By Chris McGrath
Few have a better perspective on the mental challenges presented by the lifestyle of a typical jockey–as amplified in Jockey Matters, the series of short films discussed in yesterday's TDN–than Michael Caulfield. For 15 years until 2009, Caulfield was chief executive of the Professional Jockeys' Association and he has since become a leading sports psychologist with the Sporting Edge consultancy. And, in making his own contribution to the film devoted to mental health issues, he declares: “Of all the sports I've come across, this is the one where the competitor–i.e., the jockey–gets beat the most. Racing will test them like no other.”
He speaks advisedly. He remembers sharing a hotel room for Perth races 20 years ago with A.P. McCoy, then in the early days of his unprecedented stranglehold on the jump jockeys' championship. In the middle of the night McCoy sat bolt upright and announced: “I think I'm gone.” He had gone 52 rides without a winner, a rare drought in his insatiable accumulation of over 4,000 career wins. Yet Caulfield also knows men who rode nearly as long as McCoy at the other end of the spectrum, in one case failing to ride a single winner throughout an entire season.
“Even A.P. 'failed' 14,000 times in his career,” Caulfield says. “I see football teams getting down after losing three on the spin. Try losing 80 or 90 or 100 on the spin. This is a sport defined by losing. One of my colleagues at Sporting Edge is working with the England rugby team [unbeaten under their new coach Eddie Jones]. As and when they do lose, the fall will be huge. Jockeys have to learn how to be beaten all the time. Even A.P. would be beaten four in five, and for most of the rest it might be nine out of 10, or more.”
Jockeys often have to endure this dispiriting ratio of success along with routine physical privations, to keep their weight down, as well as a daily schedule that may extend from galloping horses at dawn to riding a second meeting of the day under floodlights–together, in Britain especially, typically entailing several hours on the road. The cumulative erosion of morale, in Caulfield's view, sets riders a unique challenge among sportsmen. But the danger comes when you start to view it as unique to yourself.
“Racing is getting quite grown up now, about understanding the pressures these people are under all the time,” Caulfield says. “In the past people sat alone in the dark or shouted at the wife. Graham Lee [in speaking out about his issues with depression] has been a shining example. The next time he went to the races 99 out of 100 people came up to him and either said: 'Well done' or 'Thank you.'”
Recently Caulfield attended a dinner of the Professional Cricketers' Association and was struck by its members' embrace of Marcus Trescothick, the prolific batsman whose public struggles in the prime of his international career did much to raise awareness of the human realities lurking behind the curtain of “stress.”
“He got a three-minute ovation,” Caulfield recalls. “Not one second of which was for all the runs he has scored. It was all because he has done so much to show how to handle setbacks, how to own up that you are struggling–and how to do something about it.”
During their time working for Middlesbrough Football Club, Caulfield enabled the club manager Gareth Southgate–recently appointed head coach to the England national team–to spend a day in the Sussex County Cricket Club pavilion, watching the batsmen waiting their turn to bat. Southgate came away shaking his head. “I couldn't have done that,” he said. “Too much thinking time.”
And much the same is true of jockeys, either behind the wheel of a car or sitting under a dressing room peg between rides that may be hours apart. The difference, however, is a positive one.
“I took another football coach into the jockeys' room at Huntingdon in the early 1990s,” Caulfield remembers. “And he couldn't believe the camaraderie. 'If only I could get my team as cohesive as this group,' he said. 'And they're all trying to beat each other!' It's the only sport where you can have an amateur rider whose family owns half of Warwickshire getting changed next to–and getting on famously with–Padraig who never really went to school.”
Hence Caulfield's pride in his role as a trustee of the Injured Jockeys' Fund. It is sometimes in their lowest periods that jockeys can discover the true depth of the fellowship that quietly sustains their hectic lives. And Caulfield observes that the rehabilitation centres at the main British training centres– John Oaksey House in Lambourn, Jack Berry House in Malton and soon Peter O'Sullevan House in Newmarket–are priceless not only because of exemplary standards of treatment but also for the timely reinforcement, just when a jockey can feel most alone, of his sense of community.
For however unsparing the year-round regime, its interruption can cause even deeper problems than all its accumulated stresses. Caulfield emphasises the wild disparities between the highs and lows of a jockey's life–highs which, as already stated, can often be divided by cruel intervals of time. “The neuroscience tells us that the rush from winning is dangerously good,” he says. “Really. Dangerously good. That's why a lot of them suffer so much when they don't have that thrill, when it's taken away. It's more mood-affecting than some things that are illegal. And, of course, the worst of all is when you lose it because you can't do it anymore.”
He compares the sudden abyss, when the rush is taken away, to that experienced by a sacked football manager. From taking 50 calls a day, from scouts and agents and chairmen and publicists and media, you sit overnight next to a silent phone. “You go from 100 miles an hour to hitting a wall,” Caulfield says.
He is unsurprised that the brotherhood he knows so well should have pulled together in order to produce the Jockey Matters series. “I do think these films are outstanding,” he says. “To have these top jockeys talking this way about these matters, it's an incredible achievement. Young riders coming into the game who want to be the next Moore, McCoy or Murtagh, they can see that talking about this kind of thing is not soppy, it's not about standing in circles hugging each other. And they need to understand that because this sport can be the hardest of all.”
As such, the one thing jockeys need to be able to do is ask for help. In his own contribution to the series, Caulfield elaborated the paradox that the strongest man is the one who is prepared to seek assistance. “The world's best coach I've come across, in sport, told me recently that the greatest strength you can have– as a performer, or as a human being–is to ask for help,” he says. “I think in the past we saw it as a weakness, a vulnerability. The fact that we might not be good enough, hard enough, brave enough. That is complete nonsense. [Asking for help] is the best and most important thing you will ever do–more important than any horse you will ever ride.”
Again, Caulfield elaborates the point with reference to other sports. Recently he visited a football club. When he proposed a Q&A session with the squad, he was warned that the players would prove surly and disaffected. His opening gambit was: “I'm told none of you will ask me a question.” Silence. Eventually a reluctant hand. What, he was asked, sets apart the guys who make it from those that don't? “They ask questions!” replied Caulfield. “You've got half a chance, because you did ask a question. But how do the rest of you think you can end up playing for Real Madrid if you don't ask questions?”
Andy Murray, he says, is the consummate example: a man who has asked for help every step of the way. When he found himself losing too many five-setters, Caulfield says that Murray resolved to find someone to make him fitter. When he found himself squandering emotional energy on anger, likewise, he sought help from a psychological expert. And so on. “And A.P. McCoy has always been exactly the same,” Caulfield adds.
Leighton Aspell, winner of consecutive Grand Nationals after coming back from retirement, warns in the film that when you do ask for help, you may not always hear quite what you want to hear. But that is where the courage comes in–the courage to know that long-term damage can sometimes only be averted by painfully pulling your head from the sand. As [Johnny] Murtagh says, in so movingly reviewing his battle with the bottle: “I didn't want to wake up when I was 50 and say: 'Oh, I could have done this, I should have done that.' I wanted to give myself my best shot. If I wasn't good enough, I wanted to be lying in bed at night saying: 'You know what, Johnny? You did a great job today, you did the best you could'.”
Click here for the Jockey Matters video series.
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