Interview with Jockey Andrew Thornton

17 December 2014

The following interview, by Oliver Brett, is available free for reproduction in full or in part.

Racing has delivered plenty of emotional moments over the years but the victory of Miko De Beauchene in the Coral Welsh National of 2007 will remain hard to surpass for ever more.

The horse’s trainer, Robert Alner, had been so badly injured in a car accident seven weeks earlier that he was clinging to life itself, in the same intensive care unit of the Bristol hospital he had been airlifted to on the day of the crash.

But the family operation somehow went on, and on the morning of the big race for which Miko De Beauchene had been meticulously prepared for, Robert’s wife Sally skipped her regular trip to hospital to see her husband in order to drive the horsebox to Chepstow.

The Alners’ gelding was inexperienced , having only run four times over fences, but crucially had shown a liking to the unique undulations of the course by winning there on his debut.

Jockey Andrew Thornton fancied the seven-year-old’s chances and remembers a perfect start to the race for Miko De Beauchene. “The start is really important at Chepstow and I managed to get him right down on the paint, on the inside rail which is where I wanted him to be because he had a tendency to jump right-handed [not ideal on a left-handed course].”

Coming round the final turn five fences out, Thornton made a decisive move on the seven-year-old, taking him wide of several runners and jumping into a share of the lead. After the following fence, the favourite Gungadu dropped out of contention leaving Thornton’s mount and Halcon Genelardais to duel out the finish.

Look at the race on Youtube, and at this stage Thornton is much more animated on his mount than Christian Williams is on the eventual runner-up and top weight, Halcon Genelardais. But the latter’s slight error at the last gave Thornton and Miko De Beauchene every incentive to go on and win the race, which they clearly did – though the passive body language of the winning rider afterwards has a simple explanation.

“When we passed the winning line I wasn’t 100% sure we’d got in front after the line or just before the line. It was a case of having to sit and suffer because you can’t hear the commentary, you don’t know what’s happened. Most people probably knew he’d just got there in time, but the 30 seconds of waiting for the result seemed like an eternity and it was such a relief. I was just praying, praying that he had got to the line first and the emotion when his number was called out - well, it was the most emotional win I’d ever had in my life and am ever likely to have. It was just meant to be.”

Seven years on, Thornton is left in little doubt about the significance of that day for one extremely ill man lying stricken in his hospital bed.

“What Robert had gone through… well, I don’t think there’s many people would have survived it to be perfectly honest. It’s just so pleasing that he’s here to tell the tale, just to give him that inspiration and something like that is better than any medicine anybody can ever give you. Sally had been holding everything together. Even talking about it now makes me emotional because Robert and Sally mean so much to me.”

Now aged 71, and paralysed from the chest down, Alner continues to have a positive outlook on life, and helps out his son-in-law Robert Walford, a fledgling trainer in his own right. As for Thornton, now 42 and one of the elder statesmen of the weighing room, he’s still clocking up the winners with regularity, and is closing on a career milestone of 1,000 winners.

I put it to him that it will be an incredible achievement when he joins a group of about a dozen men from both sides of the Irish Sea to hit this landmark. “Well for me it is,” replies the man from Teesside, who refreshingly doesn’t deal in self-deprecating platitudes.

“There’s not many jump jockeys who have done it and through my career I’ve not had a big stable behind me. Robert would be the biggest, with 50, 60 horses. I think I’ve ridden winners for 170 different trainers which is a lot. I’m lucky I’ve got Seamus [Mullins] now who’s got 50 horses and they’re in great form at the moment, Caroline Bailey too - they’ve been staunch supporters of mine.”

If most of the highlights of Thornton’s riding career are behind him now, there’s little doubt that the three stand-out moments are See More Business winning the King George in 1997, Cool Dawn taking the Cheltenham Gold Cup less than three months later and Miko De Beauchene’s famous success a full decade on.

And while he claims he was lucky firstly to pick up the ride on See More Business and then to catch a quirky horse on a good day, he fully buys into the “fairytale” of Cool Dawn’s win. Owner Dido Harding had secured a four-figure bank loan to buy a point-to-pointer she could use as a hunter chaser, sent him in into training with Alner, and a couple of years later he won the Gold Cup. “It was just a dream,” recalls Thornton of that day in the sun at Cheltenham.

But it’s just possible that Miko de Beauchene’s win at Chepstow is even more special for the veteran jockey. “With all the other circumstances that were going on, emotionally it would have to be my top win,” he says. For one man who counted himself fortunate to be able to watch the race on a television in a Bristol hospital, it was most certainly Thornton’s most significant success in the saddle.

The Coral Welsh Grand National is live on Channel 4: December 27. Coverage starts at 8am with The Morning Line.