As M.Roberts has runners today.From 1992
HE LOOKED like an injured whippet. Small, sick, shrivelled, and so stiff he couldn't pick a newspaper from the floor. Hardly perfect shape for his most crucial week of the season, but Michael Roberts had come a long way for this.
His 38-year journey from a dairy farm in the Cape Province to the top of our jockeys' table and on to the back of last week's sensational winner Lyric Fantasy now has an almost ordered look about it. An inevitability that the most gifted and successful rider in South African history should migrate to tackle and conquer the territory where this whole galloping nonsense began. But the orderliness is only hindsight. Many of the bumps remain.
Principally the unremitting ache of the two squashed vertebrae in Roberts' lower back which had threatened not only the York appointment with Lyric Fantasy but the healthy lead Roberts had established over Pat Eddery in the jockeys' championship. It had been a slow motion, sideways fall over the tail of a squabbly filly on the gallops a fortnight ago this Tuesday. At first it was the neck that seemed locked, but when physiotherapy eased that, the back pain became apparent. 'I promise you,' he says in the neat, nasal tones of the Veldtland, 'that if it wasn't for this title race and for Lyric Fantasy I would have taken three weeks off. But this is the chance of a lifetime.'
So it was in just four days that a set- lipped but rather wary-stepping Roberts returned at Newbury, and only five afternoons later there he was being hoisted on to the back of the pony-sized Lyric Fantasy and by now it was a case of mind over very little matter. When you are carrying an injury the one thing you don't need is to be dieting down to the bone. And when you are wasting, the one thing you must avoid is a dose of flu. Now Roberts had all three problems at once. He looked like the embodiment of the man in the Stanley Holloway monologue, 'My Word You Do Look Queer'.
Although a natural lightweight at only 5ft 1in, he has muscled himself up to almost eight stone to cope with the extra driving he found British horses needed when he took up the challenge here in 1986. But Lyric Fantasy looked to be one of the fastest fillies for at least a generation. She was bidding to become the first of her age and sex ever to land the Nunthorpe Stakes, the most coveted and competitive sprint of the season. As a two-year-old she was set to carry only 7st 7lb. There never has been much flesh on Roberts' leathery, elfin face and now it was hollowed out like a museum exhibit. It's a good job it's the horse who does the running.
But it's a man who does the thinking and that has long been Roberts's strongest suit. Stiff or not he had walked the track before racing and noted a longer, potentially speed-sapping growth of grass ahead of his stands-side draw. Flu-ridden or no, he had studied the form closely enough to be sure that other horses, most notably Pat Eddery's mount Freddie Lloyd, were likely to have the legs of Lyric Fantasy in those speed-blazing opening furlongs. She would have to hurry but her little general must keep his cool. It has been ever thus. Teenagers who only weigh 4st don't get to cope with farm life, let alone become the first South African apprentice to rule the seniors, unless they have brains to match their brawn. 'It's a gift really,' Roberts says with a refreshing lack of modesty. 'I've always felt comfortable around animals. Felt I was able to communicate with them. I think it is very important. You've got to make them trust you. Down at the start I was pulling Lyric Fantasy's ears, talking to her, making her relax.'
He may be a millionaire, have a thousand-acre farm back in Natal and have kicked home horses to the tune of over pounds 1.3m this season but the race is one not just of business but of vocation. His picture now hangs on the walls of the Jockeys' Academy at Summerveld on the rolling hills inland from Durban. Very soon after he arrived there in 1968 they knew they had something special. Seventeen seasons, 11 championships and several sideboards' worth of trophies later, the South African public knew it too. 'I had nothing left to prove,' Roberts said last week. 'I had a lot of support to switch to training but I knew I'd regret it if I didn't have another crack at England.'
Even now, six years in, a 20-winner lead in our jockeys' table, an ever-growing list of major prizes on his escutchion, there is no hiding the hurt of that first abortive slow-horse summer of '78. True, he clocked up 25 winners, but for a man who was topping the century with Bradmanesque regularity at home it was a journeyman's total. And for those who had read the 'greatest living rider' cuttings which had preceded him, there was plenty of chance to gloat. 'It was degrading in a way,' Roberts says. 'I would sit in the weighing room sometimes, boiling over with frustration knowing I could do things better than the others. I felt like going up to people and saying 'Just give me one ride on your horse and I'll show you what I can do'. I think this is the hardest school in the world to break into. But once you are in it's the best.'
The second coming was not an instant sensation, but with the aspirant Alex Stewart and the seasoned Clive Brittain to back him, it was soon clear that this was a pilot who needed watching. 'Forty-two winners in 1986 was quite satisfactory,' Roberts says.
'But it was not until we beat Reference Point (the Derby winner) with Mtoto in the Eclipse the next year that things really took off. That Sunday the phone never stopped. It was like night and day.'
Soon the little figure, hunched slightly upright behind the mane, became a fixture in the big races of the European circuit, and centuries here became as standard as they had been in South Africa. But not a championship. Despite a keenness to oblige which mimicking critics put into the 'teacher's pet' category, Roberts couldn't get closer than third in the jockeys' title. For a man who had been raised as a phenomenon it was still not good enough. The astute and industrious Graham Rock was hired as agent, the ambition was hatched, and Rock, in an investment he will take to his grave as underplayed by a factor of 10, had pounds 100 on Roberts for the title at 100-1.
'We didn't make that fast a start,' Rock says, adopting the first person plural which is the agent's hallmark, 'but things really began to buzz in May. Michael is incredibly thorough and never wavered all through the heavy two meetings-a-day schedule we've had over the last three months. We've had over 750 rides already. That's 200 more than Pat Eddery. With 155 on the board we have a 20-winner cushion but these last three months can still be very difficult because Pat will have many good horses to come.'
Roberts may not have wavered, but six weeks ago the plane carrying him did. One of the wheel struts snapped before take-off after an evening meeting at Chester. Two hedges were holed, a clump of trees were miraculously avoided before a mud-filled ditch claimed them and South Africa's foremost expert had to remember those early swimming lessons on the beaches of the Atlantic. It was a mind-numbing episode by any standards, but was thankfully given a chuckling postscript when the little party, by now clad in hospital pyjamas, stopped at a late-night kebab joint en route to Newmarket and were reported by the owner under suspicion of escaping from an institution.
Roberts relates a story at the end of racing on Friday. The Sandown weighing room is emptying fast. Cauthen has already left. Eddery is pulling on that blue Oxford shirt and tailored slacks that are his uniform. Carson rubs a towel across that buttery, pigeon-chested torso. There's been another winner. The weekend schedule is less hectic, just a single ride at Deauville today, tomorrow off, one ride on Tuesday. He can begin to talk of the injury and the dieting in the past tense. But the riding remains in the present. 'She's always going well even, though the others can look to have her ruffled.'
We're back to Lyric Fantasy on Thursday and the 57 seconds' worth of decision-making under pressure which had been the highlight of his week. 'It's in the middle part of the race that her speed really showed. But I didn't want to use her too soon. When I finally asked her, she did it sweetly.'
The sentences are quick. The words exact, the affection, like the ambition, unashamedly naked. 'I really want to do this,' he said as he went to the car, 'I want to show I can make them run.
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