The turf | 31 August 2017

I guess his mother may have called him Patrick, or even, when he was in trouble, ‘Patrick Joseph’, but in the racing world, like the great McCoy, the Yorkshire-based jockey P.J. McDonald is known simply by his initials. It is proving to be a very good year for ‘P.J.’ and those initials are becoming steadily more familiar to southern as well as northern racegoers. He won the National Stakes at Sandown and the Molecomb Stakes at Glorious Goodwood on Karl Burke’s Havana Grey, and as I write he is firmly ensconced in the top ten riders’ table with nearly 80 winners. ‘I’d love to get the hundred up this season,’ he says, and there must be every chance he will. But at 35 his is the success of a hardworking slow-burner, not that of a precocious youth.

Sometimes it looks as though everyone in Ireland has a trainer in their family tree, a horse in their backyard and an ex-jockey for a neighbour but there were no such advantages for P.J.: