It’s 10 years since AP McCoy’s incredible 4000th winner – where have all the great jump jockeys gone?

IS it really 10 years since AP McCoy rode his 4,000th winner on Mountain Tunes?

Where has the time gone? It only seems like yesterday I was spending my afternoons lounging around watching the racing, punting away my student loan.

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It’s 10 years since AP McCoy rode his 4,000th winner over jumps[/caption]

I seem to remember I backed the second, Kris Spin (ain’t that the story of my life) but it was a typically brilliant, never-say-die McCoy ride and one of those moments I’ll never forget.

Neither will the huge crowd who were at Towcester that day, especially as JP McManus bought a round for the entire racecourse to celebrate.

Mine’s a quadruple gin and tonic, JP.

The game has changed a lot since then. For starters Towcester, which was packed to the gunwales on November 7, 2013, no longer stages horse racing.

And if a jockey were to ride the same race nowadays, they’d pick up an eight-day ban for breaking strict new whip rules. Funny old game.

McCoy was one of the greatest athletes of all time, a winning machine who bounced back more times than Zebedee from crunching falls and stints in A&E with broken bones.

Which reminds me of the story about the man who was admitted to hospital after swallowing several plastic horses. His condition has been described as stable…

Once McCoy had reached his never-to-be-broken milestone, it signalled the beginning of the end of his career and a golden era of jump jockeys.

After he retired in 2015, Ruby Walsh wasn’t far behind in hanging up his boots, and neither were Barry Geraghty and Richard Johnson.

Even the likes of Noel Fehily and Jason Maguire, who never really got the recognition they deserved, were top-notch jocks, and when Davy Russell packed it in earlier this year, a wonderful chapter in jump racing history came to a close.

You see, McCoy might have been champion jockey 20 years in a row, but the reason he was so driven each season was because of the intense competition from his weighing room rivals.

And let’s not forget, that stellar group of jocks came hot on the heels of another legendary generation, which included Richard Dunwoody, Adrian Maguire, Norman Williamson and Peter Scudamore, to name a few.

For 30 or 40 years, there was at least one jumps jockey who was a household name.

Which begs the question – where have all the great jump jockeys gone?

I don’t mean to cause offence to our current crop of National Hunt riders, but there are plenty of names in the current top 50 I haven’t even heard of.

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Harry Cobden is one of the best jockeys riding over jumps right now[/caption]

Sean Bowen is well-clear at the top of the standings right now. A very good jockey, no doubt.

With respect, though, he wouldn’t have laced the boots of some of his predecessors. 

Mind you, I don’t think he would be the worst champion jumps jockey we’ve had…

I have plenty of respect for Brian Hughes, Sammy Twiston-Davies and Nico de Boinville, all fine horsemen.

I reckon, though, the only jockey riding in Britain at the moment who would really have held his own in the glory days is Harry Cobden. I think he is the dog’s b*llocks.

Feel free to write in and tell me I’m talking out of my backside, it’s just an opinion.

But in order to sell our sport to the masses, it doesn’t half help if you have some top-class human athletes to promote.

Clearly, it’s not just on the equine front that we are lacking over the jumps in this country right now. Let’s see what the next 10 years brings…

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