The time-honoured Victoria Derby on Saturday was won by an Irishman, John Allen, who mixes riding on the flat with booting home winners over fences and hurdles.
Could Australia's greatest race, the Melbourne Cup, be won in similar fashion on Tuesday by an Englishman who cut his riding teeth in the rough and tumble of British jumps racing – the highest-standard jumping in the world – before concentrating on riding on the flat?
Salute: Jim Crowley wins the Ebor Handicap aboard Muntahaa in August. The pair will team up again in Tuesday’s Melbourne Cup.Credit:PA
Jim Crowley is the rider in question and he will partner the enigmatic Muntahaa at Flemington, a horse saddled by John Gosden, one of the few men in the racing world who can compete at the highest level with the horse whisperer that is Aidan O'Brien.
Crowley is the retained rider worldwide for Sheikh Hamdan Al Maktoum's Shadwell Stud operation and wears the familiar colours of royal blue with white epaulettes, plus a blue-and-white striped cap that distinguish Hamdan's horses from those of his better-known brother, Sheikh Mohammed's Godolphin squad.
It is one of the plum jobs in racing, and the 40-year-old Crowley is a regular visitor to the winner's enclosure in big races all over the world.
The jockey won the English premiership title in 2016, and that paved the way for his appointment by the sheikh, replacing another former title-winning rider in Paul Hanagan.
Riding in the top races produces its own kind of pressures as so much is riding on the result: a colt's value can triple or quadruple if he wins, even by a nose, in a group 1 weight-for-age flat race in Europe, while his value can plummet if he is beaten as a result of jockey error when expected to win.
Crowley has won five group 1 races in Europe since becoming Shadwell's retained rider – four for Sheikh Hamdan – but the Melbourne Cup would be by far the most valuable if he can pull it off on Muntahaa.
The five-year-old has the right form credentials, having won the Ebor Handicap at York, Europe's richest handicap, last time out when Crowley was in the saddle.
This is the race won in recent years by Nakeeta (fifth in last year's Cup), Heartbreak City (second in 2016), All The Good in 2008, who went on to win the Caulfield Cup that year and Purple Moon (2006) who also finished second in the Melbourne Cup a few years later.
Crowley landed in Australia early last week and wasted no time getting acclimatised, landing a double for the David Hayes/Tom Dabernig operation at Bendigo last Wednesday before piloting Oaks hope Qafila into second place at Flemington on Saturday.
This is his first time in Australia, and winning the Cup at his first attempt on the son of Dansili would be a real feather in his cap.
His Ebor victory was Muntahaa's first win in 14 months and Crowley showed his tactical flexibility, leaving the horse to plot a wide course on his own from a very wide stall before blending into the field gradually and going on to win under 61 kilograms from Weekender, his stable companion, who was conceding him 1.5 kilos.
Muntahaa has a decent gate – No. 13 – in the Cup, which will give Crowley plenty of options, not that he was that bothered beforehand.
“He drew the car park in the Ebor and he still won,'' he says with a grin, although he is realistic enough about the grey's widely reported temperament issues, which probably account for his inconsistency.
Definitely talented, a horse of his ability might have won more than the four times he has from his 15 starts. But given his last start was his best success, Crowley hopes temperament won't be an issue.
''Obviously you would have concerns but, at York, when he won the Ebor, it’s not the same as here, but it’s still a fairly big day and he was good that day," he said.
“He’s growing up, he’s getting mentally better as he gets older. Hopefully he can take it all in. He’s a strong traveller. He used to pull hard in his younger days but he’s got better in his last few starts.
''In the Ebor, he was the last horse off the bridle. At the furlong pole, everybody was pushing away and he was just sat there and I pressed the button. He’s quick enough. He’s won over a mile-and-a-half in group races [the group 3 John Porter Stakes over 2400m at Newbury last year].''
However, Muntahaa did disappoint as a three-year-old in the St Leger when he was well backed but finished fourth, with one of Tuesday's Cup rivals, Ventura Storm, ahead of him.
''Things just weren’t going right for him at the time and they gelded him," Crowley said.
“John Gosden is just an unbelievable trainer and he decided to start again with him and take him back to square one. That’s why we saw him win the Ebor the way he did.”
Crowley is less stressed than most top flat jockeys: in part that is because of his maturity, but it's also because he has seen the ups and downs – literally – of jumps racing.
He has experienced racing tragedy and knows that getting too het up about anything is pointless as it could all end in an instant.
Riding over jumps at an English course called Market Rasen in 2005, Crowley was in a race in which a friend of his, 20-year-old jockey Tom Halliday, died when his horse fell and rolled on him.
He was also involved in a race fall in a flat contest at Kempton late in 2016 when his horse and another, ridden by a former champion apprentice Freddie Tylicki, came together and fell.
The pair were put on spinal boards and flown to hospital. Crowley escaped serious injury, but Tylicki was left paralysed and is now in a wheelchair.
In an interview in the Guardian last year, Crowley put the experience into context.
“It’s awful because he’s a friend of mine. You ride together and when you see one of your colleagues hurt like that it puts life in perspective. I see Freddy as often as I can when I go to Newmarket. But in our job you have to be tough. Otherwise, if you thought about that accident too much you wouldn’t be able to ride.”
Being a jumps jockey – in which sphere he rode more than 300 winners – also inured him to the inevitable disappointments that racing brings.
“This would be my second season [with Shadwell] and touch wood, it’s gone well,'' he told Australian journalists in an interview leading up to the Cup.
“I spent the first seven years as a jump jockey. My father-in-law is Guy Harwood, who used to train Dancing Brave [one of the great flat horses of the 20th century in Europe].
“In the summer time he would always tell me to try and sweat and go on the flat and I would think ‘This is crazy.’ But I did it and I haven’t looked back."
Crowley was one of those jockeys whose natural weight suited him for neither branch of the sport exclusively. But like many when they get into their 20s or 30s, their body stabilises and they find they can ride at lower weights.
“I was in limbo. I was probably too heavy for flat and a bit too light for jumps and I managed to get my weight under control. It’s the best decision I ever made.”
So how did he lose the weight?
“I stopped eating. I stopped calling in at McDonald's for breakfast," he said.
“I’ve got it under control, now 55 [kilos] would be around my lightest weight. I don’t try and ride too light all of the time and as I’ve got it off me now, it’s a lot easier.''
Making the transition involved convincing those in the racing world that he was up to the job on the flat, where horses run faster and tactics are more important.
“It took a while to win over the trainers because a lot would say ‘Oh, he’s a jumps jockey'. But I started riding winners, so it’s not an issue any more.
“Guys have come from jumps to the flat since me and they’ve had great success. Ray Cochrane [who won the Caulfield Cup on Taufan's Melody in 1996] started on the jumps … Since me, you’ve got many good lads who have gone to the flat."
Still, winning a jockey's championship, as he did in 2016, would have been far from his mind when he made the switch.
“If you’d had said somebody is going to come from jumping and then go on to become champion rider on the flat, it’s just madness," Crowley said.
“That would be the highlight of my career, that and this job I have for Shadwell, it’s one of the biggest jobs in the world riding for Shadwell.
“You get to ride some great horses and it’s a real privilege. We had an unbelievable year [when he won the jockey’s championship] and everything I sat on, I won on. That set it up for everything.''
His biggest win to date, he says, is the group 1 Juddmonte International at York in 2017 when he scored on Ulysses, who subsequently placed in the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe.
A Melbourne Cup triumph would be right up there though.
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