The nine-time winner of the Epsom Derby “George Best of horse racing” passed away at 86
Another bad blow for Queen Elizabeth. Lester Piggott, his favorite jockey, perhaps the best of all time, an iconic figure in the world of horse racing, nine-time winner of the Epsom Derby: known all over the world, thanks to a legendary career spanning nearly 50 years, Lester Piggott has died at the age of 86. He leaves an individual legacy that has marked the sport of horse riding and has even changed the way of riding.
He had defied nature Lester Piggott: endowed with an uncommon height and weight in jockeys, so much so that he was called “The Long Fellow”, he led his first winning horse, The Case, in Haydock in 1948 when he was just 12 years old. With a prodigious and precocious talent, for decades at the top, he has known a longevity that few athletes will be able to equal: 4,493 victories (including 30 national classics), eleven jockey championships conquered.
As for the Derby, at the time the most important race in the world, he won it for the first time in 1954 on the saddle of Never Say Die and the last in 1983 with Teenoso. Strengthened by the long collaboration with the coach Vincent O’Brien, which guaranteed him the most prolific period of his career, he also won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe three times, retiring definitively from racing in 1995, at the age of sixty. His last victory, that of him with Palacegate Jack at Haydock, the same track on which he had made his debut, in 1994, a few weeks before his 59th birthday.
His famous “derriere”
Lester Piggott innovated the way of riding, shortening the stirrups, with his famous “derriere” in the air, in precarious balance; an inimitable style that everyone tried to follow. Taciturn, a lover of long silences but also salacious jokes, he had an intense life: convicted of tax fraud in 1987 to three years in prison, he made a triumphal return to horseback riding after a year spent behind bars: he had just gotten back into the saddle 10 days, when he won the prestigious Breeders’ Cup Mile at the Royal Academy at the age of 54.
But by now he was so famous, adored even by housewives, that his statue adorns nine racetracks in England and just a week ago the one at Ireland’s premier racecourse, The Curragh, was unveiled. At the news of his death, Frankie Dettori, the son of Gianfranco Dettori, the Italian among the most popular jockeys in history, paid tribute to him. “Lester was my hero and a good friend. The impact he has had in racing on all of us is second to none. A legend”.
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