End Of An Era As Fallon Retires

If there is something poignantly unsurprising about his exit from the stage, slipping away into the shadows just as he seemed to be mastering a new script, then the least Kieren Fallon deserves is that we remember the way he once presented himself so boldly in the starkest of spotlights. For he now requires all the fortitude and indomitability we so admired, in his pomp, to meet far graver challenges beyond the sight of all, and the comprehension of most. From the outside, his recent vacillations may have suggested mere caprice: the fresh starts, first in the United States and then in Ireland; the enthusiastic talk again dissolving into disillusion and disappearance. It seemed as though the lightest of gusts could ease the pegs of his personality from their mooring, leaving his reputation flapping wildly whichever way the wind might blow. But the announcement of his retirement reproved any such condescension.

Those who had presumed Fallon simply to be in denial about the erosion of his professional gifts, at 51, on Monday learned that he has instead been teetering over the abyss of what the Turf Club chief medical officer now diagnoses as “severe depression” for around three years. Albeit the horribly corrosive properties of this condition are nowadays recognised far more widely than was once the case, the fact remains all the available treatments must still be harnessed to such inner resources as he can summon for what must feel the most solitary and private of battles. It can only be a comfort, then, to remember those times when Fallon seemed almost a force of nature, a monument to human strength, implacably imposing his will on the chaotic variety of factors that determine the outcome of a horse race.

Seldom in the modern era has any jockey brought such a communicable air of invincibility to his work. As a late starter, Fallon never achieved a streamlined or elegant style. But you could always pick him out, forcing a quart of effort into the pint pot of his mount's capacity, his reins loose, his back straight, his head bobbing. The whip served only as the bass drum, brought into play late on to keep the rhythm going, to keep his mount from losing the thread, the hectic forward pulse instead vested in knees and elbows. You can picture Fallon raising it now, that slow, deliberate wind-up, one-two-three, the momentary bracing of his convulsed physique, and four! And then straight back into the larger, longer flow of inexorable commitment.

Between 1997 and 2003 there were six British championships, the only hiatus caused by a serious injury at Royal Ascot in 2000. His three Derby winners, among 16 British Classics altogether, included a masterpiece on Kris Kin (Kris S) in 2003. Run that race a dozen times and give him a dozen different jockeys, and few believe that the result would ever have been the same. By the time John Magnier and his partners at Coolmore were seeking a new rider, in 2005, Fallon so bestrode the weighing room that they felt able to disregard even the fact that he had been arrested the previous September by police investigating race-fixing allegations.

Coolmore's fidelity to Fallon, when he was among several men eventually charged with corruption in 2006, was in an edifying contrast with the British racing authorities. In a flagrant departure from the axiom that a man should be treated as innocent until proven guilty, they suspended his licence and so condemned him to a horribly ambiguous existence–still feted in Ireland or France, yet a pariah in Britain. If this purgatory undoubtedly contributed to his mystique, it also compounded the fragility of temperament first disclosed when Fallon, as an evolving talent on the northern circuit, had been banned for six months for hauling a rival jockey from his saddle as they pulled up. Other nadirs included an alcohol clinic and two suspensions for failed drug tests in France, the second following almost immediately after the collapse of his trial at the Old Bailey.

Those more familiar than the police investigators with the day-to-day intricacies of racing could tell from the moment the gates opened that the prosecution case–above all those elements relating to the most celebrated defendant–was based on a series of excitable misapprehensions. Sure enough, the judge ordered the jury to dismiss the charges even before the defence began its response. Having supported Fallon through his long ordeal, however, his employers understandably ran out of patience after the second drugs offence resulted in an 18-month worldwide ban.

That incorrigibility, that self-destructive streak, has always lent Fallon some edge of danger. Craggy and pale and brooding, he is capable of receiving questions with a long stare and an inscrutable silence–only to break into a charming grin, and some teasing rejoinder. On the whole, he has only ever been a menace to himself, to the extent that he has long since seemed to have used up a ninth life. But in his happiest periods, when unfettered by doubt or dejection, he could certainly intimidate even the most accomplished of rivals as they sought to stifle the ferocious expression of something akin to genius. That does not seem too strong a word, certainly, for his ride on Dylan Thomas (Ire) (Danehill) in the 2007 G1 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. How icily he pulled that race out of the fire, on the very eve of his trial at the Old Bailey. But that told you all you needed to know, really; Fallon was always at his strongest, at his most serene, on horseback; never felt so liberated from his cares as when in that rarefied “zone” of instinct and adrenaline.

He will no longer have that succour. But there remain many other ways he can profit from his affinity with horses, from a judgement perhaps more reliable on the gallops than has sometimes been the case in getting a human measure of himself or others. He adores the daily cycles of a racing yard, and used to talk whimsically of training himself someday. The notorious stresses of the profession are perhaps more than he could sensibly embrace, but there is no reason why a young man like Michael O'Callaghan should cease to profit from his experience and expertise.

As Fallon has said himself, he “came from nowhere”. He did not sit on a horse until he was 18. But let us hope he knows himself to have become far too cherished since, whatever his occasional flaws, for the Turf community to allow him to slide back into oblivion now.