Masterful McCoy already plotting course for his 17th championship

This amazing sportsman first became champion jockey in 1995-96 – the year when a British golfer (Sir Nick Faldo) last won the Masters at Augusta.

Yet, while British golfers have left Georgia empty-handed in every subsequent year, McCoy has been the undisputed champion of National Hunt racing for 16 successive campaigns.

It is not just an outstanding physical performance by a 36-year-old who spends hours in a sauna each day because his racing weight is invariably two stone less than ideal for a man who is 5ft 10ins tall.

It requires mental toughness to sustain the highest possible standards – a lesson for the jockey’s Northern Ireland compatriot Rory McIlroy after his game disintegrated during the high-pressure final nine holes of this month’s Masters.

However, there was little time for McCoy to dwell upon his achievements as he lifted the jockeys’ title at Sandown on Saturday.

He finished the 2010-11 season with 218 winners after French Opera won at Sandown.

Perversely, the 2011-12 National Hunt Season started 24 hours later, giving its riding combatants no time to recharge their batteries.

And, while McCoy is at Fairyhouse for the Irish National meeting for the start of the new season due to contractual commitments with top owner JP McManus, he knows a super-fast start to his title defence will – once again – be the key to retaining the title and keeping his great rival Richard Johnson, the 13-times runner-up, at bay.

This is why the champion, who rides Quantitativeeasing in today’s Fairyhouse feature, now picks and chooses his rides so carefully in comparison to his younger days when he would travel anywhere to ride any horse – irrespective of whether it would yield a winner or a visit to A&E.

Marriage and fatherhood have changed him for the better.

He will also avoid horses with poor jumping records ahead of the season-defining Cheltenham and Aintree festivals so that he does not miss these major meetings, or other key points in the racing calendar.

Tellingly, McCoy also reduced his rides last week, with his 16th title secure, to minimise the risk of injury ahead of the new campaign.

He knows it will be difficult for Johnson to catch him if he rides 50 winners by August.

This is racing’s equivalent of Ryan Giggs famously turning to yoga to extend his mercurial career with Sir Alex Ferguson’s all-conquering Manchester United side who have dominated domestic football for two decades.

Perhaps this is why McCoy and ice-cool Giggs are, in all probability, Britain’s two most successful sportsmen at present – they are always looking to the future and ways of preserving their fragile bodies.

They also know when to rest. Giggs knows that he cannot play every game if he is to feature in United’s quest for honours both domestically, and in Europe.

Likewise, McCoy undertook a golfing holiday after Cheltenham to allow various niggling injuries to heal.

He would never have done so 10 years ago. He would have seen it as an admission of weakness.

Despite his advancing years, McCoy is physically stronger than at any point in his career – far more so than the rider, rough around the edges, who announced himself by completing the Champion Hurdle and Gold Cup double in 1997 with Make A Stand and Mr Mulligan. Today, he cringes when he watches replays of such rides.

As the great champion closes in on the 3,500-winner mark, and horse racing comes to terms with another controversy about the use of the whip following Jason Maguire’s National win on Ballabriggs, it should be noted how McCoy has re-invented himself in the saddle.

In his formative years, he was the subject of innumerable bans for excessive use of the whip. Although some were more justified than others, the upshot was that McCoy was left in a state of despair by missing out on so many rides.

The consequence, after he suffered the indignity of being sent to a riding refresher in Newmarket, was that McCoy became a more sympathetic horseman who only uses the whip as a last resort.

Many of his big race wins, like Don’t Push It in the 2010 National, were because he was at one with the horse in question.

Equally, McCoy has learned that he can be even more effective by using hands and heels to push a horse if necessary, and he has done this for two circuits of a race on many occasions to land the spoils. His Somerset National win on The Ferbane Man at Wincanton last Thursday was a case in point.

As Sir Peter O’Sullevan, the legendary commentator and McCoy devotee, once said, there is nothing wrong with the whip being used to encourage a horse or help change direction – but not for chastisement.

Though O’Sullevan’s riding idol Lester Piggott frequently fell foul of this, it is a distinction that McCoy empathises with. And it is a salutary lesson as Towcester Racecourse looks to become the first racecourse in the country to ban jockeys from using the whip in any finish – a consequence of Maguire’s unappealing riding in the National.

In short, McCoy would have won the National on Ballabriggs by gentle persuasion rather than brute force – and not ruined the horse’s future prospects.

By looking after his horses, as he now does, and abiding by the whip rules, McCoy knows that they are likely to provide him with further success, and the prospect of a 17th successive title.

And, while every ride involves an element of danger in this toughest of all sports, this is a far more likely proposition than a British golfer like the aforementioned McIlroy donning the winner’s green jacket at Augusta next April.

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