Lester Piggott: at 75 still the Derby's lord of the reins | Sport | The Guardian
The Observer
Lester Piggott: at 75 still the Derby's lord of the reins
The Epsom legend shares his views on modern-day racing and looks back at his illustrious past on the 60th anniversary of his first Derby ride
Lester Piggott, the 30-times champion jockey, at the Park Lane Hilton earlier this month. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Observer
Sunday 29 May 2011 03.00 EDT
First published on Sunday 29 May 2011 03.00 EDT
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As the eye picks out Lester Piggott approaching, the mind relocates to Tattenham Corner, where the sharp angles of his frame would coast down the hill at the back of the Derby field, waiting to swoop, ready to assert his ownership of the world's most illustrious Flat race.
Piggott is only gliding across a hotel foyer, but the association with Epsom is still instant. In the handshake, his fingers are curled from all the reins he held to steer home 30 Classic winners and nine Derby champions. His face bears softened versions of the creases that scored his features when he was the famished, hardened lord of the weighing-room. And in his eyes now is more of the softness that was so rarely visible behind the mask of the ruthless pilot.
In the golden age of sports personalities – Muhammad Ali, Pelé – Piggott acquired charisma by turning his face away from noise and celebrity. He had no use for the tumble of words with which others described their activities. His silence was his calling card. The cold glint in his eye thrilled punters and terrified his rivals. All emotion was excised from the business of winning races. At Epsom, nothing before or since has matched the glamour of him sweeping into the home straight and picking off the leaders on the best horse in a Derby.
Saturday brings the 60th anniversary of his first Derby ride, on Zucchero, who finished 13th in 1951. He conquered Epsom's undulations and cambers for the first time three years later on Never Say Die and farmed the great mile-and-a-half fiesta, winning also on Crepello, St Paddy, Sir Ivor, Nijinsky, Roberto, Empery, The Minstrel and Teenoso, the last of his successful Derby mounts, in 1983.
He has a tip for us. Piggott first rode for the Queen at Newmarket in 1955 and as our conversation turns to the monarch's Carlton House, favourite for this year's Investec Derby, he says: "It'll probably win, too. He's the obvious one."
In his official biography, written with Dick Francis, Piggott picked out his greatest dislike as "people who talk too much", so there is nothing to be gained in his presence from journalistic babble. The trainer Jeremy Tree once asked him: "I've got to speak to my old school, Lester, all the boys at Eton, and tell them all I know about racing. What shall I say?" After a pause, Piggott replied: "Tell 'em you have flu." With his partial deafness and speech impediment, he said he learned to "lip read and watch people's faces," which he still does, intently.
He weighs each question carefully and then measures out an answer like a jockey just loosening the reins. He thinks, for example, that Frankie Dettori is the finest of the modern jockeys, and that today's whip is "rubbish" and much less painful to horses than the public understands: "I think today Dettori is still the best. There's a handful of really good jockeys but I think Dettori is the one. Beautiful balance on a horse. Of course, Ryan Moore's good and Kieren Fallon's good but if you really come down to it Frankie's still the best."
In his time Piggott was a famously vigorous coercer of horses but was also known for his artistry and his super-human judgment of pace, which looked bred into him through a long ancestry of jockeys and trainers.
"I never hit them unless they were answering it. If they were going forward you knew they were responding. But there were a lot of horses I rode I never hit at all because they didn't like it."
A quick statistical blizzard: Piggott's 30 Classic wins from 1954-1992 will probably never be surpassed. Since 1900, Willie Carson comes next, way back on 17. Piggott was 12 when he rode his first winner and 18 when he accompanied Never Say Die at Epsom. Back then he was an enfant terrible, often in trouble with the stewards.
He was champion jockey 11 times and rode 4,493 Flat winners as well as 20 over hurdles, including one at the Cheltenham Festival in 1954. He rode Nijinsky to a Triple Crown (the 2,000 Guineas, Derby and St Leger) in 1970 and won the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe on Rheingold and Alleged (twice). When Vincent O'Brien, the great Irish trainer, talked him out of retirement he won the 1990 Breeders' Cup Mile on Royal Academy and the 2,000 Guineas with Rodrigo de Triano.
Working as an ambassador for the Qipco British Champions Series, Piggott granted the Observer a rare interview, and talked with the soft wit his closest friends and admirers always said was there. "People ask me why I ride with my bottom in the air. Well, I've got to put it somewhere," he once said.
The Long Fellow's style in the saddle expressed his journey across Britain's racecourses. The raised rear might as well have been a shark's fin.
There is a bit of fuss around him this week. "There's always some anniversary, isn't there. It's 60 years since I first rode in the Derby, you know?" he says. The question mark at the end of the sentence is a familiar racing habit used also by Henry Cecil, trainer of Frankel, brilliant winner of the 2,000 Guineas and an old Piggott ally.
Frankel was never going to be a Derby horse, Piggott insists: "No, he's too fast, isn't he? He ran the first five furlongs of the Guineas in about 58 seconds. Henry's got some other good ones. He trains in a very simple way and makes it look so easy. He has a good staff and a lot of people helping him. The old way. He trains like he did 30 years ago."
"The old way" is being swept away in racing's quest for modernisation and Piggott is happy to go along with it, to a point. "With the whip they have today they couldn't hurt a horse much. It's impossible. The whips are rubbish," he says. "It's all right people saying they shouldn't have whips but the ones they use today are hardly any good anyway. They're just half-and-half. The jockey had to have a whip because otherwise the horse used to go all over the place." He laughs at the thought of half-a-ton of horse without a tiller.
