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Brooke now in top condition to repay faith of McCains
Henry Brooke. PA
HENRY Brooke, on course to become National Hunt racing’s champion conditional, smiles as he recalls the dressing down that he once received from the redoubtable and much missed Ginger McCain.
“We were leading some yearlings. They wouldn’t come out of the shed because there was some water,” said the Tadcaster-born jockey, whose 30 victories leave him six clear of his nearest pursuer.
“He shouted at me ‘if you can’t even lead a horse, you can’t even ride one’. Or words to that effect – there were definitely a few expletives. But, a bollocking off Ginger, it’s a badge of honour, part of your rite of passage.”
Four months after the record-breaking Grand National trainer passed away, it would be fitting if Brooke, 21, was to prove the old curmudgeon wrong by winning a championship won previously by the likes of AP McCoy, Richard Johnson, Brian Hughes and then the teeange phenomenon Sam Twiston-Davies 12 months ago.
Lauded by many, including BBC racing correspondent Cornelius Lysaght, as racing’s rising star of 2012, Brooke seems unfazed by the burden of expectation as he talks inside Catterick’s weighing room about his association, now in its second season, with the redoubtable McCain’s son Donald, who has established himself as a top trainer.
“Flying. It’s great and I’m having a really good time,” Brooke told the Yorkshire Post. “I haven’t given the conditional title any thought whatsoever. It hasn’t been in my sights because I didn’t think I would get anywhere near it.
“It’s just nice to ride winners for the likes of Donald, and I have a great agent – Richard Hale – who is keeping me busy.
“You don’t know if you’re a here today, gone tomorrow jockey. Racing’s a weird old game. It’s like a cloud, you get through it or you can’t. Sometimes you run into fog and you’re gone.”
The engaging Brooke may be surprised by his rise to prominence. And so might his teachers – he left Easingwold School, having grown up in the town, without any GCSEs.
But racing is his blood – his mother Julia now runs a livery, and trains point-to-pointers in Middleham, while his father, Glenn, is a blacksmith who enjoyed a successful association with Michael Dickinson when the then Harewood trainer was dominating National Hunt racing in the early 1980s.
“Before I could even talk, I was sat up on ponies,” said the jockey, whose first winner came as a 16-year-old in a point-to-point race. “Before I was even planned, mum owned a pony – the pony came before me. Perhaps that’s why I ended up in racing.”
As well as riding his pony, Brooke, realising his academic limitations, spent every school holiday working in racing yards. He remembers a spell with Penrith trainer Martin Todhunter: “I got shouted at a lot. I’ve had a lot of shoutings at in my career!”
He had a six-week stint in Ireland at the yard of Derby-winning trainer Jim Bolger, the fierce disciplinarian who nurtured the early career of the one and only AP McCoy. “He offered me a job but I wanted to stay here.”
The reason was this: when his mother moved to Middleham, Brooke started working for Kate Walton – and coming under the tutelage of her son-in-law Richie McGrath, a stalwart of Northern racing, who was to prove instrumental in securing the link-up with McCain’s expansionist yard in Cheshire that came to prominence with the victory of Ballabriggs in last season’s Grand National.
“I never sat on a racehorse until I went to Kevin Ryan’s one day. But, as soon as I got to Kate’s, Richie got hold of me. Just a few more tellings off – I’m good at taking them! – and he started to get me sorted out,” said Brooke, who names his Silver Trophy win at Chepstow in October 2010 on McCain’s Any Given Day as the best win of a very promising career.
“I was really wary about going conditional, being paid to ride horses, because I didn’t think I was good enough. I really had to work to improve my riding. Everything.
“I was riding out one day and I mentioned that Donald McCain and his number one jockey Jason Maguire were flying.
“Richie looked at me and said ‘that’s where you’re going to be’. He had evidently spoken to Donald and said he had this promising rider, and had sorted it all out.
“He is one of my biggest role models. I owe everything to him. Without him, I wouldn’t have got to ride Overturn in a Northumberland Plate last summer.
“I wouldn’t want it any other way. If I had not gone to Donald’s, I wouldn’t be where I am now. Fact. And I would be going out and getting drunk. Fact.
“I rode 17 winners in my first season, 30 this year and I just want to repay the faith people have shown in me. Without them, I wouldn’t be where I am.”
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