Sporting Bygones: Duffield’s crowning moment on User Friendly in St Leger came after dicing with death in the skies alongside Piggott

Already the winner of the Epsom, Irish and Yorkshire Oaks, the Clive Brittain-trained filly’s victory on Town Moor confirmed her as the 1992 horse of the year.

“The race was tailor-made for her,” said Duffield, who grew up in Stanley and who had never won a Classic until he partnered Bill Gredley’s wonder-horse at Epsom.

“Lester Piggott took the field along at a decent clip on Mack The Knife with us contentedly lobbing in his shadow.

“One kick in the belly halfway up the straight and it was all over in a matter of strides. She murdered them. The margin of victory was three-and-a-half lengths without me being hard on her.”

If only the build-up had been as incident-free.

First, the Yorkshire Oaks. Duffield was flying on a light plane from his Newmarket base to York with Piggott, Philip Robinson and Michael Hills when the turbulence from an off-course jet airline saw the aircraft flip over.

“It was a jet that flew up under the nose,” Duffield recalls in ‘The Smiling Pioneer’, the brilliant biography of Clive Brittain by one-time BBC political editor Robin Oakley.

“The jet pilot radioed back to base ‘I’ve just taken a light aircraft out of the sky’. We had to land to see if there was any structural damage. All I was thinking was that I didn’t want to miss the race.

“I rode in the first race that day, the two-year-old selling race, and I was totally oblivious to the race. All I could think about was how close we had been to being dead.

“I remember Lester saying to me when we were flying back ‘We were really lucky, you know. We should be dead’.”

Though the Yorkshire Oaks victory was far from smooth, in part due to the jockey’s shattered nerves, Duffield did tell Gredley after dismounting: “She will win the St Leger standing on her head.”

Those 10 words convinced the owner to pay £25,000 to supplement User Friendly into the St Leger (she had not been entered as a juvenile because she was so backward that she did not race as a two-year-old).

And then calamity nearly struck again on the eve of the race when Duffield suffering a crashing fall after his mount clipped heels with a rival.

As he rolled over the firmish turf, he kept thinking “Leger, Leger, Leger”. Fortunately, only the jockey’s pride was injured.

Yet, as the Yorkshireman proved his fitness, Brittain was threatening to withdraw User Friendly because he felt the Doncaster ground was not too firm. It prompted a game of brinkmanship with John Sanderson, the then clerk of the course.

“We had built the filly up and we needed the course to be watered,” explained Brittain in his biography.

“I walked the course more than once with a stick with a duck’s head on it. I said to John Sanderson ‘This will tell me how much you have watered’, showing him the duck’s head.

“Sanderson said they couldn’t possibly water and I replied ‘I wouldn’t even run this duck here’. I made a bit of a joke about it. But, seriously, in the end the taps did go on. We forced their hand a bit.”

Brittain could have been fined if he had withdrawn User Friendly on the day of the race – but he knew her absence would hit the Doncaster gate.

As for Sanderson, his staff reportedly deposited a quarter-of-a-million gallons of water on the track, the equivalent of one-tenth of an inch of a rainfall. He said at the time: “We are not doing this just for one horse. We don’t want any horse to go away from this meeting jarred up.”

User Friendly remains the last filly to win the Ladbrokes St Leger – and this will remain the case on Saturday unless the John Gosden-trained Great Heavens can beat the Triple Crown-seeking Camelot.

After Brittain and Duffield’s Doncaster drama, they hoped to crown a memorable year by landing the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe – Europe’s richest and most prestigious race.

Duffield still rues to this day his decision not to make the Longchamp race a greater test of stamina from the front; instead, he provided a perfect lead for Subotica, who won by a neck. He was so devastated that he was speechless for an hour.

As a four-year-old, User Friendly failed to hit her great heights of 1992, beating just one horse home in the Arc.

As for her jockey, he was just lucky to be alive after that near-miss in the skies while en route to York.

Clive Brittain: The Smiling Pioneer by Robin Oakley (published by Racing Post, price £20).