A.P.McCOY

Who is the greatest sportsman or -woman in the world at the moment? Mm, that's a tough one, and the source of many a heated discussion over a pint of beer. How do you compare sports? And even within one sport, how do you compare different people, particularly if they don't compete head to head? Rooney or Messi? Cancellara or Contador? Federer or Nadal?

But if you could sort out those statistical and measuring problems, who would you pick? Valentino Rossi from motorcycling? Tiger Woods from golf? Michael Phelps from swimming? One of the people who without doubt ought to be on the final shortlist is Northern Irishman A.P. (Tony) McCoy. McCoy has just won the National Hunt jockeys' championship for the fifteenth time in a row. Given that he is still only 35, that basically means that he has always won it. Indeed, he is the odds-on favourite to win it this year as well.

National Hunt racing, in which horses jump over hurdles or fences, is big in the U.K. In order to win the jockeys' championship, you don't have to win ONE race, you have to win lots of races. Around 200 a year, in fact. During his career, McCoy has won more than 3,000 horse races. In the 2001/2 season, he broke the record for the most winners in a year, either National Hunt or flat, with 289. The previous record of 269 had been set by the great flat race jockey Sir Gordon Richards (24 times a champion), and had stood for 55 years.

It is true that the good jockeys tend to get the pick of the best horses, which in turn makes it more likely that they win. But as any punter will know, that doesn't always hold true. Besides, unlike in flat racing, where accidents are rare, the chances of a National Hunt jockey at some point falling off a horse going full gallop are pretty much 100%. During his career, McCoy has broken his ankle, arm, wrist, leg and back, pretty much everything really. You have to wonder why he still does it.

One question mark on his career had been the fact that he had never won the Grand National, the race with the biggest fences and so the one which is most a lottery. Great jump jockeys such as Jonjo O'Neill, John Francome and Peter Scudamore never won it during their careers. However, that blot on an otherwise unblemished CV was remedied this year, when McCoy won the National at the 15th attempt on Don't Push It.

What a record!

Walter Blotscher