Skelton To Go Head To Head With Johnson

Jonathan Powell meets Harry Skelton and ask if he can track down champion Jockey leader Richard Johnson.

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Christmas came early for Harry Skelton who achieved the considerable feat of reaching a century of winners for the season early in December with a double at Fontwell.

The pleasures of success are bound to be that bit greater when you have been through the mill and it is not easy to forget that during an unhappy period a few years ago Skelton couldn’t buy a winner for love nor money.

It happened when his career nosedived alarmingly in the seasons following his greatest triumph as a young jockey on Niche Market in the 2009 Irish Grand National.

Before that outstanding victory he had been hailed as a future champion by his boss of nine years Paul Nicholls.

You wouldn’t have known it when his total of winners for the 2012-2013 season slumped to eight from one hundred and forty six rides. Crucially only one of them was for Nicholls.

Yet here he is almost five years on with a century of winners already logged for the current campaign as he keeps up his relentless pursuit of the dual champion Richard Johnson.

A century by early December is a rare achievement in jump racing. Even more remarkable is the fact that every one of those 100 winners has been provided by his older brother Dan who set off in his new role as a trainer near Alcester in rural Warwickshire with the irresistible force of a tornado.

Harry Skelton, now 29, is not getting carried away by his relentless run of success and continues to say in public that he cannot possibly beat the ageless veteran Johnson.

“Obviously I’d love to be champion but if you look at the figures Dicky gets so many more rides than me. On the sheer weight of numbers it is going to be very hard to beat him. He had nearly 500 more rides than me last year.