Scotia-you will enjoy this from the Sunday Times ..

www.timesonline.co.uk

There is a story Ruby Walsh tells about his friend and rival, AP McCoy. It was in the early days when they were still getting to know each other and after staying at McCoy’s house near Lambourn, Walsh and his host were travelling together to Kempton Races. The day is remembered for McCoy’s broken collar bone.

With winners to ride, recovery time was cancelled. From the back seat Walsh saw the pain on McCoy’s ashen face. “We stopped at a BP service station in Bracknell,” he says, “and the pain was so bad AP had to go to the toilet to throw up. He rode a double that day and leaving the racecourse afterwards I thought, ‘Is this what we have to do’?”

Perhaps, if it is your destiny to ride more than 3,000 winners or if your aim is to be champion jockey from the moment you first compete to the day you stop and not have one day in between when you’re not champion. McCoy has been number one for 14 consecutive years and is far enough in front to do a Devon Loch and still claim No 15 two months from now.

We notice him when winter mists dissipate to give us a clearer view of Cheltenham and its festival. But that misses the point of his career: wherever there are white railings, a winning post and enough daylight, he performs. His 1,500th winner came at Exeter, the 2,000th at Wincanton, the 3,000th at Plumpton and the key to his greatness is his unrelenting expression of it.
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At Leicester racecourse two hours before the first race, he leans back against a table, half-sitting but fully engaged. We are talking of this endless quest and what it is that keeps him going. He will be 36 in May and by then he will be chasing a 16th consecutive title. “Why?” he asks to a question. “It is what I want.”

“If you don’t want it, fine, don’t do it. But I want to be champion again, and so I’ve just got to get out of bed early and get on with it. When I look back at some point in the future I don’t want to think, ‘You lazy git, you could have made a lot more of it.’ I want to say, ‘You had it as good as anyone will ever have it.’”

His talent has always been subordinate to his character. He grew up in a small County Antrim village and though his mother Claire believed little could be achieved without education, he didn’t like school and fought for his right not to attend. A difficult, even pig-headed little boy, you might have said. Yet when he began to help local racehorse trainer Billy Rock, he proved himself diligent, punctual, well-mannered and hardworking.

From the start he knew his own mind. Horses and the people around them would be his teachers. He never wished to cause trouble but if he felt strongly about something, he couldn’t hold back. Consider him as he was in 1997 at age 22; his third season in England, his first riding for the dominant Martin Pipe. It was the first day of the Cheltenham Festival and McCoy showed up late for an appearance at a pre-race corporate event that Pipe wanted him to attend.

Enraged at what he saw as his young jockey’s lack of respect, Pipe lost his temper and used foul language to make his point. McCoy hadn’t experienced that side of the trainer and was taken aback. This row happened an hour before the start of their first Festival together and less than two hours before McCoy rode a fine race on the Pipe-trained Or Royal to win the Arkle Chase.

“Well done, a great ride,” Pipe said as horse and jockey were led back to the winner’s enclosure. Unprepared to let the joy of victory dilute his sense of having been mistreated, the jockey leaned towards the trainer and whispered, “The next time you speak to me like that, you’ll be getting someone else to ride your horses.”

They would have other rows and would always make up but from that first scrape, the boy told his boss that he was already a young man, not to be pushed around. “I wouldn’t have those kind of rows now,” he says, almost but not quite embarrassed by the recollection of brazenness. “We had a few hot-headed rows, Martin and I, but the one thing you never lost with him was admiration for how he did his job. I don’t think there’s anyone in racing I’ve more admiration for.”

If there has been a mellowing, that is not to say he deals only in sweetness and light. Every rival understands that in the heat of battle, he will burn them to get first to the winning post. Ask him about the changes he has seen in the 15 years of his dominance and you touch one of the man’s fiery nerves still alive. “For jockeys, there have been more changes in England than in Ireland. The way jockeys are catered for at English racecourses is much better than Ireland, much, much better.

“We’ve got physios here, proper food and at virtually every racecourse we are treated like professional sportspeople. In Ireland, it is a joke. It actually makes me not want to go there at times. A couple of weeks ago I went to one racecourse in Ireland and couldn’t have a shower afterwards. It wasn’t that the water was cold, it wasn’t working.”

The British jockeys’ championship ends on the last Saturday in April and the new race begins the following day: no interval and no respite. And he, the eternal champion, is always ready. “Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century,” Salman Rushdie once wrote and McCoy refuels on it.

“I have always questioned myself. From day one, I have lived in fear of not performing today as well as I did yesterday. That is no different than it was 10 years ago. Physically, I don’t feel any slower now. I’m as fit as I’ve ever been and I'm enjoying it as much as ever, but that fear of not being able to do it, that is always there.

“I have really enjoyed riding but it would have been much more enjoyable if that doubt hadn’t been nagging away in the back of my mind. But if I was convinced I had all the natural ability in the world, then maybe my attitude mightn’t have been as good. It’s almost like I’ve been living with the fear that I’m not that good.”

The rewards can be listed numerically but the greater prize has been the progression of a single-minded tyro to mature manhood. There has never been a reason to take him away from the sports pages and his relationship and marriage to long-time girlfriend Chanelle Burke have smoothed a few rough edges. “My wife is very good socially.

“She keeps me socially active, which I suppose is a good thing. There is nothing flash about my life but we have a lot of fun and since Eve [the McCoys’ two-year-old daughter] came along, there has been more happiness. She has changed my life in the sense that I know when I come home after a day’s racing, someone is going to be happy with me.

