Pat Eddery© Photo Healy Racing
I spoke to Pat Eddery face-to-face only once, in the old press room at the Curragh where jockeys used to come and watch racing on the telly. It was just a casual, meaningless conversation about whatever we were looking at. He was very pleasant and relaxed, and I was very tongue-tied: after all it's hard to know what to say to your childhood idols.
Subsequently there were also a couple of telephone interviews during which Eddery stoically went through the professional motions. And that was it. That was all the personal contact involved. Yet news of Eddery's death was dreadfully sad for many who hadn't had even that merest of involvement with the man. Some of it is selfish. When childhood idols start passing away, one's own middle-aged feet start to shuffle a little uneasily. And Eddery was an idol to a lot more than me. It's probably a generational thing. He certainly couldn't have realised how to some racing fans of a certain age he's the reason we were, and are, racing fans. But he was Irish, he was brilliant, and he wasn't Piggott who all the adults continually raved on about. Despite a natural reticence Eddery also came across in interviews as fundamentally decent - no bullshit merchant. So when he became No.1 at Ballydoyle the cocktail of talent, excitement and glamour was complete. I can still remember the excitement of Golden Fleece winning the Derby, El Gran Senor the Guineas. Even the disappointments were enthralling. The idea of Danzatore for the classics kept one cold winter a little warmer. He didn't even make the Guineas so a sub, Lomond, was sent instead, and won.
It's an adolescent conceit to fervently identify with public figures but I can also still remember the sense of absolute indignation at 'my man' getting so much flak for El Gran Senor's Derby defeat: who were these faceless grandstand critics to be taking shots at genius? Childish things pass, and now I'm in that grandstand myself, but that Derby still makes for painful 'Youtube' viewing. Typically though, the man himself simply continued banging in the winners despite the shadow of that defeat seemingly still casting a shadow even decades later. Equally typically, with hindsight, he also maintained he'd simply got it wrong in that Derby, which only proved how even the greenest kids' judgement can be bang on the money sometimes.
The real sadness though lies in how, as everyone acknowledged last week, 63 is no age, and how someone who generated such joy during his working life didn't get to fully enjoy retirement because of an all too prevalent compulsion capable of dragging even idols towards helplessness. The picture painted by Natasha Eddery about her father's struggle with alcohol was painfully evocative. No doubt the rate of alcohol abuse among jockeys will get examination and there's no doubt the peculiar lifestyle jockeys lead can result in people encountering problems. But the sad reality is that addiction knows no boundaries and generalities are dangerous.
Pat Eddery couldn't control his addiction to booze. He was hardly alone in that. Only a handful in racing history, however, experienced the sense of control over a thoroughbred the way he did. And that's what generations of fans who didn't know the man at all will continue to marvel at, even when old enough to remember how childhood really is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Talent is talent. It's that simple.
Eddery became the first Irish born jockey to win the British jockeys title, and at a time when Irish riders didn't really figure towards the top of the flat tree in Britain. No one cared where he came from. His talent was obvious and so was the resilience to wait 70 rides for a first winner. That's why those recent rounds in the gender-ring have been so boring. Talk of rampant chauvinism or allowances for female riders are nothing new and remain essentially off-beam.
To steal a well worn line it is about quality, not equality. Male chauvinist dinosaurs exist and always will since inadequacy is never going to disappear. But in racing, self-interest trumps chauvinism every time. Only complete idiots cut their own noses off to spite themselves and no lost genius of the saddle has been cast to the shadows because of an irreversible misogynistic impulse.
The greatest female riding talent this country has produced is Nina Carberry and it is surely significant she showed no willingness to accept the sexism baton the world so enthusiastically offered to her after Michelle Payne's Melbourne Cup success. Neither did she bite at Tony McCoy's suggestion about a weight allowance for women. That's because Carberry has long been good enough to be judged on her skill, not her gender, something others clearly feel to be insufficient, determined as they seem to be to continue picking fights which serve only to trivialise real sexism. In such an unfair world, equality of opportunity is impossible, no matter what your sex, and making allowances for gender is a slippery slope which smacks of the sort of tokenism that would otherwise be summarily dismissed. Carberry's talent is such that no woman has ever blended so unobtrusively among her male contemporaries. When, and it is surely a question of when, another exceptional female rider comes along her gender will be similarly irrelevant because talent is talent.
Finally, anyone in doubt about the problem of promotion and regulation being under the one umbrella got yet another reminder of its dangers in the debacle that world athletics finds itself in over doping. If the whole sorry episode shows us anything - and it shows us plenty - then it is the dangers of any industry, sport or organisation effectively policing itself.
When exposing cheats can be judged too expensive or inconvenient to uncover by those also charged with keeping the best face out what results isn't so much a slippery slope as a high-speed water slide.
In fact we could be at a stage where a cynical public left wholly unconvinced by anything it is told simply will not tolerate any sport, industry or body left to regulate itself in the naive presumption that it will do the job properly.
