Rain drain
Robin Oakley
If one day soon you see the likes of Philip Hobbs, Nicky Henderson, Paul Nicholls, Ferciy Murphy and Noel Chance on some circle of sacred turf, stripped to their Yfronts, daubed in war paint and chanting to a cluster of chosen deities it won't be that much of a surprise. A rain dance is about the only hope left for Britain's National Hunt trainers.
It is bad enough that the Office of Fair Trading's report threatens the very existence of jumping, that sponsors are departing, and that more tracks are contemplating restricting themselves to Flat or allweather racing. Now, just as the National Hunt season moves into top gear, racegoers are finding themselves faced by a string of two-, threeor four-runner races. The downside of a glorious summer and a remarkably dry early autumn is that racecourse executives, even those like Wincanton and Cheltenham which have spent a fortune on buying water, are strug gling to produce raceable ground and that owners and trainers are reluctant to enter their horses and risk an early season breakdown on ground that is at best 'firm in patches'.
At Sandown on Saturday there were reasonable entries for the hurdle races. As Clerk of the Course Andrew Cooper pointed out to me, the hurdle course was fine because it had been watered through the Flat season. Nor did the chase course look too bad. But the three chases had attracted between them a total of just nine runners. As it happened, all three produced reasonable contests but Sandown must have been desperately grateful for the presence of jockey Mick Fitzgerald, who arrived in Esher needing just one more winner to take him on to the 1,000 mark in his career and with an affectionate crowd willing him to do so.
Mick had two good rides for Lambourn trainer Nicky Henderson, with whom he has been part of the furniture for 12 seasons, and Nicky was clearly hoping the landmark would be achieved on one of his. But he confessed that Mick might manage it before his two ran, and so it proved. The man once known as 'the Bank Robber', for the number of races he stole at the end after sitting quietly in behind, did not have to do it either with a late swoop. On Orswell Crest, trained by Philip Hobbs and in the colours of the appropriately named Mane Chance partnership, Mick gave a perfect demonstration of pace judgment, leading most of the way in the first chase and coming clear after the last to be applauded all the way to the line.
Only eight other riders in National Hunt history have hit the 1,000-winner mark and it remains a formidable achievement, all the more so for a comparatively late starter like Mick who had a few years round the gaff tracks before he really hit the big time and who was only saved from emigrating to New Zealand in frustration by landing a selling hurdle at Hereford. I am not sure how many rides it has taken for Mick to amass his 1,000 winners, but if you take his 16 per cent winners-to-rides ratio this season it would mean a good few thousand. Multiply those by the number of obstacles jumped and then bear in mind that a jump jockey can expect a fall on average every 13 rides and it shows you the kind of dedication required. Remember, too, the wasting: Mick rides regularly at 10 st 41b although his natural off-season weight is 11 st 7 lb.
After his Grand National victory on Rough Quest, Fitzgerald was incautious enough to declare, to his then fiancée's mortification, 'After that, even sex is an anticlimax.' Reminded of that amid the Sandown celebrations, his response was pithy. 'When I said that I was about to get married. I'm now divorced.' This time he was more cautious, but equally vehement in his feelings. Fitzgerald has suffered the National Hunt jockey's usual grim cata
logue of broken arms and legs and the removal of a collarbone. This summer he was out of the saddle for months having reconstructive surgery on his ankle. But when asked what he wanted to achieve now his answer was a simple one, and almost exactly the reply I had received when I asked the retiring Pat Eddery at Newmarket the previous Saturday what had kept him going for 37 seasons. 'Winners, winners and more winners.'
Like so many of his breed, a perfectionist who wears out the rewind button on his video looking back at races in which he may have made a mistake, Mick Fitzgerald is also no mean talker. Donkeys have been seen checking their back legs after a Fitzgerald debrief nearby. 'The horses would have been along five minutes ago,' the commentator announced at one Lambourn Open Day, 'had Mick Fitzgerald not just started a sentence.' But Nicky Henderson testifies that Mick is a thinker too: 'He's got a real tactical brain. He's always worked it out. He wins races by knowing exactly what he wanted to do.' And no young rider these days should set out without reading the sections on raceriding in Mick's autobiography, the best description of the art I have seen.
What really warmed the crowd, though, after the 1,000-up was that Mick then rode two more winners on Nicky's pair, Caracciola and Iris Royal. As his trainer and friend then smilingly declared, it was a case of 'Job done'. Having backed all three Fitzgerald winners on the day, I will echo that.
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