Four legends on what it takes to become a champion
With Richard Johnson about to become jump racing’s champion jockey, four former winners – Jonjo O’Neill, John Francome, Sir AP McCoy and Peter Scudamore – tell Marcus Armytage what achieving the feat meant to them
Richard Johnson will be champion jockey with over 180 winners from over 1,000 rides. The first time you won it, John, you rode 96 winners. But you appeared to be a bit take-it-orleave-it about the title? John Francome Yeah, I was. AP McCoy But he’d rather have taken it. In 1981-82, you stopped early when Peter Scudamore broke his leg so he could share his first title with you.
JF I still can’t believe I did that. Any excuse to stop early. I must have had some building work to do. If I’d known he’d go on to win seven more I might have thought differently. But in those days it was Bob Davies, Ron Barry and Jonjo. Ron Barry rode 122 winners one season and Gordon Richards sacked him to get Jonjo in.
Peter Scudamore No one rode 100 in our day. If you did that, you were a god.
JF We were southern lads. We never went north.
AP I went to Perth for a ride once. What was I thinking?
PS I remember going to Hexham and all the northern lads taking the p---. I remember as a coy amateur taking the train to Folkestone once. Francome was a god and I’m thinking I’ve got to follow his example. When I got to the station in London, there he was, eating sausage and eggs on the platform. I thought maybe that wasn’t an example I should be following.
JF I remember Andy Stringer coming down to ride at Folkestone once. I said I’d show him how to get there and back without buying a ticket. On the way back, there’s a queue where the chap’s asking for our tickets. I said, ‘Whatever you do, keep walking – if you stop, you’ve had it’. I kept walking and when I looked back he’d grabbed Andy by the sleeve and he had to go and buy a ticket. I nearly fell over laughing. In those days, though, we had two months off, there was no Sunday racing and we didn’t ride in bumpers. The day after the season ended, you’d be 12st.
PS Except Brad [Graham Bradley] who’d be 12st a day before the season finished. He used to sit in bed drinking soup trying to lose the weight. I remember a jockeys’ trip to America – by the time we got off the plane, Brad was too heavy to ride. JF Did you ever muck out? AP I did the year I was champion conditional.
JF I was still mucking out my two when I’d been champion five times. I had a s----y old car and the best part of racing was driving the ‘guv’nor’, because he had a Fiat Sport.
AP The first time I went to Hereford, Toby Balding took me and got there 15 minutes before the race. They wanted me to make the running, and I didn’t even know whether it was a right or lefthanded track.
Jonjo O’Neill There were no jockeys’ agents then. I had one of those early car phones. You needed a trailer to carry it, and if you got to anywhere with reception you had to park up to make your calls.
PS You’d ring a trainer for a ride and the trainer would say, ‘Oh, that nice Jonjo rang up last night for that’. Jonjo was the first with a car phone.
JO So, you were ringing up to nick my rides?
Jonjo, were you obsessed with titles?
JO No they were just things that happened. You didn’t think about it until March. The first usually happened by accident.
PS I think, in the end, the more you won, the more you wanted to win, and the greater the expectation. I remember Steve Smith-Eccles’s attitude was that you’d speak to the West Country trainers (where all the racing was at that time of year) in the autumn and stop talking to them as soon as it rained!
JF I remember an owner down there lending two of us his boat on one trip to the West Country. If you lend me anything, I’ll put it back exactly as I found it. So we took two girls out in it, cleaned it, put it back. The next morning, I got a call: ‘You ----. That boat’s at the bottom of the harbour’. I’m no sailor and I’d tied it up tight at low tide, so I went down there and all I could see was the shadow of the boat under the water. Fair play to him, he said it was just one of those things. About eight years later he rang and said, ‘Do you remember that boat? Well it’s time to pay for it. I want you to come and speak at a dinner’. So I did. We’ve diverted off course here a bit … what about titles? JO The title wasn’t a massive thing in those days. JF Not long ago, you’d win it with 75 winners.
AP I’d try to ride 75 winners before the end of August.
PS The season would end at Market Rasen on a Saturday night. There was nothing glorified about it. Jonjo changed our professional attitude because he made us get a few quid. We changed a few things and then AP took it to another level. You look at old pictures of jockeys in the Hennessy and you wouldn’t let them ride out now.
AP But there was definitely more depth to the riders when I started. There were 15 good jockeys. There were twice as many jockeys then as there are now.
PS The other thing which has changed is the power of the owner. With a few exceptions, in our day no one was really powerful. You were champion jockey because of the yard you were attached to rather than the owner.
AP Some of them have more horses than most trainers, so they deserve to have a jockey.
AP If you were riding lots of winners there was a good chance you’d be riding big winners.
PS Was [Richard] Dunwoody more obsessed than all of us?
AP I learnt a lot from Dunwoody – both good and bad. Physically and mentally, he was very hard. He wanted to book his own rides even though he had an agent. He wanted to drive himself everywhere. That would drive me nuts.
PS Fred Winter always said, you should get the right balance. Winning the title is not happiness – I half think Dunwoody didn’t get the balance right. It took him over.
AP He knew everything about every horse in a race. The only time I’d ever relax was when it was numerically impossible for someone to beat me. In March.
PS I always say, if you’ve done everything professionally, even if you fail, you can face yourself. I knew when we took One For Arthur to Aintree, that even if he’d fallen at the first we’d done everything we could to get him there in the best shape.
JO You said if it had been up to you, you wouldn’t have run him!
AP And you wanted the jockey to be in front at the Canal Turn!
PS We mustn’t belittle what we did, but what AP did to our records was embarrassing. There’s that old saying that jockeys can only get horses beat, they don’t make them win. But you’d see AP winning on horses which shouldn’t be winning. John also says he didn’t care about titles. He’d be laughing and joking with you in the weighing room, but if it came to asking him for a bit of daylight at the second last, he’d suddenly go deaf on you. He cared.
AP Yes, you have to enjoy it, but you also have to be a little obsessed.
PS I saw John knocked out at Towcester one day and the first thing he said when he came round, ‘What’s Scu’s ride in this?’ There was a bit of pride there.
AP It’s a shame he doesn’t get knocked out a bit more often and we’d know a bit more of what was going on inside his head.