Lester Piggott
Outstanding jockey who rode to victory nine times in the Derby and won a string of other Classics
LESTER PIGGOTT, who has died aged 86, was one of only a handful of jockeys in British racing history to cross the boundaries of their sport to become a household name.
Piggott rode 4,493 winners in Britain. He won 30 English Classics, among them an extraordinary nine victories in the Derby, a record which still stands today. He won eight St Legers; six Oaks; five 2,000 Guineas; and two 1,000 Guineas. He rode 116 winners at Royal Ascot and was champion jockey on 11 occasions – in 1960, in every season from 1964 to 1971, and in 1981 and 1982.
As with all sportsmen of the highest class, sheer talent was not the whole story. One fellow jockey once remarked of Piggott: “Unbelievable man – he can even think like a horse.” More to the point, perhaps, Piggott displayed a mental toughness and a ruthless will to win that none of his competitors could match.
There is no question that Piggott was one of the greatest jockeys ever to grace the Flat racing arena. Sir Gordon Richards, who concentrated on the national scene, rode more winners, 4,870, and would certainly have passed the 5,000 mark but for the intervention of the Second World War.
On the other hand, Piggott was, at 5ft 7in, tall for a jockey, and had he had a lighter natural weight he might have notched up even more winners; as it was, he was competing at around 21lb under his natural weight, a remarkable achievement in itself and one demanding extraordinary self-discipline. When riding he appeared to subsist on coffee, chocolate bars and cigars. His favourite food was ice cream.
Like Fred Archer, the 19th-century champion, Piggott had the advantage of a racing family background, giving him the opportunity of making a quicker start than great jockeys such as Richards or Steve Donoghue; and both in build and in temperament, the lean, withdrawn Piggott resembled Archer much more closely than he did the stocky, determined Richards or the charming but mercurial Donoghue.
Archer’s life ended in suicide, and the evening of Piggott’s career was marred by his conviction for tax evasion and consequent prison sentence. His carefulness with money was well known, and medical evidence at his trial in October 1987 suggested a link between years of strict dieting and the tendency to hoard money for its own sake rather than for the pleasure of spending it. (Archer’s closeness with money had led to his being nicknamed “the Tinman”.)
Lester Keith Piggott was born at Wantage, Berkshire, on November 5 1935, the son of Keith Piggott and Iris Rickaby, both of whom came from well-known racing families. From childhood he suffered from a slight deafness, which led him to appear shy and aloof with other children; but his affinity with horses became apparent when he and a New Forest pony called Brandy began to win prizes at local gymkhanas.
Lester’s grandfather, Ernie, had been champion jumps jockey three times and had ridden three winners of the Grand National. Keith Piggott, too, had been a successful National Hunt jockey before taking up training in Berkshire, and Lester sat on his first racehorse at the age of seven, by which time he was dividing his daylight hours between school (which he was to leave at 14) and his father’s stable.
He made his debut as a jockey aged 12 on April 7 1948 at Salisbury, on a filly called The Chase, trained by his father. His first win came at Haydock four months later, and his evident flair was soon attracting notice. His determination to win, however, occasionally made Lester reckless, and his first serious suspension followed Barnacle’s disqualification at Newbury in October 1950.
Barnacle also gave Piggott his first notable victory, in the Great Metropolitan Handicap at the Epsom spring meeting of 1951. That July saw his first success in a major European race when he took the Eclipse Stakes at Sandown Park on the Frenchtrained Mystery IX.
In the summer of 1951 Piggott had his first ride in the Derby, finishing unplaced on Zucchero. But the following year, when he was still only 16 years old, he came close to winning the race on Gay Time; Piggott maintained that his mount suffered interference from the winner, Charlie Smirke’s Tulyar.
When he did win his first Derby – on the 33-1 chance Never Say Die in 1954 – Piggott became the youngest 20th-century jockey to win the race. The Epsom classic, founded in 1780, had only once been won by a younger jockey – the 16-year-old John Parsons, who was successful aboard Caractacus in 1862.
Piggott believed that “balance” was the most important quality in a Derby horse, owing to Epsom’s demanding gradients and adverse camber. He once explained: “If [the horse] loses balance he loses speed and direction, and that might cost him the race… the horse has his own centre of gravity just behind his shoulders. The jockey has a centre of gravity. But the jockey can shift his and the horse can’t. At every stride the horse’s centre of gravity is shifting in relation to the jockey’s. Getting a horse balanced means keeping your balance, every stride, every second, to suit his.”
After Never Say Die’s Derby, rather than paint the town red Piggott went home to mow the lawn: “It was a bit unexpected, really. The owner wasn’t there and there was nothing going on. I never thought to celebrate.”
Fifteen days after Never Say Die’s triumph at Epsom the horse landed Piggott in trouble at Royal Ascot when they were beaten in a rough race for the King Edward VII Stakes. The Jockey Club stewards who investigated the race took account of his reckless riding in the past when suspending him for the remainder of the 1954 season; they also insisted that he leave his father’s stable to continue his apprenticeship elsewhere.
Years later Piggott remarked: “When I was young I didn’t want to get beaten and go back with excuses. It was every man for himself, you went out to win. Yes, I did cut up one or two, and them me. But you can’t do two things – do your best to win all the time and be careful all the time.”