"Most horses hang one way or the other so you need something to correct them. The whip then was more of a whip. Today they're nothing like that. But, you know, I can see from the public point of view – at the end of a three-mile steeplechase it doesn't look good when they're whacking them. But not on the Flat."
He also regrets the rise in fixtures that serve only as betting shop fodder: "Except for the big meetings racing's become a weekend thing. The week-day racing is rubbish, isn't it? It's a lot of handicaps. People still bet on it, but it's mediocre. They went too much towards mediocrity. There's too much racing and too much mediocrity. But the sport has come through all these bad times and survived."
At 75 he no longer rides but still enjoys a punt. "We always have a bet in the bigger races. It wouldn't be any fun otherwise, would it?"
Money was Piggott's other great love, and his downfall, when he was sentenced in 1987 to three years in prison for failing to declare income of £3.25m to the Inland Revenue in the biggest tax-evasion case of its time. He served a year, was stripped of his OBE and saw his blossoming training career ruined. "I liked training a lot but it was a bad time for me, really, and I didn't continue," he says.
In 2007 he found himself in intensive care in a Swiss hospital with heart trouble: an affront to a man who has probably never eaten a Mars bar or sausage roll: "I don't know why it happened really. It's a funny thing. You wouldn't think I would get it because I was very fit but it can happen to anybody. It was just a blocked artery."
There is a placidity about him that speaks of an inner calm. But when I open his biography and show him some of the pictures he looks uncomfortable, as if to look back is too painful. "I'm quite busy, but it's not quite the same, really," he says at one point. People expect him to join them on the their nostalgia trips but he has to occupy the present, without riding, minus the thrill of the chase.
The Derby defined him because he mastered nature around Epsom and usually found his way on to the best animal, sometimes at another jockey's expense: "Of course there are bigger races later in the year now but the Derby still holds up. Look at last year [Workforce]: the winner was a great horse who won the Arc. So it holds up. The horse that wins the Derby has got to be able to do a lot of things.
"Where Sea The Stars [2009] was so good was that he was able to go through the gears. So few horses can do that. And he was a bit lazy, so we really never knew what he could do. To win the Arc so easily was fantastic.
"I thought Sir Ivor [1968] was probably the best of mine. He had this speed. He wasn't a mile-and-a-half horse but he had this terrific turn of foot. They were all great but I think he was the best. It depends a lot on the horse but it's a very tricky race. It was always the big thing. It was the thing. So you had to put a lot of thought into it. I was riding good horses. That helped."
Sometimes another jockey's good horse? "Not really. The intention was to get on the best one. That's why you're a jockey – to get on the best horse. The only controversy was Roberto [who was to be ridden by Bill Williamson, in 1972] – and that was the owner. He left it a bit late, but it was his idea."
A good idea, too, because John Galbreath saw the truth that still radiates from this mellow, shrewd-eyed horseman, with his winning energy and his poise. Around Epsom, with the right partner, Piggott would break the hearts of the opposition.
Piggott's Derby love affair
1951 Zucchero Piggott's first Derby, when he was just 15, was on a temperamental character who planted and refused to budge until the remainder of the field were almost out of sight. What did Piggott learn from this experience? "Not to get left at the start"
1952 Gay Time After winning well at Salisbury just seven days before the big race, PiggottPiggott considered his mount 'a certainty', but Charlie Smirke was in no mood to be upstaged and gave his young rival a famously hard time on the track. Smirke's mount, Tulyar, held off Gay Time by three-quarters of a length and Piggott was eventually unseated after the line
1954 Never Say Die The first of Piggott's nine successes in the race came aboard a 33-1 chance. The papers were in a frenzy about the youngest rider ever to win the race ever winner but, rather than stay out to celebrate, he was driven home by his parents where he to spend the evening mowing the lawn
1957 Crepello A heavily backed favourite, Piggott's winning ride cemented his reputation with punters and the press as being the best around. As he returned to the winner's enclosure, celebrity hairdresser 'Teasy Weasy' Raymond burst through the crowds to thrust a gold watch into the hands of the jockey as a thank-you present, while the horse's owner, Victor Sassoon gave Piggott his car, a Lincoln Continental limousine
1968 Sir Ivor Any regrets the rider might have had about his split with Noel Murless did not last long. Sir Ivor became the first of four winners Piggott would partner for Vincent O'Brien, eight years after his previous Derby win on St Paddy Piggott found Sir Ivor an easy ride – "it was as if he knew what he was supposed to do"
1970 Nijinsky Probably Piggott's most popular and famous winning ride in the race, the outstanding Nijinksy went on to become the first horse since Bahram in 1935 to win the Triple Crown. An iconic victory in the Derby, which took his record to eight from eight, was achieved in effortless fashion from French colts Gyr and Stintino
1972 Roberto Piggott had to be at his very strongest to force the winner home from Rheingold, who might have won but for continually bumping into his rival. Short of room for manoeuvre, it took a ride of astonishing power and determination to secure a short-head verdict in a photograph which took the judge what seemed like hours to resolve
1976 Empery A seventh Derby win made Piggott the winningmost successful rider in the history of the race, but punters could have been forgiven for being surprised by the 10-1 success over hot favourite Wollow. Piggott repeated the success on The Minstrel the following year
1983 Teenoso The last of Piggott's wins, gained in the most testing conditions many could ever remember at the track. Trainer Geoff Wragg, in his first season with a licence, was given a dream start to his career and the horse proved the win to be no fluke when winning the King George the following year
1994 Khamaseen Having returned to the sport after serving a prison sentence for tax evasion, Piggott was a 58-year-old grandfather when he finished fifth behind Erhaab, closing a chapter in the history of the Derby as he rode in the race for the 38th and final time