When I first began racing, few jump jockeys reckoned their careers would last beyond the ages of 32 or 33. But they last longer these days.
Lying on the Aintree turf, though, after a fall in April last year, with his leg bent impossibly inwards, the 39-year-old Barry Geraghty wondered if that was where it was all going to end for him. (He has in the past few years broken both legs, both arms, fractured eight ribs and punctured a lung.) But that was only until the morphine kicked in. After six months of rehab for a broken fibula and tibia, he returned once more to the saddle and demonstrated with five glorious victories at the Cheltenham Festival in March that he was as good as ever. At the time he knew, although we didn’t, that at 40 it was going to be his last Festival and now he has announced his retirement. The first reaction must be delight that it is at a time of his own choosing. But his departure, after those of his fellow musketeers A.P. McCoy and Ruby Walsh, leaves a particularly big hole: listening to Barry Geraghty after a race always left me with a sneaking feeling that I had missed out by not being born Irish.
Revered by fellow practitioners for his strength in a finish, he had a marvellous light touch when out of the saddle. ‘Pressure is for tyres,’ as he once said before a big race. No wonder that Sigmund Freud allegedly labelled the Irish ‘the one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever’. Barry never seemed to take himself or the sometimes introverted and obsessive world of horseracing too seriously.
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