Pushing it to the limit

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: My AutobiographyBy AP McCoy Orion, 342pp. £20

IN ANOTHER LIFE, Tony McCoy might have been what’s known in agricultural circles as an AI man. His early mentor Billy Rock, the Antrim racehorse trainer, also had a lucrative sideline in artificial insemination, importing and selling bovine sperm. And in allaying the fears of McCoy’s mother about her teenage son’s career ambitions, Rock used to tell her that if being a jockey didn’t work out, the young man would always have a fallback “bulling cows”.

In the event, McCoy was so good at riding horses that plan B was never necessary. But there was also a time – unthinkable now – when he might have been a flat jockey rather than the more endangered jump variety. Then he broke the first (and simultaneously the second) of many bones when thrown from a horse at Jim Bolger’s stables in Kilkenny. After a five-month lay-up at home, and many Ulster fries later, he would never again be light enough for flat racing.

Riding over jumps tends to be a shorter and more painful career. And, sure enough, McCoy would go on to amass a medical dictionary’s worth of injuries, including broken shoulders, ribs, collarbone, cheek and vertebrae; a wrist so badly shattered it was hanging on by ligaments; front teeth driven into the roof of his mouth; a thumb gashed so badly the bone was exposed; and, of course, multiple concussions.

But it almost goes without saying that you don’t make it in the jump-jockey business without a high pain threshold. So as you’d expect from a man who has rewritten the record books of his sport, McCoy has a Himalayan pain threshold. Within seconds of any bad fall he will be assessing the injuries in terms only of whether they prevent him riding more winners that day.

A broken collarbone, for example, is not insurmountable, as he has proven. So he will usually put off taking morphine in case there’s a chance of running more races. Beyond that, lying to doctors may also be necessary, although there have also been occasions when it was McCoy who had to tell the experts how bad he was. After a fall at Warwick a couple of years ago, he was diagnosed only with broken ribs. McCoy knew otherwise. On further inspection, doctors found he had shattered two discs in his back. He needed a serious operation, extensive physiotherapy and a spell with a Zimmer frame before he could walk again.

Between such setbacks, McCoy has earned the British jump-racing jockey’s title 16 years running, in the process winning more than 3,000 races. He has chased and beaten every record of note, including Sir Gordon Richards’s long-unreachable 269 winners in a season. And his ferocious competitiveness extends even to medical treatment.

Resorting to cryotherapy after the back injury, for example, McCoy at first found it unbearable to expose his body to temperatures of minus 100. Then, typically, he began to see this too as a challenge. When he learned that the record temperature undergone by anybody at the facility was minus 145, nothing would do McCoy but to match and beat it.

Before he left, he had endured minus 150 degrees and had burns to prove it, although on the plus side his masochism had also expedited his recovery, ensuring, however reluctant the doctors were, that he rode in yet another Cheltenham festival.

Not surprisingly, there is a downside to being as driven as McCoy. So the most gripping chapter of this compelling book (ghostwritten by the racing journalist Donn McClean) is the one about the early years of the jockey’s relationship with Chanelle Burke, now his wife. It began with McCoy meeting the Galway woman at a post-race social event and falling almost as hard as he ever had from any horse.

For a time she wasn’t interested. But he pursued her with trademark determination until his charms won her around. Then, by his own admission, he turned into a monster. It wasn’t just that, once won, she was relegated to second place in his priorities; their social life was never allowed to impinge on his relentless search for victories. Worse, he was a self-confessed bully, control freak and “s***.

On one occasion, when he found her having a sneaky cigarette at a friend’s house, he promptly drove her home and left her there while he went back to the party. The next day, still in a huff, he made her pack, then drove her to the train station, telling her the relationship was over. She left for London in tears until, only after making his point about smoking, he went back to the station and brought her home again.

Some of this behaviour he attributes to the harsh regime of a jockey’s life: the endless hunger, the hours sweating off weight in saunas and so on. Whatever the reasons, it need hardly be said that Chanelle’s friends hated him. Nor that, eventually, she was the one to tell him it was over. Whereupon he had an epiphany and begged for a reprieve.

Reluctant to believe his promises, Chanelle called a summit of her best pals. A vote on giving the jockey another chance was tied 3-3, so she turned to her father, who despite severe misgivings told her to trust her instincts. She did, and, after McCoy proposed on a gondola in Venice, she finally married him in 2006.

Their daughter, Eve (a medical miracle, given McCoy’s very low sperm count: yet another hazard of his profession), has since helped to mellow this extraordinarily determined man. “Haunted” may be a better word for him, because he admits that, throughout his decade and a half of unrelenting success, it has been the fear of losing as much as the joy of winning that motivated him.

Either way, having set records that may never be beaten, he can now afford to relent a little. And yet only last winter, riding the second-best horse in a race at Ascot, he risked both their necks in going for a make-or-break jump at the final fence. They fell.

Afterwards, the horse’s trainer, Jonjo O’Neill – himself immortalised by the famous last-gasp win on Dawn Run in the 1985 Gold Cup – looked him in the eye. “You know, AP,” he said, “sometimes you just have to finish second.” Whereupon McCoy shook his head and replied: “We still had a chance.”

Frank McNally is an Irish Timesjournalist