“There is one person sure to be smiling when I go in the door. The moment I love is putting my keys down and hearing her coming round the corner roaring flat out. She doesn’t care whether I’ve three winners or no winner and it makes a difference to know there is someone who is always happy with you. As well as that she’s just a fun child.”

He finds time too for his childhood football team, Arsenal, and gets to see them play six or seven times each season. The most recent? "Unfortunately, a few Sundays ago, against United, very depressing. Hereford was called off, I diverted to the Emirates and after half an hour I wished I’d gone to Plumpton where I could have picked up one ride.Does he share Arsene Wenger’s belief in the current team? “Not really but I understand his point of view.”

He knows because his own career has been founded on attitude. He had to ride the most winners and wanted to ride the best horses. Though he has got much from an extraordinarily successful career, he hasn’t got it all. Ruby Walsh’s job as first jockey to the leading trainers in Britain and Ireland, Paul Nicholls and Willie Mullins, gives his rival opportunities to ride superior horses and more Grade One winners.

McCoy once rode for Nicholls, the trainer loved him but then he joined Martin Pipe who had far more horses and trained far more winners. When the time came to move on from Pipe and accept a generous retainer to ride for the sport’s biggest owner, JP McManus, Walsh was already established with Nicholls and the opportunity to pick up an old thread didn’t exist.

A regret? “No, not at all, definitely not. Not for all the money in the world would I change the way my career has gone. I’ve made the right moves for me and if I was advising a young person about the ideal career path for a jump jockey, I would tell him to go exactly the same route I went; Billy Rock, Jim Bolger, Toby Balding, Paul Nicholls, Martin Pipe and JP McManus.

“My education has come in the time spent with these people, because if you can’t learn from these men, you’re in trouble.”

You wonder what he makes of McManus and if he has found the key to the Irishman’s extraordinarily successful business career? “The thing about JP is that he doesn’t do bullshit. He’s very quick at spotting things, very good at analysing. I’m not saying when it comes to horses he’s always right, we have our disagreements; he will think he’s right and obviously, I know I’m right. But I think he appreciates that I have no wish to bull**** him.

“We spent a fair bit of time over meals and I’m there like a sponge, hoping to learn the things that will make me as successful as him. The thing about JP is this: I have never met anyone who loves jump racing as much as he does. I mean I love it, but not as much as he does. I don’t think anyone in racing loves it as much as him; Monday to Friday, January to December.”

If McCoy is in any way envious of Ruby Walsh’s big-race successes, he has a funny way of showing it. On his frequent visits to race in England, Walsh stays with the McCoys. “Oh yeah, every time he’s over for a weekend or a couple of days together, he will stay in the house. He has his own room, the builders named it ‘Ruby’s Room’ and it stuck. The thing that bothers me is that Eve seems to be more f*****g infatuated with him than she is with me which is very disappointing. He’s not the warmest character, no way, but she thinks he’s special.

“I don’t know, maybe he reminds her of Santa Claus, but with Eve, it’s Ruby-this and Ruby-that, and the Friday night before Newbury she wouldn’t go to bed until she had a cuddle from Ruby. If that’s not enough, he’s a brilliant bloody jockey. People ask me if I think riding standards are still on the rise, and I think of Ruby and wonder how the standard could ever get higher than that.”

McCoy looks forward to Cheltenham, and believes he’s got a lot of good horses. Denman, he is sure, can still be a big factor in the Gold Cup. “When he made the mistake at Newbury and then landed in the middle of the next and I came off, my first thought was ‘that didn’t go to plan.’ I expected there would be people with different views to mine but there weren’t. Paul [Nicholls]knows his stuff, he was philosophical and helped by the fact that his other horse won the race.

“It will have dented Denman’s reputation a little but it’s possible he’s a better horse when Paul really screws him to the gills and gets him ready for D-Day. I believe you’ll see a different horse at Cheltenham and I’m just grateful I’m going to get another go on him. I will make it up to everybody in the Gold Cup.”

If he had to pick one from all of his Cheltenham rides? “Captain Cee Bee in the Arkle. He should go very well. I’ve been very impressed with him and I think he’s a very, very good horse. You worry sometimes about Irish horses being asked to jump quicker when they come to Cheltenham but he’s got a very good engine.”

He has ridden 21 Festival winners, an impressive total but three less than his greatest rival. “Look,” says Ruby Walsh. “He’s the guy with 3,000 winners, not me. And if anyone is ever going to walk in AP McCoy’s footsteps, he’s going to have to be brilliant, he going to need an iron will and he’s going to have to be prepared to ride with a broken collarbone.”

Geraghty’s four-timer

Barry Geraghty rode a four-timer at Ascot after the day’s high-profile National Hunt meeting at Wincanton was abandoned because of a frozen track. Finian’s Rainbow and Burton Port, each an odds-on favourite, gave Geraghty a rapid double and he followed up with the 11-2 shot Monet’s Garden in the feature race, the Betfair Ascot Chase. The Nicky Richards-trained veteran was recording the 16th win of his career and Geraghty said: “He’s up there with the bravest I’ve ridden. When I gave him a kick he set sail.” The jockey’s fourth winner was 8-11 shot Sprinter Sacre

Hibs I never took you for a broad sheet reader. Scottish Sun and Daily Record man I thought you were.

Cheers Bob really did enjoy