Sean Bowen – who will be crowned British Champion Jump Jockey at Sandown on Saturday for the second successive season – is targeting AP McCoy’s record of 289 winners in a campaign, but believes that the racing calendar produced by the BHA is making life unnecessarily harder for jockeys.
Speaking in a press call ahead of Saturday’s season-closing card where he will ride the Olly Murphy-trained defending champion Resplendent Grey in the bet365 Gold Cup Handicap Chase, Bowen criticised the lack of a proper break.
He said: “The racing calendar is fairly stupid, if I’m being honest. I’ll have two days off [after Sandown] and then I’m off to Punchestown. There’s only two days put together twice all summer until our August break.
“I think the calendar as a whole is not right, it doesn't really work, and two days put together twice all summer is crazy, really.
“You have a day on, day off, day on, day off. It'd be very, very easy to put four or five days together, but they don't really think of that.”
However, despite the lack of a break to recharge his batteries without an enforced loss of income, the 28-year-old is already chomping at the bit to get started on a new campaign in which he believes that passing AP McCoy’s immense total is a realistic goal.
He explained: “I can't wait to get back to zero, to be honest, and start all over again. And we'll obviously try and do what we did this season, if not a little bit more.
“I'll pass a thousand rides this week, so that takes a lot of work in itself, and the miles on the road are a lot. It's hard work but you have to if you want to be champion jockey, and all I dreamt of as a kid was to be champion jockey. Now I'm in the position I am in, I don't want to give it up too easily.
“Obviously, AP's records are incredible, and that isn't going to be easy to do. I think we counted 290-odd days in a season - a winner every day - so I'll have to get a scoot on at the start and, hopefully the balls bounce my way then.
“I don't think it's something that's impossible to do. It'll obviously take a lot of hard work, but if it's something that I can do, I'll definitely be trying.”
Citing AP McCoy and Richard Johnson – whose 2015/16 winning total of 235 Bowen passed last week – as his heroes, Bowen revealed that, despite growing up the son of leading trainers Peter and Karen, his early years were focused on footballs rather than horses.
“I probably didn't pay much attention from a young age till I was about 12, maybe older,” he explained. “I definitely didn't go racing and enjoy it, and I I used to hate coming home and having the racing channel on every day. I wanted the football channel on.
"Nothing used to annoy me more than when I'd come home and the racing channel was on, and I wasn't allowed to change it for a couple months.
“I definitely wasn't into it until I started riding ponies, and then James started riding ponies, and Mickey started riding horses, and I had no one else to play football with!”
Clearly, there is a competitive nature to the relationship of jockeys Sean and James, as well as older brother Mickey who has enjoyed a fine start to his training career, but Sean is adamant that he will continue to cherish the fortunate position that he has worked his way to.
“We're all very, very lucky, and that obviously all started at home. We both love our jobs so much, and are very lucky that we're doing a job that we love, and a lot of people don't get to do that.
“So, yeah, we enjoy going racing every day. And having your brother sat next to you in the weighing room every day, it makes things a little bit easier as well when things have gone right or when things have gone wrong.
“You've always got someone to speak to and we have good fun doing it. We try not to get too high on the good days and too low on the bad days. We talk about racing all day, every day.
“We're as competitive as anyone else, and we both want to win. But we're always happy for each other when they’re the winner.
“And if we're not at the same meeting, we'd be on the phone three or four times a day talking through each other's rides. So, we're each other's jockeys coaches a little bit, too.”
Crediting his own coach Andrew Thornton alongside agent Alain Cawley and a close-knit family that includes wife Harriet, Bowen is also full of praise for the impact that trainer Olly Murphy has had on his career.
“I think I'm on 110 winners for him this season, which is mental, really. I think very few jockeys have ridden over 100 winners for one stable in any season. So, I've done that two years running now, and, obviously, that's a big part of me being champion jockey.
"Without those 110 winners, it'd be a race between myself and Harry Skelton on the 130-winners mark. He's a big, big part of everything I do every day, and he's an incredible trainer, very young still, and the quality in the yard is only rising.
“So, hopefully we're on a upward trajectory and in the next few seasons, we'll have a few good horses to go to war with at Cheltenham and Aintree.”
The subject of Cheltenham Festival winners – a rare omission on Bowen’s CV – is not yet a spiky thorn for the smiling Welshman, and it’s likely that he rides one before it becomes one, while a question about ‘rides that got away’ is swiftly batted away, too (‘Truthfully, no, I don’t think so’).
It’s that sort of focus on the promise of future successes rather than reflecting on the past that must be equal parts ominous and inspiring to some of Bowen’s weighing room colleagues. McCoy doesn’t appear the sort of person who would be anxiously fearing for his record, but even he might be wondering whether the chance of it being surpassed has become more likely following this follow-on season of Bowen dominance.
After all, as Bowen said: “It's a record that definitely can be broken. Any record can be broken, so I'll give it a good go.”
There’s little doubt about that.
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