Rare Talent Swinburn Remembered

To think that we once viewed them both as the very epitome of life–these twin carvers, in the 1981 Derby, of a glistening monument to the unfettered expression of youth, vigour and flair. Now the name of Walter Swinburn has joined that of Shergar in the tragic shadow cast behind a shining moment in time. Now he, too, has been taken from us prematurely, and the living sap they shared must begin to harden into a nostalgic sepia. Like a prehistoric fly trapped in amber, they remain a cause of wonder still, an aesthetic delight, but henceforth they shall be impenetrably sealed into another epoch. And, reviewing Swinburn's life, we are reminded yet again that there is only so far we can ever expect these horses–even the very greatest–to take us.

Shergar, of course, long ago had his own stake in Turf history horribly perverted, instead becoming a symbol of the violence and perfidy of man. But while the horse notoriously disappeared overnight, kidnapped by terrorists during the Irish troubles, the unanswered questions were purely circumstantial. We do not know where his bones rest, nor exactly how long it took his captors to despair of their own folly. We do know the full pity of his tale, and the sins at its root. Not so with poor Swinburn, whose sufferings were purgatorial rather than infernal.

There is no convenient culpability here, beyond the ghastly privations he embraced to control his weight. And, even as he unfurled the public pageant of his genius for nearly 20 years after Shergar, we could have no proper grasp of the mystery that smouldered beyond. There were uncomfortable glimpses when he took a “sabbatical” here, or lurched unmistakably off the rails there. But in a way he became far more elusive than Shergar.

The cruelty of his abrupt loss, at 55, is that it robs our parish not only of a gentle, sensitive and intelligent man; nor only of one of the most divinely natural horsemen, it does not seem excessive to propose, of all time. Above all, it limits such comfort as we could contrive from the relative stabilities he appeared to achieve in retirement. For a certain air of fragility seemed to abide even in the fresh starts he made as a trainer, a family man, a broadcaster. Only those who knew him best can say quite how insidious remained the legacy of the torments he endured as a rider. Reports that he was suffering from epilepsy have prompted some to make a literal connection, specifically to the fall that nearly killed him at Sha Tin in 1996–a crisis, it now seems poignant to recall, that Swinburn allowed himself to interpret as a moment of redemption.

It says everything that a shattered shoulder, broken ribs and punctured lung, not to mention a four-day coma, should have enabled him to awaken to a sense of “liberty” he had not experienced for years–years in which the delicate beam of his talent had lit a precarious path through a black night of bulimia and alcohol. At last, he felt, no need to worry about his next meal, his next ride. Though he resumed race-riding, albeit somewhat sporadically and meanwhile seeking a more sustainable mode of living, by 2000 he was able to recognise his cue and quit one day at Kempton after riding a horse named, of all things, Bogus Dreams.

The bleak familiarity of his tale, to anyone versed in the biographies of so many great riders, extends to the elixir for which Swinburn traded such hardship. As was so often the case among troubled souls of the 19th Century Turf, it was on horseback that he most reliably found serenity. Seldom has any jockey proved so free of nerve on the biggest stages. No less than his feathery touch on the withers, that was what emboldened Sir Michael Stoute to hoist the teenaged Swinburn into the saddle on an odds-on Derby favourite. Whereas Shergar separated himself from his pursuers in a dominating gesture to his inferiors, asserting his majesty as pack leader, Swinburn never seemed to have much interest in imposing himself on his rivals in some parallel, alpha-male spirit. Here was a man who sought a complement, not compliments. He felt completed by the horse.

And, given a great horse, that took him to a rarefied plane–far beyond most of his peers, even in a golden age among Europe's elite riders. The process was so instinctive that it never interfered with his humility. As Shergar went clear at Epsom, he heard someone along the rails shouting: “Go on Lester!”

Imagining that Piggott was bearing down on him, he picked up his whip–a memory he professed to find embarrassing, albeit it suited his nature ideally to pronounce the punter in question perfectly entitled to presume that only Lester deserved so stellar a mount.

Just because it all came to him naturally, that does not mean he was a mere butterfly, dropping elegantly into the great blooms of Shergar and the rest. Swinburn's innate dash would have been hopelessly neutralised without physical courage, while his freedom from arrogance did not mean he lacked steel or ambition. No dilettante, certainly, would ever have endured that ancient and bitter paradox through which he fed an addiction to the irregular highs of race-riding, by daily renewing those hateful rituals that gnawed away his deeper morale. Seeing Steve Cauthen and Cash Asmussen apparently succeeding in a similar trade-off, Swinburn had soon found himself “flipping” (that is, inducing himself to vomit bolted meals) and numbing his shame with drink.

All the while, even so, his looks retained an elfin youthfulness. In the Shergar days, he had appeared so impossibly cherubic that he was christened “The Choirboy”–and, as though in token of some Mephistophelian pact, the nickname could stick even as he aged precipitately within.

Barely a year after retirement, he was 11st. Yet he still looked svelte. That is a measure of the savagery by which he preserved an artificial riding weight in the 8st-9st range, above all during the years spanning his second and third Derby winners, Shahrastani in 1986 and Lammtarra in 1995. In his younger days, remember, he had been built to look after himself on the rugby field, his lightning hands qualifying him as an outstanding scrum-half at Rockwell College.

Those same hands could hold together the seething, simmering talent of a horse like Zilzal as though on a single thread; while somehow able, at the same time, to urge changes of direction or gear. However incongruous with his hidden torments, then, the seraphic exterior was perfectly consistent with vitals seated far deeper than his stomach or liver. There was a nearly ethereal continuum between the core of his being and that of the horse he governed so lightly. Tony McCoy used a singular expression, by his own standards never mind those of Twitter, when hearing of Swinburn's death: “a jockey that God hath retained.” And that is the way we should remember him. To be sure, he fell to earth–but he was ever an angel.