Dick Francis's Gamble - Felix Francis [6]
That particular Wednesday, just over eight years ago, I had been riding a horse that the Racing Post had rather kindly called an outsider. The horse had just one speed—moderate—and absolutely no turn of foot to take it past others up the final climb to victory. My only chance was to go off fairly fast from the start and to try to run the “finish” out of the others.
The plan worked quite well, up to a point.
At about halfway, my mount and I were some fifteen lengths in front of the nearest challenger and still going reasonably well as we swung left-handed and down the hill. But the sound of the pursuers was getting ever louder in my ears, and six or seven of them swept past us like Ferraris overtaking a steamroller as we turned into the straight.
The race was lost, and it was no great surprise to me, or to the few still watching from the grandstands.
Perhaps the horse beneath sensed a subtle change in me—a change from expectation and excitement to resignation and disappointment. Or perhaps the horse was no longer concentrating on the task in hand in the same way that his jockey’s mind was wandering to the following day’s races and his rides to come.
Whatever the real cause, one moment he was galloping along serenely, albeit one-paced, and the next he had stumbled and gone down as if shot.
I had seen the television coverage. I’d had no chance.
The fall had catapulted me over the horse’s neck and headfirst into the ground. I had woken up two days later in the neurosurgery and spinal-injuries department of Frenchay Hospital in Bristol with a humdinger of a headache and a metal contraption called a halo brace surrounding and literally screwed into my skull.
Three uncomfortable months later, with the metal halo finally removed, I set about regaining my fitness and place in the saddle only for my hopes to be dashed by the horse-racing authority’s medical board, who decided that I was permanently unfit to return to racing. “Too risky,” they had said. “Another fall on your head could prove fatal.” I had argued that I was prepared to accept the risk and pointed out that a fall on the head could prove fatal even if you hadn’t previously broken your neck.
I had tried at length to explain to them that all jockeys risked their lives every time they climbed aboard half a ton of horse and galloped at thirty miles per hour over five-foot fences. Jockeys were well used to taking risks and accepted the consequences without blaming the authorities. But it was all to no avail. “Sorry,” they said. “Our decision is final.”
So that had been that.
From being the new kid on the block, the youngest winning jockey of the Grand National since Bruce Hobbs in 1938 and widely tipped to be the next champion, I was suddenly a twentyone-year-old ex-jockey with nothing to fall back on.
“You will need an education for when your riding days are over,” my father had once said in a last futile attempt to make me take up my place at university instead of going racing when I was eighteen.
“Then I’ll get my education when I need it,” I’d replied.
And so I had, applying again and being accepted once more by the LSE to read for a combined degree in government and economics.
And hence I had come to live in Finchley, putting down a deposit on the house from the earnings of my last successful season in the saddle.
Finchley Central Underground Station, around the corner from Lichfield Grove, was just ten stops up the Northern Line from the LSE.
But it hadn’t been an easy change.
I had become used to the adrenaline-fueled excitement of riding horses at speed over obstacles when winning was the thing. Winning, winning, winning—nothing else mattered. Everything I did was with winning in mind. I loved it. I lived it. It was like a drug,