Lester: The Official Biography

by Dick Francis

  The worst they could find to say was that when Lester went over to Ireland to work Vincent's horses on the gallops, he would be trying to find out which of the Ballydoyle horses were best and which were fit, which Vincent wouldn't always want him to know in case Lester used the knowledge to get off his horses and onto those of other trainers. A duel of wits would ensue, with Lester usually and craftily finding out what he wanted to know.

  "I would tell him," Vincent says with a laugh, "to set off up the gallops with the others, but he would manage to get left, so he could come along from more than six lengths behind and find out how his horse compared. He'd do diabolical things and then say, `Sorry about that.' "

  "Vincent would come into the house in a terrible temper sometimes, saying he'd never get Lester to ride work again," Jacqueline says, "and then five minutes later, they'd be bosom friends as usual.

  "Lester's sweet," Jacqueline says. "Something very dear about him. And so funny.

  Also he's considerate and thoughtful about people in ways you wouldn't expect. For instance, we were staying in Florida with him once and I had our youngest child there, who was only three. We were staying also with the Galbreaths, actually. Lester was concerned whenever our son was getting cold in the water or sunburnt, and would look after him-things you wouldn't expect him to worry about or be interested in. When my own hip was bad, he was always asking how I was, very kindly, and he's always so fond of his two girls."

  From Vincent's point of view, Lester's overall knowledge of racing has been invaluable. Vincent says, "He knows other horses from running against them. He's very intelligent. I'm a bit away from things here and I can ring up Lester and ask him what he thinks of any race coming up, and he can tell me. His judgment is superb. He knows how the other jockeys react and what they're likely to do. It's as if he's been playing poker every night with the same half-dozen fellows. he's got them all sized up."

  Neither Lester nor Vincent lost any regard for each other, but towards 1980 things began to change. There was no one dramatic circumstance which caused the ending of the great partnership, only several small factors of relatively minor importance which together led toward an amicable conclusion.

  For a start, Lester grew tired of the continual journeys to Ireland, beginning after all the years to find them irksome. Then, Vincent says, with himself growing slightly deaf and the telephone lines from Ireland quite often crackling, he was finding it harder to understand what Lester was saying. Communication grew more difficult; even frustrating. They occasionally misunderstood each other completely.

  Vincent also had, at the insistence of some of his owners, got Lester some time earlier to sign an agreement to ride the Ballydoyle horses when required and, again as in years past, Lester had begun to chafe.

  "He signed the agreement," Vincent says, "but I always knew that if a better horse came on the scene, Lester would be on the phone. He would come up with all sorts of unbelievable reasons why he shouldn't ride one of mine when he'd got a better prospect. He always made us laugh. But then one of my owners insisted on running a particular horse in one of the classics, and also insisted that Lester should ride it, and since it had no chance, none at all, he was a bit fed up.

  "Lester and I agreed that it was no good him going on being tied down. He had to be free. He was best that way. He had to be a freelance, it suited his nature. He was in a bracket on his own. He had been riding occasionally for Henry Cecil (and in 1979 won the Ascot Gold Cup for him on Le Moss) and as Henry lived just along the road from him in Newmarket, he didn't have to cross the Irish Sea to ride work.

  "I, of course, wanted a jockey who could ride every horse I ran, so we talked it over and an amicable parting of the ways came about. Indeed, Lester concurred with my decision to approach Pat Eddery to take his place."

  Funnily enough, while I was in Vincent's house in 1985, Pat Eddery happened to telephone about future plans. There was a horse of Vincent's he couldn't ride because he was still nursing an injury, and he suggested Lester should this time take his place.

  Between the jockeys, there was accord.

  Lester's parting from Vincent brought the usual misleading and hurtful headlines: "Piggott sacked". "Piggott snubbed". "Piggott out, Eddery in". Presumably no one asked Vincent for the truth; and he's not easy to reach, to be fair. He's as reserved and private as Lester, and equally unwilling to bare his soul to the Press.

