Racing legend and human enigma: the Lester Piggott I knew | Sean Magee

Precious few people ever got to know the real Lester Piggott. But collaborating with him on books over the last two decades gave me a front-row seat from which to observe his enigmatic personality.

He was by turns mischievous and taciturn, witty and surly, funny and grumpy, charming and exasperating. He could drive me up the wall, but I loved him.

The more I thought about our relationship, the more I identified with the lifestyle of the oxpecker, the small bird who perches on the top of a hippopotamus or other large mammal and helps the big beast out in various minor ways, to the advantage of both sides.

Or perhaps I was Boswell to his Dr Johnson – though Lester did not go in for portentous pronouncements, and I doubt whether Dr Johnson ever took a boiled sweet out of his mouth and asked his amanuensis to look after it while he was interviewed at Redcar racecourse.

Fabled almost as much for his social dysfunction as for his riding genius, he had serious difficulties with communication – exacerbated by his deafness and lifelong speech problem – which meant it was impossible to know just where you stood with him.

So when the former BBC racing commentator Sir Peter O’Sullevan, Piggott’s mentor since the early 1950s, told me that Lester had given me the highest compliment in his lexicon and pronounced me “all right”, it felt like our association had reached a fresh level.

That impression was enhanced soon afterwards when he insisted on taking me to lunch at a swish London gaming club. What was all this nonsense about Lester Piggott having a reputation for weapons-grade stinginess? The accounts of his meanness were legion, yet here I was told to eat what I liked and drink what I liked, and hang the cost.

Next morning Sir Peter phoned and asked how I was getting on with Lester.

Very well, I said, and told him about that lunch at the club.

“Oh, he likes it there,” came the honeyed O’Sullevan tones: “He doesn’t have to pay.”

Lester’s fame brought him free lunches, but he was never comfortable with the outside world recognising him – or thinking it did. One summer’s afternoon he was asked by an ice-cream vendor on the Finchley Road whether he was “that Wilson Pickett”. He replied that he was, since denying it might have complicated things.

But he expected his achievements to be recognised. At a Variety Club lunch at Sandown Park, the MC elicited applause for the various “celebrities” present – with the notable exception of the 11-times champion jockey in their midst.’

Lester was clearly wounded by the omission and replied to my expression of surprise with a doleful, “I don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who I am” – at which point Jimmy Tarbuck bounced on to the stage and saluted the greatest racing celeb of them all, who beamed as he made a diffident bow.

But celebrity is relative, and the fame of a sporting hero from an earlier generation can be trumped by a current household name from another walk of life. A past master at appropriating other jockeys’ rides, Lester met his match from an unlikely source at the Cheltenham Festival.

Invited to Gold Cup day by the racecourse executive, we had just taken our places in the cavernous lunch tent when a course official told us that we had to move. A bigger star and her entourage had just arrived, and Katie Price’s people were insisting on a table well away from the prying eyes of passing racegoers.

As we got up to move, Lester grunted to me that he had been “jocked off by Jordan”.

Winning and then keeping the Piggott trust was no easy matter, and his suspicious nature could reveal itself in the most trivial circumstances. One day at Newmarket’s July Course he was required to go to the paddock to judge a best-turned-out horse award, and suggested I look after his copy of the Racing Post while he did so. On his return he asked for his newspaper back, then – clearly fearing that I might have sold part of it in his absence – demanded: “Is it all there?” (He had not asked the same question about the boiled sweet at Redcar.)

He rarely spoke about his year in prison, but the lowest point of the Piggott story could not be excised so easily. In Ireland for a charity race meeting, our host, looking to find something in common with the guest of honour, jovially told him: “You know, Lester, you and I have one thing in common. We’ve both done time.” Lester did not respond.

There are hundreds of Lester Piggott stories, some of them true. One that sums up the man better than most concerns a trainer who before a race gave him specific instructions. Piggott was to hold his mount up for as long as he dared, then make a late run and get the horse’s head in front right on the winning post.

Lester’s deafness usually made riding instructions redundant, and when the starting stalls opened he shot the horse into the lead. They were still five lengths clear entering the final furlong, then started to slow down, and were caught on the line.

Incandescent with rage, the trainer rushed into the unsaddling enclosure – where Lester dismounted, slipped the saddle off the horse and said to the trainer: “You were right, you know.”