• Hi Guest Just in case you were not aware I wanted to highlight that you can now get a free 7 day trial of Horseracebase here.
    We have a lot of members who are existing users of Horseracebase so help is always available if needed, as well as dedicated section of the fourm here.
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    AR

Lester Piggott

RIP. He was 86 born in 1935 a few months older than myself (and that rather bothers me). He rode his first race at the age of 12 in 1948 on a horse named The Chase at Haydock Park. I didn't get interested in racing until 1951 when i was 15 years old and I used to follow Lester and once he had 27 losers on the trot and when I'm losing that gives me some comfort.
 
Bloomburg article - Piggott was penalized more than once for his methods on the track, too. In one race, he took a whip from a fellow jockey when his own went flying, while at another, he pushed away the head of a competitor with his hand.

“When I was young, I didn’t want to get beaten and go back with excuses,” Piggott told the Observer newspaper in 2001. “It was every man for himself. Yes, I did cut up one or two, and them me, but you can’t do things, do your best to win all the time and be careful all the time.”

“An unbelievable man,” former jockey Graham Bradley has said of Piggott. “He could even think like a horse.”
 
I remember reading a biography of Ger Mckenna, probably the greatest Irish Greyhound trainer of all time. He won 3 Irish Greyhound Derby's and 2 English Greyhound Derby's. There was a passage in the book where he spoke of one of the greatest days in his life, when he was introduced to Lester Piggot at the Curragh. Lester was obviously his hero, as he was for thousands of racing fans.
 
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