  Looking back and looking forward, Vincent says now with conclusive sincerity, "I have the greatest admiration for Lester, as a man and as a jockey, and as a friend."

  -

  21 Teenoso

  BY the autumn of 1980, the complex pattern of Lester's life had melted and reformed yet again.

  Early in September most people were still happily drawing the wrong conclusions about his parting with Vincent only to be thrown into doubt and reverse by the announcement that he would ride first jockey the following year for Henry Cecil.

  Henry Cecil's former main jockey, Joe Mercer, who lived near Newbury, had negotiated to ride for the nearer stable of Peter Walwyn once Peter Walwyn's former jockey, Pat Eddery, had gone to Vincent. Lester proposed to Henry Cecil that he, Lester, should take Joe Mercer's place, and Henry immediately, and with awakening interest, agreed. The three jockeys thus moved round in a ring in a manner convenient to each, with none of them a loser.

  At about the same time, it became clear that Lester, without particularly trying, was again in contention to be champion jockey, his total creep ing nearer that of Willie Carson who was leading. Lester, thinking it might be a satisfaction to regain the crown he'd abdicated, tried hard from then on, but not to the point of sacrificing absolutely everything to the chase. He left the field to Willie in the last week of the season in November and went to ride again in the Washington International.

  His mount, three-year-old Argument, trained in France by Maurice Zilber, had been placed but hadn't won all season in good class races. Lester, booked only a few days before the International for a horse he'd never ridden, nevertheless came up with a game plan for Laurel that brought the American crowd to its feet. Tucked in tight on the rails for most of the way, Lester brought Argument wide on the last bend and with a flick passed with seeming effortlessness the three horses who had been battling each other for the lead: and it was after this resounding triumph that he finally sought treatment for his injured shoulder and painful arm (see page 240).

  Willie won the championship conclusively with a flurry of late winners from John Dunlop whose horses had all come roaring back into form after a bout with a virus, but the year overall had been good for Lester. No classics, but many big successes like the Coronation Cup, the Yorkshire Oaks, the Great Voltigeur, the Cheveley Park and the Middle Park Stakes and the Tote Cesarewitch.

  In addition, there had been Moorestyle, trained by Susan's brother Robert Armstrong, owned by Moores International Furnishings, which had started by winning the Tote Free Handicap at Newmarket in April and in splendidly untroubled fashion won four more top sprints in England and two in France-the Prix de 1'Abbaye on Arc day and another Group I race later in October-totting up prize money of roughly £ 160,000.

  Moorestyle had been picked out and bought by Susan, acting for the owners, and it was this success which above all consolidated her high rating as a bloodstock agent.

  It had been a great year altogether for the brother-in-law partnership: they won nineteen races together in England alone, with Robert finishing sixth on the trainers' list.

  There were frissons of the future, if only one could have felt them. In July, Lester won on Winsor Boy who left the starting stalls normally and showed no signs of diving out underneath, and in September, engaged as quite often by Newmarket trainer Michael Stoute, he rode and won a small race on a first-time-out two-year-old coltShergar.

  By the following season, Shergar was being ridden by nineteen-year-old Walter Swinburn who had risen from the apprenticeship ranks with tremendous panache to be Michael Stoute's stabl
e jockey. Shergar and Walter Swinburn shot away with the Derby to win by a staggering ten lengths: and almost immediately afterwards, as if 1954 were happening all over again, the acclaimed teenage conqueror was handed a suspension for careless riding. The offence occurred, almost unbelievably, in exacdy the same race, the King Edward VII Stakes at Royal Ascot.

  Walter Swinburn, riding Centurius, bumped Bustomi. Centurius finished second to Bustomi subsequently and was disqualified. Walter Swinburn got six days off for the bump, which was better than Lester's six months but the designated six days included the upcoming Irish Sweep's Derby.