As a result of the stewards’ judgment Piggott joined Sir Jack Jarvis, to whose Newmarket stable his cousin, Bill Rickaby, was first jockey. It was a subdued ending to a year which had also seen evidence of Piggott’s skill as a hurdle race jockey when he won the Triumph Hurdle on Prince Charlemagne at Hurst Park. (Piggott was to win 20 hurdle races in his career from 56 rides.)
The retirement, through injury, of Gordon Richards in July 1954 left Noel Murless’s powerful stable without a regular jockey, and Piggott was appointed to the role from 1955. For the next 12 seasons they formed the most powerful team in British racing. Piggott’s next two Derby victories – on Crepello (1957) and St Paddy (1960) – were for Murless. He also rode the stable’s brilliant filly, Petite Etoile, to win the Oaks and other big races.
The Queen’s Carrozza, in 1957, was another Oaks winner trained by Murless during this period. Her triumph at Epsom, and Roberto’s Derby victory in 1972, were widely regarded as the most forceful of Piggott’s many great rides at that racecourse.
His association with Murless, though occasionally revived, ended in 1966. Relations were already strained that summer when Piggott chose to ride Valoris, from Vincent O’brien’s stable in Co Tipperary, in the Oaks, rejecting Murless’s Varinia; Valoris proved an easy winner, Varinia finishing third.
Piggott then officially went freelance, but in effect he became O’brien’s regular big-race jockey. Nijinsky (the 1970 Triple Crown winner), Sir Ivor (1968), Roberto (1972) and The Minstrel (1977) were the four Derby winners he rode for O’brien. Alleged, twice successful in the Prix de l’arc de Triomphe, in 1977 and 1978, also helped to make O’brien and Piggott the most successful partnership in European racing.
During this period Piggott’s interest in the national championship became subsidiary to his commitments for O’brien and other overseas trainers such as Maurice Zilber, based at Chantilly, for whom he won the 1976 Derby on Empery, as well as many big international races on the tough mare, Dahlia.
By 1980, however, Piggott’s relationship with O’brien had worn thin, and that summer they parted company. The following year saw Piggott become first jockey to Henry Cecil, who had succeeded Noel Murless (his father-in-law) at the Warren Place stables at Newmarket.
This new partnership got off to a fine start when Fairy Footsteps won the 1,000 Guineas. Ardross, another star of the Cecil stable, provided Piggott’s 10th and 11th Ascot Gold Cup victories, in 1981 and 1982. Piggott was champion jockey in both those years, his first championships since his run of eight successive titles between 1964 and 1971.
He left Cecil at the end of the 1984 season to go freelance. He said goodbye to his career as a jockey on October 29 1985 at Nottingham, where Full Choke provided him with a winner. He had won his ninth, and final, Derby on Teenoso in 1983.
Piggott operated as a trainer from 1985 to 1987, winning at Royal Ascot in his first season with Cutting Blade. At one time he had 97 horses, but in 1987 his training career was interrupted when he was sentenced to three years in jail for tax evasion.
In the event he served 366 days, later saying of the experience: “I decided to keep my head down, keep my nose clean.” He was stripped of the OBE he had been awarded in 1975, and in 1994 finally settled with the Inland Revenue by paying them £4.4 million.
The commentator Sir Peter O’sullevan, a close friend of the jockey, once asked the Queen what she thought of Piggott’s misfortune. As O’sullevan told Paul Hayward in The Daily Telegraph: “I was sitting next to the Queen at Windsor … Lester had just come out of prison [after the tax evasion conviction]. The one thing that really hurt him was his OBE being taken away. He felt it was wrong.
“So I thought this was an opportune moment, and launched into my Lester spiel to Her Majesty, who put down her knife and fork, and looked at me quite seriously for a moment. I had said to her: ‘Ma’am, admittedly he nourished the Treasury below the level of requirement. But …’ Then I went into the mitigating circumstances.
“She put down her knife and fork and said: ‘I like the way you put it, but he was rather naughty, you know. He was not only rather naughty, but he was very stupid, because he paid it [his tax bill] on a bank that hadn’t come up in the case, and hadn’t been investigated.’ ”
When Piggott returned to his yard after his release only a handful of horses remained, and he decided, in 1990, to resume race riding. Within days he had won, at the age of 54, the Breeders’ Cup Mile, one of America’s most prestigious races.
In 1992 he suffered multiple injuries when his mount, Mr Brooks, broke a leg during the Breeders’ Cup Sprint in Florida. Two years later he had another potentially serious fall at Goodwood, when his saddle slipped at the end of a five-furlong sprint. He retired for a second, and final, time in September 1995.
Between 1955 and 1984 Piggott rode more than 100 winners a season in Britain on 25 occasions.
Among other big race successes, he won the Prix de l’arc de Triomphe in 1973 on Rheingold, and the 1968 Washington DC International on Sir Ivor. The story goes that after the latter race the American sporting press, who had criticised his tactics in an earlier race, crowded around him in feverish admiration, asking: “So, Lester, when did think you had the race won?” “I thought I had it won last week,” replied Old Stoneface, “now f--- off.” He took the Washington DC International twice more, on Karabas in 1969 and Argument in 1980.
Lester Piggott married, in 1960, Susan Armstrong, the daughter of the Newmarket trainer Sam Armstrong. Both their daughters, Maureen (who married the trainer, William Haggas) and Tracy, became skilled riders. Piggott also had a son, Jamie, a bloodstock agent, with Anna Ludlow, who had worked for his wife.