Sir Gordon Richards at the Coronation Derby

Champions are not made by talent alone. They are made by the patience to lose the same race twenty-seven times, to come back at forty-nine years old with the knighthood three days old and the kingdom four days into a new reign, and to ride the twenty-eighth attempt as if it were the first, and the only, and the last.

THE MINER'S BOY

He was born at Donnington Wood in the Shropshire coalfield on the fifth of May 1904, the third of twelve children of Nathan Richards, a coal-getter at the Granville Colliery and a Primitive Methodist lay-preacher, and Elizabeth Donnelly, an Irish-Shropshire colliery wife. The family lived in a pit cottage on Wrekin Road, two up and two down, the privy at the bottom of the garden, the pit-head winding wheel turning above the rooftops at the end of the street. He left school at thirteen for the office of the Lilleshall Colliery Company. He was small, neat, light, with the wiry build of a child whose family ate meat once a week. He had never ridden a horse. In the autumn of 1919, aged fifteen, he answered an advertisement in the Sporting Life placed by the Wiltshire trainer Martin Hartigan of Foxhill, near Wroughton, offering apprenticeships to the sons of working men, board and lodging found, the indentures running seven years. His father read the advertisement aloud at the kitchen table on a Saturday evening, then wrote the answering letter himself, in the careful round hand of a lay-preacher who knew that this would be the last letter he wrote on his son's behalf. The boy travelled south alone in March 1920, a small leather case in his hand, the Foxhill stable hands waiting at Swindon station. He was apprenticed to Hartigan for seven years, weighing four stone seven on the day he signed. He rode his first winner, Gay Lord, at Leicester on the thirty-first of March 1921. He was sixteen years old.

THE TWENTY-SEVEN

He was Champion Jockey of Great Britain for the first time in 1925, at twenty-one years old, with one hundred and eighteen winners. He spent the spring of 1926 in a Norfolk sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, his career thought finished by every observer who had seen the lung X-rays. He came back at the end of 1927 thinner and quieter and ten pounds the better, and won the championship again the following year and the year after that. From 1931 he won it every year of the decade except 1941, when wartime racing was reduced to almost nothing. He won the Two Thousand Guineas, the One Thousand Guineas, the Oaks, the St Leger, and Royal Ascot's Gold Cup. He won every Classic the English Turf had to offer. He did not win the Derby. From 1924 onwards he rode in twenty-seven consecutive Derbys without finishing higher than third. The Derby is one mile and a half over the rolling, cambered, left-handed Epsom Downs, a track that punishes the small mistake of the wrong moment, and Richards, by his own honest account, had been at the wrong moment on the wrong horse for twenty-seven years. By the spring of 1953 he had ridden four thousand seven hundred winners, a figure no jockey of any era had approached, and he had begun to talk of the saddle as something he might lay down soon.

THE FIRST OF JUNE

The Coronation Honours List was published in the London Gazette at half past midnight on the morning of Monday the first of June 1953. Towards the end of the list of knighthoods, beneath the diplomatic and military and judicial names, the entry read: Richards, Mr Gordon, for services to horse racing. He read it in his Marlborough hotel room over breakfast. He was the first jockey in the four-hundred-year recorded history of English flat racing to receive the accolade. He was, by his own report, briefly unable to finish his tea. The Queen was crowned at Westminster Abbey the following morning, the second of June, in front of eight thousand peers and dignitaries and a global television audience of twenty-seven million; the procession down the Mall to Buckingham Palace lasted five hours, in the rain. The Derby was four days later. The London evening papers, on the Friday, carried Pinza and the Queen's colt Aureole at the top of every ante-post column.

PINZA

Pinza was a five-year-old bay colt of immense scope and a difficult disposition: he had injured himself as a two-year-old, missed his classic season at three, returned as a four-year-old to win the Ormonde Stakes and the Dee Stakes, and was prepared by Norman Bertie at Newmarket through the spring of 1953 with a single race in mind. He was owned by the seventy-one-year-old Shanghai-born British industrialist Sir Victor Sassoon, who had failed in three Derbys of his own and had stated publicly that this would be his last attempt at the race. Bertie had Pinza fit to the minute by the last week of May. The horse was led off the Newmarket-to-Epsom box at Tattenham Corner station on the Friday afternoon and walked to the racecourse stables. Richards saw him for the first time at half past two on the Saturday in the parade ring. He weighed in at seven stone nine, hands the same width he had carried since the apprenticeship at Foxhill, the silks the blue and white of the Sassoon stable. Twenty-six other colts circled the ring. In the royal box, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh watched through the binoculars. Aureole, the Queen's chestnut, was led round opposite.

