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Tim Williams meets Champion Jump Jockey AP McCoy. Originally printed in The Oxford Student in January. Reprinted alongside a Q+A with myself about students and racing in International Thoroughbred magazine in their March issue.
It was lucky I interviewed him in the morning, since that afternoon AP McCoy was ambulanced to hospital with broken ribs after getting kicked by his horse and missing the final of his four rides of the day at Taunton.
Some people would question why he was even in Somerset that day. McCoy has ridden 3000 horses to victory, been named BBC Sports Personality of the Year, and is regarded by many as one of the greatest sportspeople of all time; what is he doing in the bitter cold and rain at a minor race meeting, just two days after riding in Ireland?
“I wonder that myself here sometimes,” he jokes. “No, I’m very lucky that I enjoy what I do, so the self-motivation comes from that.”
He may be in the public eye more often than he used to be, “but my attitude and perception to it hasn’t changed and it’s the same now for me as when I started riding. Just because I’ve been lucky enough to win a lot and win a lot of things, I don’t think it’s any different.”
Anthony Peter McCoy, better known throughout his sport as Tony, AP or ‘the Champ’ grew up in Northern Ireland and rode his first winner aged 17. After moving to the mainland he took just two years to become Champion Jump Jockey and has remained so in all of the 16 years since, winning every major race there is to win – a set finally completed by his victory in the 2010 Grand National.
His success is all the more remarkable because he has often missed months of a year through injury yet still rides more winners than anyone else. He says there is no secret to his success, just sheer hard work and talent: “It’s kind of self-taught. When I started off riding I looked at the people who were at the top. You try and learn from them and hopefully get to a stage where you can do things as well as they did.” His earliest employer, trainer Jim Bolger, was a “perfectionist who always made sure you did things the right way”.
“Sometimes I go racing and only ride one horse. I could get other rides but I don’t want to be going out on a horse in the mindset that it doesn’t really have a chance of winning because I think when you go out in that mindset it’s very hard to get out of it. I want to go out with the mindset that every horse I’m riding has a realistic chance of winning.”
McCoy maintains that if he were not Champion jockey he would immediately retire – a claim that has never been tested. So the reason he’s here at Taunton is because he could win today. It doesn’t quite turn out that way – beaten twice and then put out of action for a month with broken ribs.
Doesn’t he get nervous? Probably helpfully, he has managed to exclude the thought of serious injury from his mind: “I don’t actually feel, in a silly kind of way, that there are risks. If whatever’s going to happen to me is going to happen to me, then that’s just the way it is. As a jump jockey you can’t expect not to end up in the back of an ambulance and some days it’s going to be worse than others.”
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Tags: BBC Sports Personality of the Year, British Horseracing Authority, Cheltenham Festival, grand national, Oxford Student, Taunton, Tony McCoy
