How I Got Hooked On Racing: Chris McGrath

For the past two weeks, we have been telling you how some of racing's biggest names fell in love with the sport. Now it's our turn. Here are some of the stories behind the bylines you see every day in the TDN.

Chris McGrath

We all know how pedigrees can confound us. We spend more than we can afford on the best page we can, and end up trying to salvage something in a maiden claimer. And then the horse you put an immediate line through, when you first go through a catalogue, ends up winning a Grade I.

Hang on, this series is titled “How I Fell Out Of Love With Racing”–right?

The point is that there was nothing in my page to concern those raising me that I might be remotely vulnerable to a sport they would have viewed, had they ever given it a moment's attention, as fraught with moral and financial peril. A largely suburban upbringing in England had instead put me on an impeccably conventional path, one that I would actually follow through to university and the law degree that my parents fondly imagined would lead to an uneventfully lucrative career.

By the time I obliged them by at least jumping through those preliminary hoops, however, the terrible seduction had begun.

Sire and dam had first started scratching their heads, and going back through their own scrupulously unsporting pedigrees, when I became precociously obsessed, from the age of nine, with cricket–something equally baffling, no doubt, to any American reader. In those days, incredible as it will seem to young people, Britons had a choice of just three television stations. And one of those would broadcast every minute of every home Test Match. (Yes, those games scheduled over five days with zero guarantee of either side winning…)

International cricket nowadays lurks behind a subscription paywall, and there are lessons for every sport in its resulting struggles to reach and inspire younger viewers. Back then, however, this tremendous shop window would only be open in the summer, and an idle English schoolboy in search of televised sport during the winter had to make do with a modest quota of soccer plus a few curiosities like snooker. (Quite a challenge, in an era when color television remained a luxury: one commentator famously said: “For those of you watching in black-and-white, the pink is next to the green….” Actually that wasn't as stupid as it sounds, but we're digressing enough already.)

One of the sports that duly profited from great exposure in the early 1980s was horseracing. And I distinctly recall being vexed whenever some other sport was interrupted to show the 2.30 from Haydock.

Gradually, however, I fell prey to a fateful combination of those adolescent trademarks, indolence and intrigue–especially, to start with, during the jumps season. Who were these eccentric characters in tweed coats, presenters and interviewees alike? And who, above all, were these astounding creatures whose bravery and beauty so obsessed them?

Now I can't deny it: the glamor was certainly heightened by the fact that people appeared to be winning and losing giddy sums on how fast these semi-controllable animals managed to negotiate a series of obstacles. At a time of life when an evolving personality is anxious to decide what kind of image to project in life, gambling became a useful source of additional loucheness, an exotic variation on the three customary routes to disreputability: girls, cigarettes and ale.

For the record, I never took to smoking; and I soon figured out, if rather too slowly, that I would need to discover a more reliable option than betting to salvage at least some portion of the comfortable income I was now determined to renounce, together with a career in law. (The girls and the ale, I stand by.) But the comical fact of the matter is that when See You Then won the second of his three Champion Hurdles, in 1986, I dared my first ever £5 wager; and that 12 months later, faithful to the same horse in the same race, I risked no less than £200.

But it was watching that same 1986 Cheltenham Festival that I reached the single moment–indeed a single, fleeting image–that definitively hooked me on racing. I don't recall having any financial skin in the game for the Gold Cup, the steeplechase that crowns the meeting. But the narrative of the race, in both the build-up and its actual denouement, was unforgettably centered on the charismatic Irish mare, Dawn Run. She had been champion hurdler but remained inexperienced over fences, and her jumping was under such scrutiny that there had been a controversial change of jockey. Watching the grainy footage again today, you still can't see how she won. Through most of the final stages, having dropped out after an attacking ride, she looks irretrievably beaten. But then the enigmatic Wayward Lad started to hang in front, and Dawn Run kept up the gamest of gallops up the hill to pull it out of the fire.

As she passed the post, the director took what for me became a life-changing decision, cutting to the crowd in front of the stands. That shot lasted barely a couple of seconds. In that fleeting moment, however, you saw a trilby hat flung so high into the air that it disappeared from the frame–and it never returned into view, because we were then taken instantly back to the horses pulling up. it gave a literally limitless quality to the joy consuming all those people.

In that single, exuberant gesture, I sensed how this game could enliven and exalt the lives, however humdrum, of anyone prepared to yield to its mysteries. Thirty-eight years on, that trilby is still to come back down to earth.