Kieren Fallon on his landmark first winner at Thirsk during rough ride in North

His first eight rides for the late Cheltenham Gold Cup-winning trainer Jimmy Fitzgerald had all drawn a blank.

Fallon was questioning the wisdom of moving from his native Ireland to Malton to further his fledgling career.

Kieren Fallon’s Dante double

And then he partnered the Gwyn Meredith-owned and Fitzgerald-trained Evichstar in the Thirsk Hall EBF Stakes.

On good-to-firm ground, Fallon’s mount surged clear of 14 rivals over six furlongs. It was to be the first of 2,253 career wins.

“Evichstar was not an easy horse, temperamental and keen, but I had ridden him a lot on the gallops and I knew him,” Fallon recalled in his autobiography Form.

“Jimmy was a great gambling trainer and the horse had been backed down from 14-1 to 11-2. He won by a length and a half and I had my first winner in England.”

He went on: “There was a slightly less glorious postscript to that win. Two weeks later, I was on Evichstar in a race at Haydock when he started sweating up in the parade ring.

“On the way down to the start, he bolted and flung me over the rails. I had a nasty gash on my face. It wasn’t my proudest moment.”

Fallon was to become the ultimate Flat horseman. The six-times champion jockey, his 16 domestic Classics also included just as many controversies in a roller-coaster career.

Now he’s the proud father of Cieren Fallon junior, the reigning champion apprentice, and their relationship is a close one.

Fallon senior, now 55, accompanies his son to the races and spends time with him walking tracks, like Thirsk, to pass on his decades of experience that began with a rough ride during his formative years.

As Fallon continued to recount in his acclaimed autobiography: “I didn’t have it easy when I came over from Ireland. I moved to Yorkshire and there was a sense straight away that I was treading on other people’s toes.

“Mark Birch, George Duffield, Lindsay Charnock and Nicky Carlisle were all good lads, but it was their territory and they owned it.

“George was one of the tough ones, too. You wouldn’t cross George. I remember him picking Jimmy Quinn up by the neck when he felt he had done something wrong during a race and sitting him on the table. You have to have that sort of discipline.

“It’s like your kids giving you cheek or thinking they can get one over on you, and if you don’t put a stop to it or make them realise it’s not the thing to do, they will keep on doing it and then someone will end up getting hurt.”

He went on: “One race at Redcar, early on in my career on the northern circuit, I was skipping up the inside and I felt I was going that well that I could go anywhere.

“Lindsay was two or three off the rail and rather than go round him, I tried to be clever and went up his inside and he pulled the struck through and hit me right across the face.

“I won the race but I came in and I was covered in blood. He thought I was being clever, I suppose. He may not have known it was me and he said he didn’t mean it but I knew he meant it and all I wanted to do was choke him.”

Fallon did – in time – learn to keep his cool, and control his temperament, after having to learn the hard way on too many occasions for his own good.

He also went on to ride horses who were much more accomplished than the modest Evichstar. But there was also one constant in his career – his respect for the aforementioned Fitzgerald who died in 2004.

A father figure to Fallon, he paid this tribute to the Malton trainer in his book: “Riding winners was great but I never got carried away.

“It was on to the next one, on to the next one. That was down to Jimmy. If you never met him, I wish you could have. I miss him even now.”

They were words written from the heart.