How King George win on Florida Pearl provided Adrian Maguire with famous victory

The best rider never to be champion jockey, the 2001 renewal of the celebrated race is remembered – to this day – for Maguire’s tactical acumen in beating AP McCoy aboard Best Mate, the future three-time Cheltenham Gold Cup hero.

Yet Maguire only arrived at the track about an hour before the race after a mad-dash following abandonments of Wetherby and Market Rasen where he was due to ride for the late North Yorkshire trainer Ferdy Murphy.

However, it is a measure of Maguire’s respect for Murphy that he would have given up the Florida Pearl to ride at the lesser fixtures – and the astuteness of Willie Mullins, Florida Pearl’s trainer, in keeping riding options open until the last minute.

It is a story as fast-paced as the race itself. “I was still living at Farringdon between Oxford and Swindon,” Maguire, 50, told The Yorkshire Post in an exclusive interview this week to mark the anniversary.

“A good friend of mine, Andrew Lejeune, was driving me first to Wetherby. We were well on the way because the weather was bad. Once we heard that was off, Andrew then rerouted to Market Rasen where Ferdy had runners.

“Soon after, certainly within the next hour, that was off – thank God – and then it was back down to Kempton. Andrew kept within the speed limit and some motorists shoved him onto the hard shoulder.

“The traffic was bad as we’d got near Kempton – I think people recognised me – and we went down the hard shoulder of the M3 just to make it to the track on time.”

It was worth it. Nearly a decade after Maguire’s brute strength saw him win the 1992 Gold Cup aboard Toby Balding’s Cool Ground in a three-way finish, the Florida Pearl win had the hallmarks of calmness and finesse in the saddle.

With the steeplechaser having been placed in the two previous Gold Cups, Mullins – now Ireland’s record-breaking trainer – suggested that Maguire, riding Florida Pearl for the first time, be prominent.

What neither Mullins, nor Maguire, appreciated was how well the Irish challenger would travel. “Willie wanted me to be handy, and if his jumping took me to the front halfway down the back, that would be perfect,” said the jockey who had ultimately usurped JP McNamara, ironically his understudy at Murphy’s West Witton stables, for the Florida Pearl ride.

“I rode him away handy and then Bacchanal, who had been leading, came off the bend as we started the second circuit. I had a dream run and, by the time we jumped the water, we were in front three furlongs earlier than planned. I just sat quietly and kept hold of him. He travelled down the back straight brilliantly and jumped up the home straight brilliantly.”

Even now, Maguire’s admiration for Florida Pearl is discernible as he recalls how the horse’s faultless jumping proved too good for a horse as mercurial as the Henrietta Knight-trained Best Mate.

Asked to put the win in the context of his whole career, Maguire ventured: “It was one of the very, very best days. Florida Pearl was then the best horse back in Ireland. He had won two times at the (Cheltenham) Festival.

“Trained by Willie Mullins and owned by Arthur O’Leary, he was a great horse to be associated with – the way he travelled, jumped and quickened to beat Best Mate for a bit of toe. He could have won big races on the Flat – a special horse.”

Florida Pearl’s majestic win came just weeks after Maguire had recorded his landmark 1,000th success – then the benchmark for greatness – and become just the fifth rider to achieve the feat. Yet, cruelly, his luck would not last – a recurring theme during a career that also saw him lose out to his great rival Richard Dunwoody on the final day of an epic 1993-94 title race.

In March, 2002, weeks after Florida Pearl’s win, Maguire broke a bone in his neck when he fell from the Murphy-trained Luzcadou at Warwick – an injury that ruled him out of a fourth Cheltenham Festival in eight years.

He announced his retirement from the saddle later in the year, saying that he initially thought he had broken his arm. “I couldn’t feel it, it just went numb,” said Maguire at the time. “But that was because my neck was broken. My neck, that was just a little bit sore. Nothing unbearable. Later, the doctors told me that they couldn’t believe I hadn’t been paralysed. They couldn’t stress enough how lucky I was. From the fall to the paramedics to being handled in hospital and having an operation, if anything had been done differently then I would have been paralysed.”

Yet, while Maguire’s riding and competitiveness over the previous decade deserved a better ending, he says that he could not have had a more loyal supporter than Murphy.

Maguire became first jockey to Murphy after splitting with David Nicholson – the champion trainer universally known as ‘The Duke’.

“From when I first came over to Britain, Ferdy was more than my boss,” reflected Maguire who is now a work rider at Aidan O’Brien’s Ballydoyle stables after a training stint of his own.

“If Ferdy asked you do something, it meant a lot to Ferdy. I was never going to say to him ‘I want to ride Florida Pearl in the King George’. Ferdy was looking out for his owners as much as Willie Mullins was looking out for his owners. That’s what it is all about.

“If the meetings at Wetherby and Market Rasen had gone ahead, it would have been just one of those things if Florida Pearl had won without me. Fair enough.”

Fourth on the Murphy-trained Addington Boy for Walter Gott in the 1999 Grand National, Maguire continued: “Ferdy was a true gentleman. Sibton Abbey’s Hennessy was a great day and there wasn’t a cross word when we had three races taken off us at Sandown because of a mix up over my weight allowance.

“When myself and The Duke split, Ferdy was the first man on the phone. We got on great together and he had plenty of horses. I’m pretty sure he rang after Florida Pearl and had a laugh about it. It all worked out – in the end.”