RIP lester Nijinsky wins the 1970 Epsom Derby under Piggott
Jocelyn de Moubray remembers the late, great Lester Piggott
L
ESTER PIGGOTT WON THE FIRST FOUR RACES I EVER SAW. When I was still very small my father decided one day in early August that we as a family were going to go racing at Goodwood for no other reason other than it was taking place and was only a half an hour or so drive from where we lived. We knew nothing whatsoever about racing, my father announced that we had to be there at least three hours before the first race, and none of us were in a position to question his judgment. So my first hours on a racecourse were spent with the rest of my family, on our own, high in the stands looking out over the course, the Downs and over to the Trundle Hill which was only just beginning to look populated, (even those in the Grandstand had access to the top tier from which you could see every part of the track and the countryside for miles).
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“Nijinksy’s Derby win was a thing of great beauty and minimum apparent effort from his jockey”
I am exaggerating as we knew one thing about horseracing, in common more or less with the rest of the population of the country; we knew that the best jockey was Lester Piggott. From the word go the family’s modest bets and my young eyes followed only this man, in the prime of his life but already a slightly strange figure, taller than the other jockeys with a stooped posture whose face was already beginning to be lined within the frame of his helmet. I have tried since, without success, to find the names of the horses Lester won on that day. One was Some Hand and I think another Green God, but that may have been the following year. In any event to me this winning sequence seemed to be a coincidence, both thrilling and somehow miraculous. Racing was an entirely new and in many ways a chaotic experience, with previously unknown sounds, sights and smells together with the reassuring certainty that Lester was
