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Don’t Push It was one of my twelve to follow in 2006 but I didn’t have a penny on him. Like Eric Morecambe with music, I play the notes, but not necessarily in the right order. I still cheered AP home with a passion. He is utterly professional, totally dedicated to winning and afraid of nothing. At the Cheltenham Festival this year his body took a terrible battering in two crunching falls. But that didn’t stop him riding the winner of the Champion Hurdle, bringing Denman home second in the Gold Cup and riding a race on Alberta’s Run in the Ryanair Chase, which was both a masterpiece of tactical riding and a testament to his gritty determination.
For racing folk AP’s victory was all the sweeter because it was achieved in conjunction with two others who had also seemed to suffer a National hoodoo. Don’t Push It’s owner J.P. McManus, the greatest patron jump racing has ever had, had unsuccessfully run 44 horses before in his bid to win the race. Trainer Jonjo O’Neill, another great jockey in his time, never got round the National course as a rider and was yet to prepare a horse to win it.
The iron man McCoy is famously unemotional. Tears have previously been permitted only in private, as when he sat alone in the weighing room shattered by the death of his young mount Gloria Victis at Cheltenham. This time they were out in the open as he acknowledged that many folk would have been unaware of his successes in Gold Cups and Champion Hurdles but that winning the people’s race had wiped out the negative on his CV. ‘Everyone knows about the National, so from a public point of view to win the biggest race in the world means everything. At least now I can feel I’ve done all right.’
At 36, AP might not have had many more chances to fill that CV gap, so hallelujah that he has done so. The crowd loved him all the more for at last letting his feelings show. What racing folk must ensure now is that McCoy, who boils himself like a lobster to bully his body into shedding every last ounce required for him to do riding weights, gets his due reward in the wider sporting world. If ever there was a worthy contender for the BBC’s TV Sports Personality of the Year, this is the man.
Plaudits, too, for the way Aintree stages the People’s Race. The razzmatazz, the bands, the parades of past champions, the signage encouraging racegoers to walk the course all help to build the momentum. But the Friday Ladies’ Day, I fear, has become a parody, a DD cup which overfloweth. The marauding she-packs roaming the terraces in every shade from purple to baby pink, from holiday-brochure blue to eye-popping purple, were dressed for night, not for day. The stand-out cocktail parasol minis would have looked over the top on a Christmas tree fairy. The National Grid must have been in peril of breakdown from 24-hour shifts in Merseyside’s tanning salons. Fun is fun, but please, girls, steady the pace. And next time you ask a Liverpool sales assistant ‘does my bum look big in this?’, don’t believe her reply.
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