  Lester, who had ridden Shergar in both his two-year-old races, was the natural choice to take Walter Swinburn's place at The Curragh, which he did, winning at a saunter without getting out of breath.

  For Lester, 1981 began, proceeded and ended well, all except for the small matter of having his ear nearly torn off in April.

  His appetite whetted by his nearness to the jockeys' championship the year before, he set out deliberately in 1981 to get his title back. Just to prove he could. Just to state that, forty-five or not, he still had it in him.

  He returned to the gruelling treadmill of travelling, travelling, travelling. He rode everything that offered and quite a few that he asked for. It is true that he was helped to his goal by Willie Carson unfortunately falling out of the contest from injury in August, but he looked almost impishly happy throughout, and from riding an astonishing 703 races in England alone, he made it to the top again, for the tenth time,with 179 wins. In 113 other races he came second, and in 87, third. His winning percentage was 25.46, meaning that more than a quarter of his mounts came in first.

  He was helped on the way to these highly impressive results by the sheer size of Henry Cecil's stable and by the full maturing of the trainer's talents. Lester rates him on a par with Vincent and says he is tremendously good at picking the right races for his horses. Together they won 75 races in England as well as others in Ireland and France in what was by far the most prolific partnership of Lester's career.

  As Henry Cecil had moved into his father-inlaw's stable when Sir Noel Murless retired in 1976, Lester was in a sense returning home, back to the bricks and mortar of Warren Place. Back also to many of the same owners as in the Murless days, notably H. J. (Jim) Joel, who owned Fairy Footsteps.

  Ridden by Pat Eddery, the filly had won her final race as a two-year-old. Lester partnered her for the first time when she was three, in an April race at Newmarket.

  She won so obligingly that she was instantly made favourite for the One Thousand Guineas, and it was because he thought so much of her that Lester scrambled through his recovery from the ear and backbone damage.

  The fillies' classic was a desperately hard race with six of the fourteen runners almost line-abreast at the finish. Lester, believing Fairy Footsteps could outstay them all, had led from the beginning, but he found in the last stages that he couldn't get her away cleanly from the bunch of challengers, and it was only because of his sheer driving force and refusal to lose that he kept her in front. The very short distances between the first six horses were a neck, a neck, half a length, a short head, half a length. Fairy Footsteps had given her best performance and didn't train on for the Oaks. Lester won the Oaks nevertheless on Blue Wind, trained in Ireland by Dermot Weld.

  There was the usual sort of fuss because the able Irish trainer chose to put the prime Epsom specialist on the filly that represented his first and best real chance of an English classic, instead of staying with his regular jockey, young Walter Swinburn's father, Wally.

  Lester had often won for Dermot Weld in the past, and the fuss over Blue Wind, as one astute newspaperman pointed out, only occurred afterwards, and only because Lester won. The engagement in itself had raised no comment ten days earlier, and in fact Wally Swinburn had agreed to the switch, acknowledging that for such a chance one had to have the best. He himself had lost by a short head on Blue Wind the previous time out, and may have felt he didn't want to repeat that in the Epsom Oaks.

  Blue Wind in the event won comfortably, but it hadn't looked as if it would be that way on paper beforehand: Lester slipped the field with a fierce burst of acceleration two furlongs out, and after that no one could catch him. Wally Swinburn was back on Blue Wind when she won the Irish Oaks six weeks later, a decent consolation.

  Ardross, bought as a five-year-old by Lester's friend, Charles St. George, provided a whole row of successes for the Cecil stable, including Lester's tenth Ascot Gold Cup; also the Yorkshire Cup, the Goodwood Cup, the Geoffrey Freer Stakes at Newbury and the Prix Royal Oak at Longchamp in September.

  As a six-year-old, this incredible horse gave an almost complete repeat performance, preluding it this time by a sturdy half-length win in the jockey Club Stakes at Newmarket in April 1982. Then came in turn the Yorkshire Cup, the Henry II Stakes at Sandown, the Ascot Gold Cup and the Geoffrey Freer Stakes. Also the Doncaster Cup; and, finally, by only a head he lost the Arc de Triomphe. As a two-year concord between great horse, consistent trainer and super jockey, Ardross's record can seldom have been excelled.

