Epsom Derby: baby-faced gunslinger Joseph O'Brien recalls the heady days of Lester Piggott - Telegraph
Horse Racing
Epsom Derby: baby-faced gunslinger Joseph O'Brien recalls the heady days of Lester Piggott
A performance fit to place before a proud dad and a petrified mum, not to    mention the Queen in her Diamond Jubilee year.
Family fortune: trainer Aidan O'Brien (left) talks to his son and jockey Joseph  during Investec Derby Day at Epsom Racecourse Photo: PA
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As Her Majesty watched enthralled from the balcony in the stand which carries her name at Epsom, when Joseph O’Brien asked Camelot to write his legend, you could not help wondering if she was thinking of all those years when she would see Lester Piggott timing his Derby-day run to perfection.
A figure so tall that he would make ‘The Long Fellow’ look like a short fellow, there were uncanny echoes of bygone years as Joseph, a beanpole baby-faced gunslinger riding high in the saddle, had every punter who had backed the odds-on favourite wondering if he had pulled the trigger too late.
Even Joseph’s mum Anne Marie was worried sick. “It was torture,” she noted. But then she remembered the words that the great Piggott himself had told her last weekend when they were at the Curragh.
“Lester said to me ‘Tell Joseph, don’t be in any hurry’. And when I saw Camelot coming through I realised he had timed it perfectly. I am so thrilled. It’s incredible, it really is.” Her face was the picture of joyous incredulity after one of the great Derby tales had been penned.
With dad, it was not so easy to tell because even as the O’Brien clan posed for the victory photos, Aidan wouldn’t remove his topper or those darned sunglasses.
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Yet even if you could not see the emotion in the eyes, his words told of the greatest moment of even his storied training career.
“Sometimes, there are things beyond dreams,” he said. He must have been welling up behind the shades.
Still, the most amazing thing was Joseph’s own calm. Dad was emotional, mum was emotional but with the kid who had just won his ninth group one race in the space of just over a year, there was nothing but almost unreal sangfroid.
He looks like a gawky adolescent but he rides like a gnarled veteran. Of course, the great Lester ended up with a face wondrously described as “resembling a well-kept grave”.
Joseph’s cheeks are still as cherubic as rosy apples but out there the kid who is already five inches taller than Piggott in his prime just seemed as calm and studied as Lester always did amid the galloping mayhem. In the process, at 19 he became the youngest jockey to win the Derby since Lester piloted Never say Die to victory at 18 for his first triumph in the 1954 edition.
He is a few months younger than Mikael Barzalona was last year when in winning on Pour Moi. Barzalona’s brinkmanship was famously fou as he stood up waving his whip before the line. You could never imagine this with O’Brien.
Yet Epsom demands the sturdiest nerve and when Camelot’s stablemate Astrology headed for home, O’Brien still needed to make up seven lengths with just over three furlongs to run.
But the hallmark of a jockey’s greatness — indeed, of any master sportsman — is that innate sense of knowing just when to make the right move and O’Brien has been doing this for 12 months now ever since his win on St Nicholas Abbey in the Breeders’ Cup rocketed him to the top of Coolmore’s jockey hit parade.
Indeed, another consummate ride here on Saturday on the same ‘St Nick’, although even more of a steering job, saw Joseph win the Coronation Cup and enjoy an early audience with the Queen, who was presenting the prize.
One could only imagine on her big day, the one you can bet she will have enjoyed more than any other during the long weekend’s celebrations, just how much she savoured the sight of Camelot, a beauty who looks like he has just strutted haughtily out of a Stubbs painting, powering into the history books.
The sun did not just come out to honour her but, perhaps, to shine on a great horse. Year in year out here, this keenest of equine students has watched the greats being crowned – Mill Reef, Shergar, Sea Bird, Sea the Stars. Maybe Camelot can join the immortals after the St Leger.
In 1970, of course, Piggott made it all look so effortless on the last triple crown winner Nijinsky, that Ballydoyle prince of another era. The Queen, as she always does, invited the famously monosyllabic Lester up for a chat afterwards and you wonder if Joseph, so polite but quiet, had any more to say for himself.
Or perhaps like Lester, the lad will just keep on letting his consummate riding do the talking. One can only hope nature does not force this prodigious talent to stop riding in a few years time but we should enjoy him while he is flying. You can bet the Queen did.