured around trying to win the big races rather than the most winners.
That means Group One races and, above all, it means targeting the five English Classics, the Qipco 2,000 Guineas, run yesterday at Newmarket where he finished sixth on Eminent, the Qipco 1,000 Guineas today, where Crowley will ride Talaayeb, the Oaks, the Derby and the St Leger.
‘The championship is probably not going to be as important to me,’ Crowley says. ‘Last year, I hadn’t won it before. When I got close to Silvestre, I thought: “I might not get another chance at this”.
‘It is more about winning big races for me now. We have only got five Classics in England. They are the races you want to win.’