82 The Economist June 4th 2022
ObituaryLester Piggott
T
he cheekiestthing Lester Piggott ever did in racing happened
during the Grand Prix de Deauville in 1979. A bit over a furlong
from the finish he dropped his whip, so he did what he had to, and
stole another. His right hand went out, as he drew alongside at full
gallop, towards the left hand of Michel Lequeux, and plucked his
whip away. Thus armed, he whipped a path to the finish line.
This combination, exquisite balance and ruthless will, typified
his whole career. He won 4,493 races in Britain, including 30 Clas-
sics. Among them were eight St Legers, six Oaks, five 2,000 Guin-
eas, two 1,000 Guineas; and, nine times, the Epsom Derby, then
the world’s foremost race on the flat. When he won it first, in 1954
on Never Say Die, he was just 18; when he reached his ninth, in
1983, he set a record that still stands. At Royal Ascot, usually in
front of the queen, he rode 116 winners. All these were on the flat,
but he excelled at hurdles too, winning 20 from 56 rides. Eleven
times he was Champion Jockey, with the most wins in a season.
Racing pundits said he thought like a horse, and there was
some truth in that. He knew how horses felt. As an only child, and
partially deaf, he had found it hard from childhood to make
friends and get on with people. As an adult he was mostly silent,
“Old Stoneface” as some called him, but he could mumble a good
riposte if he wanted to. And with horses he had an understanding.
He had grown up with them, his family involved in racing and
training on both his father’s and his mother’s side, and at seven
had been lifted onto his first racehorse to feel the raw quivering
power of it. He could be almost eloquent as he described the secret
of his riding: how, because a horse could not change the centre of
gravity that lay behind its shoulders, he would adjust his own cen-
tre of gravity at every second and with every stride.
To achieve that he first starved his body, keeping it roughly two
stone below his natural ten-stone weight: dry toast for breakfast,
scraps of protein, no carbs, until his frame, tall for a jockey, waslean as a rake. Then he hit on the idea, when he was still a school-
boy racer, of shortening his stirrups and perching high above the
saddle, almost bent in two. There, even at speed, he could keep his
balance like a circus rider. Most other jockeys tried to copy him,
but he was the first. Having mastered that extraordinary tech-
nique, he would then “encourage” a horse, as he thought of it, by
laying on the whip in the last stages with a ferocity that could
shock spectators, as when he bludgeoned his mount Roberto past
Rheingold to win the Derby by a short head in 1972.
Yet it did not always work. Despite his 1979 whip-stealing he
came second in that race, later relegated to third, to his disgust.
You went out to win. That philosophy was his father’s, whom he
trotted after round the stables in the same flat cap and jacket: win,
win, win. He won his first real race at 12, at Haydock Park, and was
set like an arrow from then on. As a teenager he was often penal-
ised for bumping other riders; he cut them up, they cut him up
back. There were fewer cameras in those days. At Royal Ascot in
1954, when he was 18, he was suspended by the Jockey Club for
reckless riding (“nothing really”). He was also ordered to leave his
father’s stable and serve his apprenticeship somewhere else.
This made no difference to his attitude. He was never a compla-
cent stable jockey, content to do what trainers or owners wanted.
He knew horses, and a rider like him did not need instructions.
His best seasons were with Noel Murless, a royal trainer, in the late
1950s and Vincent O’Brien in the 1970s, but he left both in bitter-
ness and, each time, went freelance. For him the only point of a
stable connection was to find and ride the fastest horse. If that
horse threw him, as one did at Longchamp, giving him a hairline
skull fracture and headaches for years, he would be back riding,
and winning, much sooner than doctors recommended.
About his mounts he was not sentimental. “He’s a good horse”
was his highest praise. Even the famous cruising Nijinsky, on
which he won the Derby in 1970, “never felt as good to ride as he
was”. He liked Petite Etoile, a grey filly, for her flying speed as she
won two Coronation Cups; The Minstrel, a brave little chestnut,
because he triumphed in the Derby with no fear of the whip. On
the gallops, rather than carefully assessing how much exercise the
horses needed, he just wanted to test their best speed. When an ex-
ceptional mount appeared, he insisted on riding it in the next big
race—no matter whether it was being kept for another jockey, or
not. “Jocking off” was his speciality, and he felt no compunction
about picking up the phone to plead his case to the owner.
In search of wins he travelled round the country, from race-
course to racecourse, riding through muck and rain, to win the
Champion Jockey title, even though he got nothing for it. It peeved
him intensely that in 1963 he lost the title by one race, on the last
day of the season, to the great Australian jockey Scobie Breasley,
and he made sure he won it for the next eight years. Money,
though, was also an obsession. His mother had stressed the im-
portance of getting cash and hanging on to it. If anyone asked him
for any, he liked to joke that they were talking into his deaf ear. He
gambled, too, and in 1985, after he had retired to be a trainer, he
was found to have evaded tax for a decade and a half, which earned
him a sentence of three years in jail.
It was all a great waste of time, he thought. The greatest waste
was that, adding prison to retirement, he was out of the saddle for
almost five years. Meanwhile, the racing world had expanded to
take in America and even Hong Kong. He had bristled at the arrival
in England of Steve Cauthen from the States in 1979, though he
came to respect him. And in 1990 he staged his own remarkable
comeback in the Breeders’ Cup Mile at Belmont Park, New York.
He was 54, 42 years older than when he had lifted his first cup
at Haydock. For a while, on Royal Academy, he dawdled at the back
of the field. Then he picked up speed and finished, by a neck,
ahead of everyone else. Confident as ever, plucking the sting of age
and disgrace, he won, as he had to. He said it was the most satisfy-
ing ride he had ever had. To ride, to win
Lester Piggott, the greatest Flat-racing jockey of the 20th
century, died on May 29th, aged 86