On the new documentary Being AP, Tony McCoy says: “I am a has-been. A retired sportsman. I may as well go away and die now.” He’s joking. Just about.
The film, out on Monday night, follows the great jump jockey during the last season of his career, the one in which injury and time finally got the better of him in a way few riders managed.
As a study of fanatical drive, selfishness and single-minded will to win, you will not find a better film about elite sport. “I am addicted to riding horses and to winning,” says AP. “But it wears off and you have to go chasing it again. The adrenalin is in winning.”
Much of the film centres on McCoy’s attempts to recover from or ride through the pain of an October 2014 fall at Worcester where he sustained a shoulder injury, ironically in The Injured Jockey’s Fund 50th Anniversary Maiden Hurdle. It shattered his dream of riding 300 winners in a season and finally convinced him to call it a day while still, more or less, in one piece.
McCoy is extremely watchable on screen
For the film-makers, what was to have been a chronicle of yet another season of McCoy supremacy became a chance to follow an unwilling journey into the good night, a stroke of fortune that they capitalise upon with a sure touch. And boy does McCoy deliver.
“I am not the one that is being weak, it is a part of the body that is weak,” says McCoy of the injury. “I wanted to bang my shoulder off the wall to punish it.” These are not the words of a man looking forward to the pipe and slippers.
“His ability to control and manage pain is unique and bizarre,” says his wife Chanelle, a woman who herself appears to have quite the tolerance for putting up with situations others might find impossible.
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Having to endure a couple of weeks away from riding plunges her husband into the depths of saturnine despair, spiced for the viewer with some dark comedy as the jockey wincingly attempts to play football at a children’s party and is, shall we say, economical with the truth when relaying to his wife what the doctors are telling him about the seriousness of his latest bone-cruncher.
An exchange about a post-retirement future finds AP questioning her, and himself, as to what on earth he might do with his time if he were to retire. “You could pack a few lunches, take out a few bins,” she suggests.
The retired jockey enjoyed a phenomenal career
AP’s withering “Seriously?” is exquisite, as is his reaction to his commercial manager’s suggestion that he might fancy a chance to become “the face of a peanut butter advert campaign”.
He has instead taken up offers of media work – “The press? How depressing”, in his words – as a Channel 4 racing pundit, which feels like a poor substitute for actually doing it.
McCoy famously liked to start the season with a bang, notching up winner after winner while others were easing themselves into the unglamorous summer. “I wanted to sicken my rivals as quickly as possible,” he says. “It has always been all about the numbers.” This season, his future, must look long and wintry right now.
Anyone who has ever known that their fiver would get every last drop of blood and sweat in the hands of AP will wish him happiness and health in retirement. This film suggests peace will be a lot harder to come by.
Being AP premieres on Monday night with a Q&A beamed to 75 cinemas. On general release Nov 27; DVD Nov 30
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