The Derby 2011: Walter Swinburn's Epsom fairytale at last looks like having a happy ending - By Ian Chadband, Chief Sports Correspondent, The Telegraph
Posted on - 03 Jun 2011
The Derby 2011: Walter Swinburn's Epsom fairytale at last looks like having a happy ending
Walter Swinburn’s face still radiates its freshness when he thinks of the fairytale which could unfold at the Derby on Saturday. “It has all the makings of one of the greatest stories in racing annals,” he says.
By Ian Chadband, Chief Sports Correspondent, The Telegraph
Back on track: Walter Swinburn will return to the scene of his greatest triumph on Saturday
And he would recognise one. Swinburn will be Epsom’s guest of honour exactly 30 years to the day since a young-looking boy of just 19 rode the most fantastic, fabled Derby winner of all to victory. “Yes, I’m praying for a fairytale story as good as mine and Shergar’s,” he smiles.
“If the Queen’s horse [Carlton House] wins, this Derby will be a very special one, a golden opportunity to put racing out there, not just in the national psyche but worldwide. If she finally won the race, what a story.”
Yes, but it will have to go some to beat the story Walter is still telling.
He laughs that even if everyone might have forgotten him, they have not forgotten Shergar, what with all the mysteries which never stopped pursuing the horse following its kidnap 18 months after their 1981 Derby triumph.
Even now, he is out there, some say, ridden by Lord Lucan and trained by Elvis Presley.
But Swinburn’s own tale seems hardly less dramatic than the fiction surrounding the horse. Except it has a highly visible, happy ending.
Swinburn guides you in a matter of fact way through the minefields and pleasure domes of an extraordinary racing life, with the glory of riding historic winners forged against the backdrop of mental agony caused by his fight against weight problems, alcohol abuse, bulimia and near-anorexia.
He was the shy boy wonder who became a tortured thirty-something, who nearly died in a terrible fall but emerged to become the picture of contentment at 49 as a successful trainer in Hertfordshire, happily married to Alison and the proud dad of Claudia and Millie.
And, no, he has not been forgotten. As we walk around Kempton, where he rode his first winner as a 16 year-old, Swinburn is pointed out to a group of racegoers by the pundit John McCririck. “Look, the man who rode Shergar,” he says..
Swinburn chuckles. It was McCririck who christened him ‘The Choirboy’, which Swinburn hated. “Now as I’m fast approaching 50, I don’t mind it,” he laughs.
He won eight Classics, an Arc, a Breeders Cup and a host of other big races but ‘the man who rode Shergar’ is an epithet Swinburn will settle for. “Because in my view, he’s the best there ever was,” he says.
The 10-length victory margin remains the greatest recorded in the race’s 231 editions even though Swinburn had time to peep behind him and ease off way before the line.
“If I’d let him go earlier, he’d have destroyed them all even more. There’s part of me that still sort of wishes I’d let him fly just to see.”
Swinburn will take his usual walk around Tattenham Corner on Saturday and “remember every blade of the way with total clarity” and “the horse with no weakness”, which, as a trainer, he now realises was a once in a lifetime performer but which, to a 19 year-old did not seem particularly outlandish.
“I didn’t know what the fuss was about. But I learned,” he smiles. “It’s like watching Usain Bolt, it seems so easy to them.”
Swinburn’s only pre-occupation that day was with his weight. It always was. He had to make 8st 2lb for the race preceding the Derby and was so worried he would not have enough strength for the big race that he ended up boosting his energy by supping an orange juice laced with three spoonfuls of sugar.
For a man designed for comfort at 10½st, the wasting was starting to torture him. “It became like a pressure cooker. I tried everything bar drugs to keep the lid on, control my weight.”
Winning was fun, preparing to win hateful. By 1990, he had been bulimic, tried diets which pushed him to the verge of anorexia and turned to the bottle to numb the pain and self-loathing.
“It took me down a painful road to a very lonely place and I couldn’t let anyone in to help because I was embarrassed by my secret.”
Salvation came, strangely, from an accident during a race in Hong Kong in 1996 which left him with a shattered shoulder and punctured lung.
“I was nearly killed but I see it as the moment that saved my life.”
Why? Because the subsequent recuperation, with no worries about having to starve himself, brought such blessed relief it dawned there was another world out there.
“No pressure. I could just be me.”
He made comebacks but his new path had been set. During one sabbatical in London, he started seeing Alison, the daughter of trainer Peter Harris. They married and Swinburn has been running his father-in-law’s old yard in Aldbury for seven years.
If only Shergar’s story was as happy. Swinburn was on holiday in Mumbai in 1983 when he heard the horse had been kidnapped at gunpoint from his stable in County Kildare by an IRA splinter group which wanted the ransom money.
He had visited Shergar in his retirement and thought him still such a good-natured, kind animal living a peaceful existence that he could not imagine anyone hurting him. He still wants to believe that.
“It’s painful to imagine anything else,” he says.
Ever since the choirboy met the wonder horse, Swinburn has felt an “eerie” connection with Epsom.
“I’ve ridden, trained, bred and owned winners there so maybe the only thing left is to train a Derby winner there too.”
Like Shergar? “No, you don’t get that lucky twice.”
