Wonder Man, Wonder Horse

When Gordon Richards broke his first big record, at England's Liverpool track 14 years ago, the news was considered important enough to be telephoned to Buckingham Palace. A mite of a man, son of a Shropshire coal miner, Jockey Richards, by riding 247 winning thoroughbreds in one season, had outdone Fred Archer's 1885 British record.* Richards' own comment hardly seemed up to the occasion. Said he: "It's been a very trying time for me and I'm very glad it's over."

Year after year, Gordon Richards was a big winner, earning up to $120,000 a season. He got extra speed out of a horse by breaking fast from the post and being a master horse-handler all the way to the finish line. Unlike U.S. jockeys, who perch crablike on a horse's withers. Richards sits his horse with longer stirrups. When he uses the whip, which is seldom, he lays it on the horse near the shoulder, as English riders do. Last week, at 43, he won his 3,261st race, and that made him officially the world's alltime champion jockey. But something was missing. He had never won England's biggest race of all--the Derby. Next week he will try again--and his chances never looked better.

Over the Downs. With the dew still wet on the grass. Richards rolled through the English countryside last week in his little Morris runabout (he left his Rolls Royce and his chauffeur at home). Usually, with his 112-lb. body wrapped in Bond Street tweeds, wealthy Jockey Richards looks like a well-dressed ex-fullback, seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Last week he went out in flannel shirt and whipcord breeches. The runabout pulled up before a rambling old brick stable. There Richards mounted a delicately built, undersized brown colt named Tudor Minstrel.

Owner John ("Lucky") Dewar, the whiskey magnate, watched through high-powered binoculars as Richards rode Tudor Minstrel three miles over the downs. London bookies, assuming that Richards will ride him (though he cagily hasn't said so yet), backed Tudor Minstrel's Derby odds down almost to even money. Wonder Horse Tudor Minstrel, a three-year-old, has never been beaten in the six times he has raced, and Richards has ridden him every time.

Spare the Whip. Richards knew his highstrung mount, and, because he did, the Minstrel had never felt his whip, and never would. Says Tudor Minstrel's head stable man: "If you whipped him it would make him nervous. It would be like whipping a good dog; he would wonder why you did it." The last time he raced, in the Two Thousand Guineas at Newmarket a month ago, he pulled away from 14 other prize three-year-olds and won by eight lengths, only a fifth of a second off the mile record (1:37 1/3) that has stood for 36 years.

If England's top jockey can't win with England's most talked-about horse over the uphill and downhill course of mile-and-a-half-long Epsom Downs next week, he will have to blame himself: he has already announced that he considers Tudor Minstrel perhaps the greatest horse he has ever ridden. If he loses, he can still relax on his 300-acre Wiltshire farm, race pigeons, fly airplanes--and ride a winner a day or so later. If that's the way it must be, relaxed, competent Jockey Richards can take it, without too much pain. Says he: "I've got a good bed, a good wife and a good car . . . that's really all a man can ask, isn't it?"

* World record: U.S. Jockey Walter Miller's 388 wins in 1906.

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