TATTENHAM CORNER

They went off at four minutes past three to a roar from the Downs that the BBC commentator Raymond Glendenning, on the open-air microphone above the stands, described as the loudest he had ever heard on the course. The field broke clean across the wide first furlong and climbed the rise to the half-mile post in a tight bunch, City Scandal making the early pace, Pinza settled fourth on the rail under Richards. They came over the top of the Downs at the seven-furlong marker, the field fanning out across the cambered descent towards Tattenham Corner. Aureole was tracking the leaders on the wide outside. Pinza, on the rail, was beginning to move. Richards, who had ridden the corner two hundred times in twenty-nine years, took Pinza into the bend at the second-furlong call on a length and a half off the leaders, kept him balanced through the camber on the inside, and brought him out into the straight in third place with three furlongs to run. He let him go at the two-furlong post. Pinza answered with the long, deceiving stride of a horse with reserves still untouched, lengthened past Premonition at the furlong, drew clear of Aureole at the hundred-yard mark, and crossed the line four lengths in front in two minutes thirty-five point one seconds. The Downs noise, by every report afterwards, ceased for a beat at the post and then resumed at a pitch that left the BBC engineers fearing for their equipment. Richards stood in the irons and raised his whip to the crowd. The white sky above the Downs was beginning to clear.

THE WALK BACK

The Queen sent her racing manager Captain Sir Charles Moore down from the royal box to the unsaddling enclosure to ask Richards to be brought to her after he had weighed in. He walked Pinza into the winner's circle to a sustained roar from the crowd pressed at the rails, slid down, unbuckled the girth, took the saddle on his arm, and walked through to the scales. He weighed in at seven stone ten, one pound over the carded weight, declared correct. He carried the saddle out to Sir Victor Sassoon, who was weeping into his handkerchief at the rail; then up the wooden stairs to the royal box. The Queen rose to meet him at the door. She held out her hand. Sir Gordon, she said, I am so sorry I could not produce a winner for you, but I am very glad you produced one for yourself. He bowed. She presented him the trophy. The Duke of Edinburgh shook his hand. The photographs taken at that moment, the four-day Queen and the three-day knight, the trophy between them, the bay colt held by the head-collar groom below, are in the Royal Archives at Windsor and in the Jockey Club Rooms at Newmarket and in the National Horseracing Museum.

THE LAST RIDE

He rode through the rest of 1953 and into the spring of 1954. On the afternoon of Saturday the tenth of July 1954, in the paddock at Sandown Park before the Eclipse Stakes, the three-year-old filly Abergeldie reared up under him, fell over backwards, and rolled across his pelvis. He was carried from the paddock on a stretcher with the pelvis broken in three places and the riding career, at fifty years old, finished. He retired from the saddle on the third of September 1954, took out a trainer's licence at Beckhampton in Wiltshire, trained for a decade with modest results, then ran a horse-management agency from his house at Whitsbury in Hampshire and later at Kintbury in Berkshire. He was made a Companion of the Order of the British Empire in 1976 (the knighthood had come, in technical Court terms, as a knight bachelor only), served as President of the Jockeys' Association, and was, by every account of the Newmarket and Lambourn yards, the most generous patron and tutor of apprentice jockeys in his post-riding decades that the English Turf could remember. He died at Kintbury on the tenth of November 1986, eighty-two years old. The Pinza Derby of 1953 was, by the unanimous reckoning of the racing press at the time and by every retrospective since, the finest race ride of his life. He had ridden, in thirty-three years from Leicester to Sandown, four thousand eight hundred and seventy winners. He had won the Derby once, on his twenty-eighth attempt, in the same week as his knighthood and his Queen's crowning, on the horse of an industrialist who had himself failed three times. The Shropshire pit cottage on Wrekin Road has been demolished. The Foxhill stable at Wroughton has gone too. Pinza's name is on the Derby roll at Epsom in the entry for 1953, between the Tulyar of 1952 and the Never Say Die of 1954, and underneath it, in the jockey column, the name Sir Gordon Richards in the only Derby entry on the roll prefixed with the title.