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I championed AP McCoys cause to be Sports Personality Of The Year on the BBC 606 Forum in 2010 and he rightfully won it, and he is without doubt the greatest National Hunt jockey ever seen, and could well win 20 Championship titles and ride over 4000 winners before he finally retires !
Yet another masterclass witnessed on Mister Hyde in the 2.10 at Market Rasen,today, where only his sheer determination on the horse won him the race.
How many times has he done that in his career,and won on horses and from positions where no-one else could have…and how many more times will he do so ?
It was entirely apposite that Phil Taylor was runner-up to AP in the 2010 Sports Personality as they were (at that time) both 15 times’ champions in their respective sports.
Both share this amazing desire to win and keep winning. They can compartmentalise the past as a foreign place, where trophies are merely baubles that act as a spur for more effort in the future. Despite the grind of seemingly endless years, it’s still the next win that counts. This is a rare, almost unique, quality.
One day their powers will wane (maybe that day has come for Taylor) but we would be foolish not to enjoy them for what they are: without doubt the finest British athletes of the last two decades.
Mike
Fair comments, betlarge….though given the choice…would you rather be throwing 3 darts at a dart board for a short time on an irregular basis or riding racehorses over countless hurdles and fences for several miles on end, almost every day, to achieve your dominance ?
I know which one I would take….certainly as far as the "danger and injury factor" is concerned !!
I don’t know whether jockeys can be described as athletes but they certainly have much more claim to the description than dart players who as skilled as they may be are playing a game….a competitive game, but a game……and unlike other games whose requirement for athleticism elevates them to the level of sport….darts is a game at best.
With respect to Phil Taylor any comparison with Tony McCoy (above) is an insult IMO…..what is risked and achieved in being the winning most jump jockey of all time stands comparison with the greatest feats of sporting endeavour anywhere and at anytime……anything achieved in being the best at darts is not part of the same conversation.
Nowadays the word athlete tends to be used as a synonym for sportsman, regardless of the athletic (in it’s original sense) prowess required to excel at the sport; so debating the relative ‘athletic’ merits of McCoy and Taylor is all but irrelevant, as both excel at at pursuits in which most cluster around the average
If darts were easy there’d be a lot of Phil Taylors; if throwing a horse at fences were easy there’d be a lot of Tony McCoys
McCoy excels in a sport that has inherent risk to life and limb and the natural reaction therefore is to regard his exploits as more mertiorious than one who excels in a sport in which the only physical danger is cirrhosis of the liver
Much as I admire McCoy – and I’ve not seen a better NH jockey and doubt I ever will – there does still remain the feeling that in the marriage of horse and jockey the horse wears the trousers, so am loath to sing too loudly the praises of any jockey, however capable.
Taylor, on the other hand has no help: darts is an archetypal ‘one against the rest’ sport in which you stand and fall by your endeavours, and your’s alone
Taylor has proven to be an individual capable of performances far ahead of his contemporaries for years on end, so if I were actually pushed to nominate who of he and McCoy were the more worthy of that nebulous epithet ‘greatest’ it would be Taylor
Not that I lie awake at night worrying about it, nor have any particular interest in darts
Well said,Wordfromthewise !
Drone….you have got to be kidding me and every other true National Hunt Horse Racing fan !!
AP McCoy has been in control of 99 per cent of the horses he has ridden and has been the ultimate factor in success or failure….racehorses need a jockey to stay on board first and foremost especially when jumping hurdles and fences at speed,let alone to coax them to actually win the race too !
Phil Taylor has a luxury day compared to AP McCoy every day of his sporting life,and, many are hard pressed to agree that Darts really is a true sport anyway !
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