Retired Poste is open for business
Pre-training operation with fiancee Francesca proving more lucrative than riding career
There are some jockeys who you just know will make a success of their post-riding career, be it inside or outside the sport. One such is recently retired Charlie Poste, stalwart Midlandsbased jump jockey for 15 years and winner of the 2011 Welsh National on Le Beau Bai.
From a very sporty family – his father was a rugby union coach while his mother was a Cambridge half-blue at Badminton – he was aged 10 when, primarily as company for a young school mate, he went to a riding lesson and, bingo, he was hooked.
Aged 16, weighing 7½st, he became an apprentice jockey, rode a dozen winners in two seasons for Richard Fahey but started growing.
He moved south to the Midlands and rode more than 200 jump winners. Four years ago, after hooking up with Francesca Nimmo – who, in September, will become Mrs Poste – they moved their eight horses to a yard near Stratford. Incidentally, his father-in-law to be, Chris Nimmo, trained my last winner, the never more aptly named Over The Hill.
Pre-training, breaking, pinhooking and selling point-to-pointers, they were up to 50 horses last winter and recorded their first two six-figure sales. He modestly calls it a “gradual progression”, but the bottom line is that the business he and Francesca have going is a lot more lucrative than a few rides a week.
Of course, he takes with him some happy memories. One of them is a story which rather beautifully sums up Andrew Tinkler, one of his best friends from the weighing room.
They were riding at Hereford one day when Tinkler took a fall. On the next circuit the obstacle was bypassed, the green screens were up and all the jockeys could see of their stricken colleague were his shiny patent leather boots poking out from under the screen.
After the race, Tinkler was being carried on a stretcher back to the ambulance room but, as he got there, he lifted the oxygen mask attached to his face and said to his then girlfriend, who was quietly weeping: “Don’t worry – I’ll live.” As Poste pointed out, Tinkler’s assessment of his own injuries turned out to be a little overdramatic – 10 minutes later the jockey had his colours on and was ready to weigh out for the next. On another occasion, Poste and Ger Tumelty were kipping in the weighing room at Doncaster. While they were asleep, Tom Messenger covered their faces in white chalk so they would wake up, weigh out and hand their saddles over to their respective trainers looking like idiots. Tumelty fell for it, handing over his saddle looking like he was apprentice to Marcel Marceau, but Poste had been warned by his valet, so he escaped.
Poste and Tumelty explained to Messenger about karma, the spiritual principle of cause and effect. Sure enough, as they were hacking home past the second-last having pulled up, Messenger was kneeling by the fence having taken a fall. They started laughing and shouting about karma at him.
When he looked up he was covered in blood. Their abuse was returned with interest, not so much by Messenger, but by an ambulance lady, one of Donny’s finest Florence Nightingales. Unaware of the full chain of events, she broke off from trying to staunch the bleeding with invective that made even the two jump jockeys blush.
Eat your heart out 88-year-old Mick Easterby. Barbara Blackie, the world’s oldest trainer, celebrated her 100th birthday at the weekend and runs the sole horse she has in work, Diplomat, at Ashburton in New Zealand today.
According to the Thoroughbred Racing Commentary, she was planning to get back on a horse as part of her birthday celebrations but, having fractured a vertebra in a fall during the winter, that will have to wait until her 101st.