John Ingles reviews Brian Hughes' season after the jockey rode his 200th winner days before being crowned champion for the second time.
Champions in most sports get to perform on the greatest stages and compete for the biggest prizes, often travelling the world to do so. But a day trip to Jersey in July – where he rode a four-timer, before a treble back on more familiar territory at Perth two days later – was about as exotic as it got for northern-based Brian Hughes who will be crowned champion jump jockey for the second time on Saturday days after riding his 200th winner of the season back at Perth on Wednesday.
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When Hughes won the title for the first time in the abbreviated 2019/20 season, he became the first jockey based in the north to be champion over jumps since Jonjo O’Neill won the second of his two titles 40 years earlier. Ron Barry and Tommy Stack were other champions based in the north in an era when jumping yards in that part of the country were often more than a match for their southern counterparts. The highlight of O’Neill’s championship-winning season in 1979/80, for example, came when he won the Champion Hurdle for the first time on the Peter Easterby-trained Sea Pigeon. A year earlier, the same stable had provided him with his first Gold Cup winner, Alverton.
Contrast that with the north’s current champion-elect who had a book of six rides at Sedgefield on Champion Hurdle day, riding a double for Donald McCain. Later in the week, Hughes had a couple of rides at Hexham on the Thursday and at Fakenham on Gold Cup day. Similarly, when the eyes of the racing world, and many from outside it, were on Aintree, on Grand National day Hughes was in action at Bangor instead, picking up another winner supplied by McCain. Hughes did have five rides for McCain at Aintree earlier at the meeting but three of those were pulled up and only one of them started at shorter than 33/1.
Hughes is the only jockey whose mounts this season have amassed more than a million pounds in win prize money but that’s despite not having ridden the winner of a major prize all season. His only graded winner of the campaign was Minella Drama – for McCain again - in the Grade 2 Altcar Novices’ Chase at Haydock in January. Instead, Hughes won his championship by consistently churning out winners day-in day-out at mostly minor meetings in the north and was reward for being the hardest-working jockey of the season.
Hughes has taken well over 900 rides this season, which is over than 200 more than Sam Twiston-Davies and over 400 more than Harry Skelton, Hughes’s remote pursuers in the championship and the only other jockeys to have ridden more than a hundred winners this season. It was Skelton who took Hughes’s title in 2020/21 by a margin of just ten after Hughes had led for much of the campaign. In the covid-hit season of 2019/20, Hughes ended the four-year reign of Richard Johnson whose title defence was hampered by breaking his arm. Before winning his first title, Hughes had finished runner-up to Johnson in both 2016/17 and 2017/18.
Hughes will take his second title by the widest margin since Johnson became champion for the first time in 2015/16 when he finished more than a hundred winners clear with a mammoth total of 235. Hughes becomes the fourth champion jockey to reach 200 winners in a season after Peter Scudamore, Tony McCoy (who achieved the feat nine times) and Johnson who reached 200 for a second time in 2018/19. Scudamore, incidentally, with a total of 221 in 1988/89, smashed the existing record of 149 Jonjo O’Neill had set when becoming champion for the first time in 1977/78.
Hughes achieved his double century when Dreams of Home won the two-mile handicap chase at Perth on Wednesday and coincidentally it was the same horse who had given him his hundredth winner of the season at Ayr in November, a victory which already put him 41 clear of closest rival Twiston-Davies.
A treble at Ayr in early-May just days after the current season began got Hughes off to a flying start and he had 15 winners on the board by the end of the month. But it was October which was Hughes’s most successful month when clocking up 24 winners, beginning with a treble at Hexham and ending with a 285-1 five-timer from seven rides at Musselburgh on October 30th.
Four of those Musselburgh winners were for Dreams of Home's trainer McCain whose own prolific success during the season, sending out more winners than any other trainer for the first time since 2013/14, was instrumental in Hughes becoming champion again. McCain supplied around half of Hughes’s winners, a partnership which had an excellent 29% success rate, while Nicky Richards (16) and, more surprisingly given his Oxfordshire base, Charlie Longsdon (11) were the other yards for whom Hughes rode the most winners. As well as riding several winners for Longsdon in the north, Hughes rode a double for the yard at Warwick in September and the stable also provided him with one of those winners in Jersey. In total, Hughes rode winners for 36 different trainers during the season.
Having made few headlines during the rest of the season, Hughes will be the deserved centre of attention for once at Sandown on Saturday when he’ll be presented with the trophy for champion jockey in front of a race-day crowd. That was something he was denied two years ago when his title was only made official three weeks after the final race of the season had been run.
Among the rides booked for Hughes at Sandown on Saturday are Nuts Well for Ann Hamilton in the Oaksey Chase, having won last month’s Premier Chase at Kelso on the same horse, and the Longsdon-trained Beyond The Clouds in the concluding handicap hurdle on whom he won three races earlier in the season.
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