‘He never put a foot wrong'

After more than 20 years and nearly 4,000 winners, Richard Johnson retired earlier this month. Julian Muscat speaks to the four-time champion jockey and his colleagues

- Julian Muscat

RICHARD JOHNSON had plainly forgotten how long it takes to muck out. When he is finally finished, he phones back offering apologies more profuse than a best man late to the wedding of his lifelong friend.

Four days into retirement and the much-decorated jockey is skipping out stables at his family’s farm in Herefordshire. He is not so much resting on his laurels as consigning them to the attic. The morning’s chores serve to confirm that his decision to draw stumps at Newton Abbot on 3 April was the right one.

“I felt good about it when I left the racecourse,” he says. “There are no regrets.”

Nor should there be. The Pony Club devotee who yearned to be champion jockey realised that dream in four successive seasons from 2015. Only one other jockey, AP McCoy, rode more winners during a career spanning two decades. More than that, however, the man known in racing circles as “Dickie” did everything by the book.

“You hear about Dickie being a great ambassador and all that,” AP says, “but the amazing thing is that in all that time he never put a foot wrong. I wasn’t surprised to hear he’d retired because he got every last ounce of it. I think his mind was in better shape than his body. That’s what being a jumps jockey does for you.”

Richard pilots Monkerhostin to win at the Cheltenham Festival in 2004.

For all his stellar achievements, it is remarkable to reflect that Richard would have been champion 20 times had the insatiable AP stayed put in his native Ireland. Their annual joust for supremacy wrote the defining chapters of their era, the like of which had never been seen.