by Dick Francis
The incarceration of jockeys is part of an extraordinarily thorough and as far as I could see completely successful plan to make racing straight. Working from the basic ignoble fact that some men will be dishonest if they are given any chance to be, the American racing authorities have set their minds to the problem of making rigged racing impossible.
Most of their attention, I regret to say, has been concentrated on the jockeys, for more than half the precautions can only be understood as springing from a belief that all jockeys are natural born crooks. Locking the jockeys into the weighing-room is to save them from tempters and to prevent them from passing hot tips to punters.
In the United States jockeys are allowed to bet on their own mounts but not on any others; this is to encourage them to want to win.
When the jockeys are at length loosed to go out to ride, they do not stand in the parade ring talking to owners and trainers as they do in this country, but go straight to their horses, mount, and walk out on to the course. There is barely time to exchange a greeting, and certainly none for last-minute conspiracy.
On the track at each quarter-mile post an automatic camera swings in a slow arc and makes a film of its section of the race. After the race the pieces of film are collected from each camera, and developed and projected in a very short time. The film can be run through in slow motion or stopped altogether, and if any jockey has been ‘strangling’ his horse or interfering with another rider it shows up unanswerably in black and white. These moving records are also watched a good deal by trainers who try to get from them helpful information about their horses, so that they know what faults need correcting next time.
After a race every jockey, whether he is first or last, has to weigh in, and he has no opportunity to shed or add a few pounds in secret on his way to the scales, for the weighing-in is done in the open air in a little enclosure beside the track and in full view of the stands. Before he may dismount every jockey must be given permission to do so: he raises his whip to ask it like a small boy in school, and may dismount only when nodded to. Then he returns to the weighing-room to be shut in until his next race.
To these deterrents against cheating there are added some incentives towards honest effort. The winner earns a double fee, and the second, third and fourth jockeys in every race get a considerable bonus too. The winning jockey is also legally entitled to ten per cent of the prize money for the race; as the prizes are large it is very worth while for any jockey to come in first, so that the bribe which might tempt him to lose when he could win would have to be enormous. In short, with a fortune to be won and a licence to be lost, the jockeys ride honest races.
The precautions to keep trainers on the straight and narrow path are just as careful. Every winner, for instance, is given a saliva test, so that any attempt at doping calls down instant doom.
Overnight declarations are the only ones accepted, and no trainer can slip in a surprise runner when the newspaper public is not looking.
To remove any jiggery-pokery in the running of two horses from one stable, all entries from one stable are bracketed together. It is no use a trainer deciding to run horse A to lose with a fashionable jockey while quietly winning with horse B at better odds with an apprentice, because horses A and B are inseparable on the Tote. On the race card they will be numbered 1 and 1A, not 1 and 2, so that whichever of the two is fancied by the punter, the Tote ticket will bear the number 1. If either horse 1 or 1A wins, holders of Tote tickets for 1 will be paid. Two horses belonging to the same owner but trained in different stables are also treated as one entry; and in this way there is nothing at all extra to be gained by winning with the unexpected one of a pair.
Although the morality of jockeys and trainers has been judged at its lowest, and their wings have been clipped, bookmakers have been extinguished altogether. All betting is done on the Tote. There is no betting before the day of a race, and by law there is no off-the-course betting at all, for private bookmaking is illegal; but I imagine this is one of the most disregarded pieces of legislation in America. Nevertheless there is no ‘starting price’, no ‘blower', and no betting in running.
Tote tickets are not cheap. The smallest amount the Tote at a big city track will accept for each of the win, second, and third place tickets is two dollars. The ‘place’ ticket only covers the first two horses, and the ‘show’ ticket pays a small return on the first three. For the equivalent of our ‘each way’ bet, an American, for his ‘across the boards’, buys a combination ticket for a minimum of six dollars. However, as in 1954 the stable lads were paid sixty to eighty dollars a week, and the jockeys a basic fifty dollars a race, none of them found this scale of gambling at all dismaying.
Of every hundred dollars wagered on the Tote eighty-five are returned as winnings, eleven are paid in taxes, and four are retained by the racecourse.
Before we were granted a licence to ride in the race we had come for, the jockeys from Europe had to pass the thorough medical going-over which is compulsory for all American jockeys. Never did the Air Force pry so closely into the workings of heart, lungs, eyes, reflex nerves and abdominal organs as the racecourse doctor. We were told, as if it were any comfort, that after one such medical examination, the doctor was able to say to one applicant, ‘Sorry, you can’t have a licence. You’ll be dead in six months.’ And he was.
However, it appeared that we were none of us in imminent danger of physical collapse.
The day of the race arrived, and with some anxiety we went out to ride in it. We had been warned by American friends that their native horses consistently covered two miles in under four minutes, and that ours took ten to twenty seconds longer than theirs, for with true thoroughness the newspapers had collected and published the times of the European horses races at home. It was no help to us either, to know that our horses had had a rough, long, and delayed air journey lasting thirty-two hours only three days before the race, and that none of the horses had eaten well since their arrival. I was hoping all the same that my mount, Rose Park, was going to produce the speed which had brought him to the top as a two-mile ’chaser in England.
