Realisation of love for riding enables Flint to rise once more following troubled times

The fairytale quickly faded and became a personal nightmare for the Northern Racing College graduate when the teenager struggled to keep his weight in check and then became disillusioned by a dearth of rides.

The sport lost so much of its lustre that Flint, still only 22, even retired from the saddle and flirted with a career as a trainer before realising that his first love – after his two-year-old daughter Scarlett – was riding.

His long journey back to the winner’s enclosure culminated on Sunday with an emotional win on his father John’s Kayf Moss in the Totepool National Spirit Hurdle at Fontwell, a race won previously by doughty warriors like Beech Road and Lough Derg.

This was Flint’s first success at Grade Two level since the much missed Fair Along, a tragic victim of colic, won the second of his John Smith’s Hurdles at Wetherby in November 2010.

Even this win – Kayf Moss led from start to finish before prevailing by a head in this prestigious two-and-a-half mile test – was bittersweet and so typical of Flint’s misfortune recently.

The rider’s over-use of the whip – he struck the horse 13 times after the final flight – led to a £500 fine and seven-day ban which rules him out of next month’s Cheltenham Festival if Kayf Moss takes up his entry in the Coral Cup.

Yet the punishment was tempered by the fact that he had recovered from a fractured leg in just over three and a half weeks – he had been kicked by an 
errant horse while riding out – so he could ride six-year-old Kayf Moss in this contest and help to honour his biggest supporter, his grandmother Marsha, whose life is succumbing to cancer.

“I don’t regret it,” Flint told the Yorkshire Post. “It’s fine margins.

“You have to go out and win and this meant more to my family than anything.

“It was dad’s biggest win as a trainer and my gran is on her death bed and not expected to survive the week.

“It meant so much to my family. Dad, mum, grandparents – my gran was just about able to watch the race. She’s aware what it means to us, and that means everything.

“She always put £1 each-way on me whenever I was riding. Always has. It’s funny.

“She used to go and watch me pony racing and things like that. She’d come up to me and give me a big hug and a kiss. It was embarrassing at the time, but I’ll miss it.”

She is also the first to understand the personal troubles that have been endured by her grandson since Flint became only the second Welshman to become jump racing’s champion conditional in 2010.

Public expectation weighed heavily on the rider’s broad shoulders – many contended that it was only a matter of time before the schoolboy rugby player usurped record-breaking AP McCoy as champion jockey.

“For years, my mind was all over the place with my weight,” admitted Flint, who is just short of six feet and has conceded that it was pointless living off a diet of fresh air in order to ride 100-1 outsiders.

“The lack of rides, the falls, the travelling, it all gets to you when you’re struggling with your weight and you don’t know what to eat or not.

“When you take time off from racing, you grow up and realise what you’re missing.

“Now it’s nice to know what I want to do and my weight is steady, just under 11 stone.”

Based in Bridgend near the stables run by his father, who previously worked for British Steel, and his mother Martine, Flint spent last autumn travelling around the country to ride out.

He is hoping to rekindle the alliance he enjoyed in his formative years with Philip Hobbs, who masterminded Fair Along’s career. I sort of got going again at Christmas, then I picked up a ban and then a horse kicked me on the gallops and fractured the fibula in my left leg. I was off for three and a half weeks and missed Kayf Moss when he won at Ffos Las,” he said. “Now this. The phone hasn’t stopped. It makes it all worthwhile. We weren’t confident. It was a big step up in class. We went there hoping to finish third, but fourth realistically.

“Coming down the side of the track, I could tell the ground was good to soft – we had been hoping for heavy – and the only way was to ride him quite hard. Coming to the second last, I thought ‘This is running some race’.

“When I came to the last, I thought the others were going to swallow me up. When I got past the winning line, I thought I had lost. I can’t tell you what it means.”

However, a sentimental Flint concedes that there will never be another horse – not even Kayf Moss – to compare to Fair Along with whom he grew up.

“If I still had Fair Along, I would be suicidal at missing Cheltenham,” he said. “I don’t think any horse will compare to him. He was something else, but Kayf Moss will make a very good chaser.”

n British Horseracing Authority officials will visit the yard of Irish trainer Philip Fenton to test his Cheltenham entries.

Fenton has been charged with possessing unlicensed substances, including anabolic steroids, and is due back in court six days after saddling Irish Hennessy hero Last Instalment in the Gold Cup.

Sire De Grugy, the new favourite for the Queen Mother Champion Chase in the wake of Sprinter Sacre’s defection, pleased trainer Gary Moore and his son Jamie with a racecourse gallop at Plumpton yesterday.