After 15 years of being champion jockey, 36-year-old Tony McCoy is starting to think about retiring. According to McCoy, these thoughts started to enter his head after his emotional Grand National win.
“But only because people started asking me when I was going to retire,” said McCoy, the jockey who has dominated horse racing for the last 15 years.
Last year, McCoy became the first jockey ever to have achieved 3,000 wins, but he does not anticipating pushing this achievement to 4,000 wins.
“Four thousand winners is a long way away; you could be looking at four or five years and I won’t still be riding in four or five years,” McCoy said. “From about four or five years ago, after having been champion jockey for 10 or 11 years, I started thinking that if I was no longer champion jockey, it would be because I was no longer as good as I had been. And I wouldn’t want people thinking that I’m not as good as I was.”
If McCoy were to lose the title of champion jockey, he says he would not try to regain it.
“The only way I would try to regain the title if I lost it would be if I lost it as a result of injury,” said McCoy. “That would be a completely different scenario. It wouldn’t be as if I’d lost my grip on the title.”
McCoy doesn’t spend much time thinking about his own retirement. In fact, he says that the only time the thought comes in to his head is when other people ask him about it.
“If you are thinking about retirement, you probably should retire. I’ve never thought about it apart from since winning the Grand National and that’s because people keep asking me about it so I can’t not think about it,” McCoy said.
Throughout the course of his career, McCoy has broken nearly every bone in his body, a risk one must take to pursue a career as a jump jockey.
“At the end of the day I’m a jump jockey so I’m likely to end up in the back of an ambulance from time to time,” said McCoy. “Injury could decide retirement. When I retire I don’t plan to train horses…I don’t really know what I will do. I’ll certainly eat more.”
