While Mrs Oakley was patrolling the aisles in Waitrose one day recently, I slipped off into my local betting shop. There, too, fresh from the pub, was Mr Knowall on the day that we learned that the former champion jockey Jamie Spencer, at only 34, intended to retire. ‘Effing retiring at 34,’ Mr Knowall told the Coral clientele. ‘It just goes to show these jockeys are all paid too much.’
There was no point in arguing with beer-fuelled ignorance, and of course Jamie Spencer won’t quit the saddle as a pauper. He has been in the elite band whose talents are so valued that rich owners fly them around the world to employ their services. He deserves to be taking a few nice nest eggs into ‘retirement’ with him. What the Knowalls forget is how few jockeys live at that level. Yes, stars such as Frankie Dettori and Richard Hughes on the Flat, or Tony McCoy and Ruby Walsh over jumps, do well, but the majority of those who risk life and limb in the only sport apart from motor-racing in which the participants are regularly followed by an ambulance are bumping along the bottom financially.
I checked a few facts with Dale Gibson, formerly a respected Northern-based jockey and now the industry liaison officer for the Professional Jockeys Association. Flat jockeys earn £118.29 a ride and the jumps boys, facing a greater risk of injury, get £161.51. Fine for a top jockey with five or six rides on a card. Not so hot for the grafter driving up to Musselburgh for a single ride on a no-hoper. Nobody pays his petrol expenses and he may well have driven 50 miles in another direction at 5 a.m. to ‘ride work’, educating horses for a trainer who won’t pay him for doing so in the hope of a future ride or two.
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