Bike fanatic Kingscote hits top gear

RICHARD KINGSCOTE is a jockey with a passion for motorbikes and is an old hand at negotiating the hairpin turns at Oulton Park. The 37-year-old is also a master at whizzing around the tight bends of Chester and he looked like he was on an equine motorbike yesterday, delivering a performance on Sir Michael Stoute’s Passenger that drew gasps from the crowd. ‘That’s just how I ride,’ said Kingscote. ‘The knee came out around the bend!’ This was the thrill of racing, Kingscote pushing a button and getting instant acceleration from a rapidly improving four-year-old to mow down his nearest challenger, Israr, and break the course record for a race over a mile-and-a-quarter in the Huxley Stakes. There is nobody better at coaxing improvement out of horses than Stoute, and Passenger, who ran in last year’s Epsom Derby, has the potential to be a Royal Ascot horse. His odds for the Prince of Wales’s Stakes, one of the showpiece contests of next month’s event, were slashed by Betfair into 11-2. ‘He’s the sort of horse who is very responsive to his jockey,’ Kingscote said of Passenger, who was racing for just the fifth time. ‘I found that out last year and it caught me out at Epsom. I asked him to come out of the stalls — and he went. I’m learning about him as he’s learning about racing.

‘I was comfortable all the way around. I thought he did a lot really nicely. You saw the gears that he had.’