FEATURE NICKY HENDERSON
20 runners in the race and there was only one jockey in the weighing room that hadn’t got a ride and that was my old mucker Steve Smith-Eccles, who by this time we already had the first of our three divorces! I said, ‘Come on Steve you better put these colours on’ and the rest to be fair is history. Around he went and off he went. Browne’s Gazette whipped around at the start and that was the end of that so the favourite was out. Steve gave him a beautiful ride and produced him there at the last hurdle. Every year the picture was the same where he is jumping the last a neck down before going away.”
He was beaten in the Gerry Feilden first time out, then he won at Ascot before he was beaten in the Christmas Hurdle. He then won at Doncaster before the Champion Hurdle. He wasn’t favourite for the race by any stretch of the imagination (16-1), but John Francome was going to ride him as he had been riding him. Just like Tommy Carmody did in the Triumph Hurdle he was going to drop him out, but I wasn’t so sure he wanted to be ridden that way.” More often than not the best laid plans are thrown out of the window in racing. And with less than an hour before the tapes were set to go up in the Champion Hurdle, Henderson soon found himself in a predicament with Francome suffering an untimely injury. Henderson added: “John was riding The Reject in the Arkle and the horse fell and John got hung up in the stirrup and he couldn’t get out, but the long and the short of it was that he couldn’t ride in the next race which was the Champion Hurdle. I go to the weighing room and in those days you would have
While Henderson is now a master at giving professional post-race interviews back then it was something he was still yet to fine tune, but despite his lack of finesse in front of the camera it failed to take away what he had just achieved. He said: “Sophie (Henderson) found this interview with the BBC and all I can say is what a wally I was. We hadn’t got a clue what we were doing and I’m doing this ridiculous “Without those people his story, and legacy he created, wouldn’t have been possible”
14 The Festival Preview Magazine
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