  In 1982, Lester also gave his own personal encore, riding even more winners than in 1981 and hanging on undisputedly to his position at the top of the heap, with at 188 his second-highest total ever.

  There were no classics and indeed, for the first time in twenty years, he didn't ride in the Derby. His intended mount, Simply Great, winner of the Mecca Dante for Henry Cecil and Daniel Wildenstein, hurt his heel on the Friday before the Derby and left the field to the co-favourite and eventual winner, Vincent O'Brien's Golden Fleece.

  Lester spent the Derby commentating on the runners with Brough Scott for ITV.

  Apart from riding more winners (again) than anyone else at Royal Ascot-six-he scored in a dozen or more big races, including the Yorkshire Oaks on Awaasif, owned by Sheikh Mohammed, trained by John Dunlop. The year ended on a great note of promise as two of the Cecil two-year-old colts, Diesis and Dunbeath, won William Hill's two highly-endowed races for juveniles, the Dewhurst and Futurity Stakes respectively.

  One can never really tell, though, in racing. Neither Diesis nor Dunbeath made it into the winner's enclosure again, Diesis and Lester being beaten into eighth place in the 1983 Two Thousand Guineas and coming second to Steve Cauthen on The Noble Player at Kempton in May. Dunbeath, similarly, never regained his two-year-old speed.

  As the very wet spring of 1983 progressed, it became clear that Henry Cecil wouldn't be putting forward a contender for the Derby, and other trainers with chances cast their eyes towards Lester. Chief among them was Lester's personal friend Geoffrey Wragg, who had recently taken over the licence from his father, Harry, and was training Teenoso.

  Lester had been Geoffrey Wragg's first choice for Teenoso's first wins but Lester, then, had been needed by Henry Cecil. Teenoso had therefore won twice when ridden by Steve Cauthen, but Steve was retained by owner Robert Sangster and trainer Barry Hills, and would be partnering their horse, The Noble Player, in the Derby.

  Lester had ridden winners for the Wraggs often (as he had for almost every top trainer by that time) and was definitely interested in Teenoso. He might never have been on the colt's back himself, but he had ridden against him four times, twice winning from him as a two-year-old, twice being beaten by him at three. It doesn't take as much as that for Lester to sum up any horse: he knew the bay long-legged Teenoso pretty well.

  On the other hand, he had also been asked to ride Tolomeo who had finished second in the Two Thousand Guineas for trainer Luca Cumani. To find out about Tolomeo's suitability for Epsom, Luca Cumani and Lester set up a gallop on the racecourse at Newmarket two weeks before the big race. The gallop was to begin where the 5-furlong races started from, but to go the wrong way round the course so that Tolomeo would experience a downhill left-hand turn similar to that which he would meet at Epsom. After the turn, the gallop would end at a distance of a mile and a quarter from the start. Three other horses t
ook part, to give Tolomeo a lead. Lester was supposed to go on and beat them at the finish, but when he asked for the effort, Tolomeo produced nothing and was in effect tailed off.

  In retrospect, Lester realised it was probably because Tolomeo, usually a hard worker, was being asked to gallop going away from his home stable. "He wasn't stupid, you know!" It was lucky for him, Lester says, that Tolomeo worked badly, because otherwise he would have chosen him over Teenoso.

  Teenoso, sired by Empery's stable-mate Youth, was one of those racehorses who positively act well on soft ground, and the ground in Derby week was still sodden.

  He liked to take a good hold of his bit and pull, but he would do nothing quickly: it wasn't any use expecting a fierce burst of acceleration. In the Derby, Lester accordingly let him pull his way towards the lead fairly early on, hitting the front a good three furlongs from the winning post, from where he ran on strongly to beat Carlingford Castle by three lengths.