How racing legend Pat Eddery proved wrong the trainer who said ‘Never heard of him’
“Never bloody well heard of him,” replied the trainer Major Michael Pope curtly when his wife, Kay, ventured to suggest booking the fresh-faced Irish apprentice for their equally unsuccessful horse.
What he did not know, however, was that the Major’s wife had been at Newbury races with acclaimed trainer Frenchie Nicholson and his wife Diane.
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Hide Ad“We were talking about the coming Flat season as two training families normally would,” she told racing journalist Claude Duval for his Eddery biography, published in 1976, entitled Pat On The Back.
“Frenchie said ‘Does your old man want a good apprentice to ride for him next season? You may laugh when I say this but I have a kid who has never been placed in over 50 races – hardly ever sighted.
“But he has the potential to be a very fine jockey and I just want him to get one or two opportunities. When the season comes round and you want a good boy, remember the name...Pat Eddery.”
Nicholson, whose son David went on to become a giant of National Hunt’s training ranks, was prescient in his appraisal.
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Hide AdEddery, just 17 at the time, would eventually win 4,632 British flat races, a figure exceeded only by Sir Gordon Richards.
These included three Epsom Derbies, the first of which came on Grundy in 1975. The champion’s subsequent King George duel with Bustino at Ascot, hailed as ‘the race of the century’, came to define Eddery.
Supremely strong in the finish, he became a master tactician – his hold-up ride on Dancing Brave to win the 1986 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, another race for the ages, was even more daring because of the quality of the opposition.
And he enjoyed longevity in the saddle – how apt that his 4,000th winner should have been on the Derby runner-up Silver Patriarch in the 1997 at Doncaster. “Above all, he just worked harder than the others I think,” said the horse’s trainer John Dunlop after Eddery died in 2015, at the age of 63, from the ravages of alcoholism.
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Hide AdWords that are even more prophetic when set in the context of the aforementioned Major Pope’s appreciation for Eddery when he stayed at the trainer’s Streatley stables in Berkshire to ride Alvaro before the career-changing Epsom race.
“Even at that age he wanted to sit and read the formbook,” he told Duval, the longstanding racing correspondent of The Sun. “All he thought about was racing. When riding work he used his nut but I shall never forget the puzzled look he gave me when we stood in the parade ring at Epsom that day.
“He very soon asked ‘How shall I ride him?’ I looked down on him and said: ‘Just guide him, he’ll win’. To a kid who had been given several rides and never ridden a winner, it must have sounded rather daft. He frowned a little and said ‘Do you really mean that?’
“I suppose as a seven-pound claimer who had never ridden a single winner it must have sounded rather peculiar advice. Of course it’s history now how Alvaro skated in by three lengths. Pat was over the moon.
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Hide Ad“But his first question was ‘Where are you going to run him next?’
“Already he was thinking ahead. Because of the win, other trainers began to notice the young Eddery and it helped that his father Jimmy Eddery was known as a top-class Irish jockey. All of a sudden the Nicholsons’s phone started to buzz.”
When Pat Eddery won Grundy’s Derby just six years later, he was already champion jockey and would win the title on 11 occasions. It was also the same number of triumphs won by his great adversary Lester Piggott who offered this appraisal of his rival: “He exuded class and always knew what to do in a race.
“The horses he was associated with speak for themselves, and I doubt you’d find a jockey with a sharper tactical brain or stronger in a finish.”
Praise indeed.
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