Alas for us all, our worst fears were justified. Rose Park was a dead horse, and could not even keep up with the rest of the field in the first mile. Campari fell in the second circuit, but was not then lying in a winning position, and of all the European horses Miss Dorothy Paget’s Prince of Denmark, with Dave Dick on board, covered himself with least confusion. He was fifth, in a field of thirteen.
Part, but only part, of the trouble was the difference in the construction of the fences, for our horses did not realise they could brush through them, and while we were wasting time going up in the air over each obstacle, the American horses were shooting by below us.
The Americans were almost as downcast by the failure of our horses as we were, and hastened to find excuses for them and to cheer us up.
Plans which had been made to run the horses again were scrapped, and all of them except an Irish horse called In View were flown home. In View ran in a steeplechase a week later, and a week’s rest and the experience he had gained in the International Steeplechase stood him in good stead, for he won.
Mary and I would have been content to stay in the United States all summer long, but I had to get back to ride in English races at Whitsun. So with sad partings we left all our new friends, returned to Pier 90, and sailed away on the Queen Mary.
At one of its autumn meetings each year the Cheltenham Racecourse Company gives a dinner in honour of the last season’s champion jockey. Stewards, the National Hunt Committee, racing officials, owners, trainers, jockeys and pressmen all take pleasure in this occasion, and the only person who does not enjoy his dinner is the poor Champion in question who has to make a speech after it.
In October, 1954, as I shaved in the early evening before the dinner, and mumbled ‘My Lords and Gentlemen’ past the razor, I thought back over the events of the past year, and wondered at the great good fortune which had come my w
ay.
In that year I had made a journey to the New World, built a house, and become Champion Jockey. Three dreams fulfilled, and all at once.
As I steered the razor carefully under my nose, I thought that there was really only one more thing that I passionately wanted to do.
I wanted to win the Grand National.
12
Devon Loch, 1956
A POST-MORTEM one day may find the words ‘Devon Loch’ engraved on my heart, so everlasting an impression has that gallant animal made upon it; for there are few horses which have so engaged my affections, and no other has brought me such delight and such despair.
Devon Loch was an Irish bred horse, and I first noticed him in October, 1951, when he ran in his first race in England, a maiden hurdle at Nottingham. I saw a big, intelligent-looking brown horse, young, but with the signs of developing strength.
In January, 1952, when he was six, he ran at Hurst Park in his first novice ’chase, and showed form which was later seen to be very promising, for he was second to Mont Tremblant. He must have suffered some leg trouble then, because he did not run again until the following October; and after that one outing he strained a tendon in a foreleg, and missed two whole years of racing.
When I first rode him I found that he was as clever as he looked, and as I dismounted I said to Peter Cazalet, ‘I would like to ride this horse in the National one day.’ He smiled at my enthusiasm, because Devon Loch had hardly even started on the ladder of novice ’chases and handicap races that climbs to Aintree, where experience in jumping is the only passport to a round trip; but one could tell already that Devon Loch had the spring and the sense which would take him to the top.
He won his next race, the New Century Novices Steeplechase at Hurst Park. It had rained for days beforehand, and the ground was a bog. In this race I rode Lochroe, who was also proving himself a brilliant novice, and who carried all the stable hopes that day; but he showed for the first time that his slender frame could not cope with wet sticky mud, and he finished in the middle of the field.
Bryan Marshall rode Devon Loch, and when he came triumphantly into the winner’s enclosure, the Queen and the Queen Mother were waiting to congratulate him. Behind Bryan’s answering smile lay a quick piece of stage management, for his teeth had been hurriedly given back to him on his way in by the stable lad to whom he had entrusted them on his way out.
It is not safe to ride wearing false teeth, for they may easily be dislodged, lost, or even swallowed, and the hatchet-faced and grim look of many jockeys in the paddock is not due to a sour nature, but to their having left their smiles wrapped in a handkerchief in their coat pockets in the changing-room. Bryan understandably did not want to greet the Royal family in the parade ring with a large area of bare gums, and hit on the excellent plan of giving his teeth at the last moment to the man who was leading his horse out on to the course. Luckily I have not needed to copy him, for the teeth which survived Tulip have weathered all storms since; but every time I came back from a fall with blood on my face Mary’s first question was always the same: ‘Are your teeth still there?’
Devon Loch ran in three more races that season, and Bryan rode him each time. In November, 1955, I partnered him again in a hurdle race, and shortly afterwards we won two steeplechases, one at Lingfield and one at Sandown. He ran without success in the George VI Chase; and he was third in the Mildmay Memorial while I was unwillingly nursing a few bruises in the sea air at Brighton.
The deep snows in Kent held back Devon Loch’s spring training, so that when he next ran, at the Cheltenham meeting early in March, he was not at the top of his form. When I reached the paddock Peter Cazalet was explaining this to Her Majesty the Queen.
‘I’m afraid, Ma’am,’ he said, ‘that the horse may not be quite ready for this race today, for of course the Grand National is his real objective.’
‘Yes,’ Her Majesty said, smiling, ‘but there’s no harm in picking this one up on the way.’
