racehorses and the ponies that came before them.

​To begin with an example of the bleedin’ obvious: jockeys and trainers would be as nameless and unfulfilled as you or anyone without the horses that come into their lives. And, of course, the insignificant yet precious ponies that started them on the road to glory, and for the less celebrated disappointment and heartache.
I am surrounded, as I write at my desk, by biographies and autobiographies of trainers, jockeys and men and women made known to a wider circle of people than their close friends and family, the history of whom began in the majority of instances with a pony. And not always an amenable pony. John Lawrence, or Lord Oaksey as he became, even named his autobiography after his first pony ‘Mince Pie For Starters’. Mince Pie was a Welsh pony and in his autobiography there is a photograph of young Lawrence flying through the air after his mount had refused at a fence during a Tetbury Hunt cross-country event. It is an embarrassment that every famous jockey can relate to, no doubt.
Ruby Walsh, who I consider the greatest jockey of my lifetime, began with a ‘stubborn yoke’ called Pebbles who wouldn’t jump a twig, apparently, soon to be replaced by ‘Flash’, a flaxen legend of a pony that went on to teach all the Walsh children to ride. I wonder if Pebbles would have defeated the grown-up more experienced Ruby as he did when the great man was seven-years old? Incidentally I am still waiting in anticipation of the second volume of Ruby’s biography.
I often wonder what fate befell all those first winners that jockeys celebrate in their autobiographies. It is hypothetical, I know, and jockeys of the calibre of Richard Dunwoody, for instance, would not have needed the guiding hand of fate to have succeeded in his career, but would it have taken him longer to establish himself if were to have been unseated from Game Trust in a hunter chase at Cheltenham rather than winning?
The house where John Lennon was born, no doubt has a blue plaque above the door. Perhaps it is the same for the house where A.P. McCoy lived his formative years. I sometimes think, as impossible as it would be to achieve, that the horses who provided champion jockeys with their first winner should be rewarded with a marked grave and united with the name of the jockey who in time brought them fame by a stone engraved with a date and the name of the significant racecourse. Fanciful, I know. Game Trust, I would contend, was as pivotal and important to Dunwoody’s career as Desert Orchid or Remittance Man, even if in his autobiography ‘Obsessed’ he is only written about on one page.
If this idea seems too ‘Black Beauty’ to be take seriously, I remind the reader that horse racing lies on the margins of sport, even if it is one of the founding pillars of sport in this country and that we need to endear ourselves to those I dub ‘the ignorant public’, people whose view of horse racing is based wholly around use of the whip and a perceived love of money and winning at all costs.
Every book in my racing library is crammed full of the names of horses that a jockey has won on or someone has trained to win a race, each name a cobblestone on a highway to fame and glory; a name either easily recalled or referenced in the form book to steer the reader from first ride or runner to end of career. It can be no other way and I am not trying to be critical for the sake of argument. But each and every one of these horses was flesh and blood, sentient creatures that we may love dearly as a breed and to the initiated as individuals, but which can be treated coldly and with little compassion when hard business decisions must be made.
Our love can be conditional at times. The two-year-olds lacking promise are sold on at the end of the season; the handicap chaser marketed as a ‘good schoolmaster’ when he is either too high in the handicap or too slow to win under rules. No one should expect a jockey to monitor the lives of the horses they are booked to ride. They do their job, care for the horse as best as is possible during the minutes of competition, pat its neck on unsaddling and continue their arduous life with the next ride and the one after that.
Where am I going with this rambling narrative?  We, as a sport, as a collective, every one of use from B.H.A. executive down the pay scale, need, or perhaps that should be ‘have a duty’, to convince and persuade the ‘ignorant public’ that the horse is not a tool of the trade but the very heartbeat of the sport. As with any sport, not every equine athlete, as it is with the human element, can be feted, their names fit to live forever in the history of the sport. No one should suggest otherwise.
What I propose, and this is no more ghoulish, mawkish or sugarily romantic, than a village war memorial or wall of remembrance, is a memorial to both the equine fallen and the equine victorious, without one there cannot be the other. A garden of remembrance at one of the major racecourses, I suggest, maintained to a standard befitting the admittance of the public, with a wall bearing the name of a racehorse that achieved something remarkable inscribed on every brick. And I would include in that number the name of every pony that helped a famous jockey on his or her path to fame as well as that jockey’s first career winner.
Chris Pitt wrote one of the best book about horse racing the title of which sits well with the subject matter of this article – ‘Go Down To The Beaten’. It is about  jockeys and horses who didn’t win the Grand National and in its many chapters, finishing with A.P. McCoy actually winning the race, it exemplifies to the reader that winning is not everything, at least not around Aintree, and that the horse can be heroic and heralded long after the event without finishing at the sharp-end of the race. Aintree, too, should have a memorial to the equine athletes who either shone without winning around its mighty course or who sadly paid the ultimate price.
As far as it is humanly possible, racehorses who fate decreed to be stepping stones in the career path of the famous shouldn’t be mere names in biography but given a fitting memorial for their efforts in service to us.