By Paul Hayward
With more on his mind than most of us could bear, the BBC's racing commentator texted his understudy at Ascot with a few technical tips about the box he would be calling the big race from.
On King George day, Darren Owen wasn't expecting help from John Hunt. Who would? On 9 July – 18 days earlier, John's wife Carol, 61, and their daughters Hannah and Louise, 28 and 25, had been fatally injured at their home in Bushey, Hertfordshire. John and his daughter Amy were in the vortex of an unspeakable personal catastrophe.
As the King George approached, John found a few minutes to help a BBC colleague, who was profoundly moved and grateful. Darren Owen sketched out some words of tribute for Radio 5Live's first racing broadcast since the Royal meeting, where several of us sat in the Ascot press box with John watching an England game at the end of another superb day's racing.
Owen wrote: “I dedicate today's racing broadcast to John and his family.”
The corporation's regular commentator – the heir to Peter Bromley, and Peter O'Sullevan – wouldn't have been at Ascot to describe Goliath winning the King George. John had carved out a parallel career as an Olympic commentator, chiefly in swimming. He has stretched his expertise too to the Winter Games, with its icy, esoteric challenges.
But the racecourse is John's natural habitat. Less than three weeks after Kyle Clifford from Enfield, North London, was arrested on suspicion of three counts of murder, the empathy and sorrow for the Hunt family remain palpable.
In the midst of personal calamity, we wonder how much support, messages and love can soften the reality of incalculable loss. Maybe the answer is that they are infinitely better than silence. If they have a chance of making a difference, then they serve a purpose
Racing is perhaps the best sport at rallying round the stricken and bereaved. At Ascot on Saturday – as at all race meetings – John's friends and colleagues are grappling with pain and incomprehension that anything so abominable could have happened to such a wonderful family (any family, really). To ask those who know John best how he is coping is to cause tears to flow. Everyone is tight and pained with sympathy for him.
All of which offers only a small insight into what he, Amy and his wider family must be enduring. And yet the love from racing has reached him, and is helping, he told two press box friends – Matt Chapman and David Yates, who have conveyed his messages with great sensitivity.
Darren Owen too was a fine spokesperson, on a day he must have found immensely challenging, in a commentary box where John has called so many races brilliantly.
The help he received from John was in keeping with everything we know about him. John is always interested in others. He always asks how you are, always strikes up a conversation. His warmth and generosity light up a profession he turned to after stints as a trainee nurse and Kilburn police officer – a gig even tougher than calling a 30-runner sprint.
It was Carol Hunt who alerted John to a possible career outside the Met. In the Harrow Observer, she spotted a Ladbrokes ad for trainee racecourse commentators. John handed in his badge and displayed a talent for accuracy and lyricism in the calling home of horses, where his rising and resonant voice is the equal of Peter Bromley. Many a car journey has been turned into a thrilling theatrical ride by a John Hunt racing commentary.
In the midst of personal calamity, we wonder how much support, messages and love can soften the reality of incalculable loss. Maybe the answer is that they are infinitely better than silence. If they have a chance of making a difference, then they serve a purpose.
Through Matt Chapman, John said that “every message that has been sent, every one of those messages feels like a hug.” He urged us all to “make the most of every day.” A fund has been set up to help Amy in the next phase, when coping with so much bereavement may feel like a full-time ordeal. As Chapman said, from the response “we have seen the other side of human nature – it just reminds us there's goodness out there in the world.”
Friends talk of the “tiny steps” the Hunt family will try to make. All acknowledge that countless such steps will be required. Racing's extraordinary willingness to rush to the assistance of those in trouble was recently in evidence with the terrible spinal injuries that befell the jockey Graham Lee. Now, it finds another focus, in circumstances awful beyond anyone's imagining.
For Radio 5Live listeners the Olympic swimming in Paris is eerie. Something is missing: John's voice, borrowed from racing, a sport that values and needs his authority and verbal skill.
John Hunt, racing and Olympic commentator, you couldn't be at Ascot or in Paris, but everyone is with you.
Not a subscriber? Click here to sign up for the daily PDF or alerts.