But when the race started my hopes of winning disappeared. There were fourteen runners, and they set off at such a very fast pace that it was all Devon Loch could do to keep up, and he lay nearly last all round the first circuit. It was not until we were half-way round again and heading for home that the speed began to wear out some of the other runners, and Devon Loch moved past them, going tirelessly. He could not reach the front, however, and finished third to Kerstin and Armorial III, but he came racing up the hill at the end as if it would have been no trouble at all for him to go on round again.
The race, although it took place on the most testing course, was one of the fastest three-mile ’chases of the season, and was actually run at a greater speed than the average two-mile hurdle race. It was no wonder that many people comforted Peter Cazalet for not having won by saying, ‘We have just seen the winner of the National in action.’
As for me, the yearly feeling of pleasure in looking forward to the National grew into a deep inner excitement. It made me laugh whenever I was asked about my chances, it made me sit smiling vacantly into space at home, it tugged at my nostrils and wrinkled up my eyes and quivered in my throat whenever the race was mentioned.
But there were still with me the fear that something would happen to stop me riding, and a sense of the responsibility that I was taking on. How appalling it would be if I fell off. What an anti-climax if we came to grief at the first fence.
Fifteen days before the National I cracked a collar bone for the ninth time.
I was faced with a dilemma. If I admitted my collar bone was cracked, no one would think me fit enough to ride Devon Loch, but I knew from experience that I would be. The ability of his body to absorb and disregard bangs and breaks is one of the things which make it possible for a man to be a steeplechase jockey, and because of his hard fitness the effect his injuries have on him should not be judged by the effect they would have on an average man. Jockeys feel the same pain but it passes sooner, and except when the injury is serious and complicated they heal faster, so that often they know they are fit to ride when other people think they cannot possibly be.
Extraordinary though it may seem, if a bone is cracked again and again in the same place, and the ends are not displaced, it causes less pain and inconvenience each time, and mends more and more quickly. I could feel the cracked ends grating together in my shoulder, but my arm was still strong, and I decided that I would ride in a few more races to see how things went.
The responsibility I owed to the Queen Mother, to Peter Cazalet, to the stable, and indeed to the whole racing public, weighed heavily on me, for no one would forgive me if I threw away Devon Loch’s chances by my own selfishness.
With elastic strapping on my shoulder I went on riding. The bone mended and caused me no trouble, and five days later I won a race at Lingfield, a race and a finish which thoroughly tested its strength. All the way from the last hurdle to the winning post I was engaged with Fred Winter in a ding-dong battle, which my horse won by a neck. Fred is such an artist at riding a finish that to have beaten him in any circumstances would have been satisfying, and as things were it was the best reassurance my troubled conscience could have had.
In the next week I rode about six more races and another winner, and when I went to Aintree I knew honestly and without any doubt that I was absolutely fit.
From the moment, weeks before, that I had been told definitely that I was to ride Devon Loch in the National, I had been thinking out plans for the race. It is not really very sensible to start off in any race without some idea of what one is going to do, for a blind trust in luck is not on the whole as useful as a calculated plan of campaign. Although the unexpected sometimes happens, it should not happen always!
Working from the experience of the Cheltenham race, I thought that Devon Loch would lie towards the back of the field during the first mile, because that is usually the fastest part of the National, when everyone is trying to get to the front ‘out of trouble’. A great hazard in the National is the nu
mber of fallen and loose horses which litter the fairway, and of course the nearer one is to the front the fewer horses there are to fall under one’s feet; but the desire to be in the lead is the cause of half the grief. If there were only a thirty-mile-an-hour speed limit sign on the stretch to Becher’s, far more horses would finish the course. The first fence is about a quarter of a mile from the start and many horses are going flat out by the time they get there, so it is no wonder that the toll of the first minute is heavy.
Two possible solutions would be to start the race nearer the first fence, or to put in an extra fence nearer the start. In either case the race would begin at a more sensible speed, but both present serious drawbacks.
If the start were nearer the first fence it would not, as it is now, be in full view of the stands, and the move would be very unpopular with everyone. And if another fence were built nearer the start it would have to be close to where the Melling road crosses the course. Whenever the National course is used this wide road is covered with tan, which horses can gallop across without trouble; but one cannot take off from or land into tan, because it is soft and floundery and gives no foothold for jumping at racing pace. The problem is still unsolved, and every year the mad scramble goes on.
Although it seemed to be wise that Devon Loch should take things steadily at the beginning of the race, I remembered Finnure’s sad fate and the way that good sense had led him straight into disaster. By the morning of the race I had ridden it in my imagination a dozen times, and had concluded that the risks of an unhurried start would have to be taken. With being so preoccupied in the morning and so despairing in the evening, it occurs to me now that I spoke very little the whole day.
The Queen, the Queen Mother, and Princess Margaret came to see their two horses run.
When I reached the parade ring before the race they were watching Devon Loch and M’as-Tu-Vu walk round, and after they had greeted me they said how well they thought both the horses were looking. It was agreed that Devon Loch had been very kindly handicapped with not too much weight, and that this was greatly in his favour.
