sport news Cheltenham record-breaker Ruby Walsh has defiant message for critics

Ruby Walsh is sitting in the lobby of a Dublin hotel. A knowing grin is spreading across his face as he listens to questions about 40th birthdays and thoughts of retirement, falls at Thurles, Naas and Punchestown, age and grey hair and broken legs, and leaving Cheltenham in an ambulance.

Ordinary people have a habit of foisting their ordinary expectations and worries, ordinary parameters for ordinary lives, on extraordinary sportsmen such as Walsh. In the last year or so the narrative that he has had to listen to over and over again is that he should turn his back on his brilliant career to escape time's advance.

As he is talking, a stranger's hand appears as if on cue from over my shoulder and reaches out for his. 'Be safe the next couple of weeks,' the fellow says, with a meaningful look, a funereal tone and a firm grip. Walsh thanks him for his concern.

Everyone seems to be fretting about him as Cheltenham approaches. It makes him smile. Everyone wants to hurry him towards the finishing post of his racing life. When the stranger moves on, I conform to type and ask Walsh if he is thinking about his legacy yet. Or what people will say about him when he has retired. 'Grumpy old b*****d,' he says.

He plays up to that persona every so often. He has a laconic way about him, certainly, but if you like dry wit and a man who is not so carried away with his image that he is beyond some nice lines in self-deprecation, you will like Walsh.

He does not feel the need to boast or defend himself. He is content and self-contained. He needs to be prodded about his legacy. He is not filled with the same dread of leaving his sport that gripped his friend AP McCoy. Maybe that is because he has no intention of quitting any time soon.

'I don't think about legacy,' he says. 'When you're gone, you're gone. This is sport. It's not about the past. It's about the future. When you're retired, it's about who's coming next.'

People mean well when they worry about the way he keeps coming back for more despite the broken bones. Walsh is a racing deity, one of the greats of modern sport, not just National Hunt racing. He has ridden 58 winners at the Cheltenham Festival, more than any other jockey. More than McCoy and Richard Johnson combined.

However riding over jumps is not a forgiving pursuit and it has not stopped battering his body. Walsh is a smooth stylist in the saddle, the racing purists' favourite but, like many of his rivals, he has levels of mental and physical resilience that inspire disbelief in normal people.

'However brilliant Ruby is, people have no idea how tough he is,' McCoy told a journalist as he watched Walsh being helped to an ambulance after he broke his leg in a fall at last year's Festival.

Between November 2017 and October 2018, Walsh was only injury-free and available to ride for 39 of 338 days. In that period, he broke his wrist, his right leg, twice, and suffered an injury to his vertebrae. He fell at the last on the favourite twice on the same afternoon at Naas in November and again on the punters' favourite, Faugheen, at Leopardstown in December.

Through it all, Walsh does not let the demons gather. 'I have no self-doubt,' he says. 'Maybe the more people start to doubt me, the more I feel I have to prove. Not self-doubt, just prove them wrong. What's that? Stubbornness?'

He fixes me with a stare and waits for me to answer. I mutter an inconclusive response that does not change his opinion.

'Stubbornness,' says Walsh again. 'It's always about the next ride. You learn from a very young age to look forward. The past can't be changed. It's what's next and how you can affect it.

'Does it get harder as you get older? I don't think so. I'm sure it does for other athletes because you physically start to slow down, but as a jockey it doesn't matter how slow we get because we were never really moving that quickly anyway. We're more like golfers. Does golf get harder?' 

Injuries are a jump jockey's constant companion but, when you are 39, others start to worry about their impact on you on your behalf. They start mentioning the fact that Walsh has four daughters, as if he is somehow being irresponsible by continuing to ride. He has a withering put-down for that. 'They're not the first jockey's kids in the world,' Walsh told the Irish Times. 

He has an answer, too, for those who talk of the sport's dangers. 'Yeah, but it was dangerous when I was 19,' he says. 'It's no more dangerous now I'm 39. I knew the dangers of this game long before I started at it. I knew everything that would come with it. The injuries, the falls, the highs, the lows. I knew what could happen.

'My girls love going racing and watching me ride. I'm sure they hate watching me fall, the same as my wife, Gillian, does, but I can't change that. I'm a jump jockey. There are going to be falls. Hopefully there are going to be winners. There are definitely going to be losers. There are no guarantees you won't fall. You hope not to get hurt but you can't really control that either. That's why I do it. I love it.

'People have been asking me when I was going to retire since I was 30. It has been happening more since I was 35. It's happening more now. It's the same for any sportsman.

'I feel like when you answer a question, you've answered it. Why do people keep asking it again? I've already answered it. How many times? What do they want you to say? I'm obviously not giving them the answer they want but I don't have any other answer.

'When you do something and you like doing something, why would you stop doing it? That's the question I ask myself. I still love competing

' I came back last year for Cheltenham. I had six or seven rides and rode two winners. That's a good strike rate for Cheltenham. The two I rode that should have won, won. The rest of them ran to the best of their ability. So you are thinking: "Why would I stop?"

'It doesn't get any easier recovering from injuries but that hasn't changed. You just get on with it. You analyse why did an injury happen? Well, I know why it happened: the way it fell, I ended up with my leg caught under its neck and it rolled over and half a ton is going to break your leg.

'Move on. Fix it. Let's go. So you know why it happened and then you do the rehab and get back and see how it's going. You go back and ride a winner and you give a few horses rides and you think: "You know what, I haven't lost it yet," and away you go.'