Jamie Spencer: End of an Era

He’s coming to Doncaster on Saturday, though in many respects his last ride on British turf was the more fitting farewell. For starters, it came on the straight track at Ascot, a Royal runway that’s arguably the most challenging of all the various assault courses jockeys have to negotiate, one at which he who dares often wins. To dare takes flair, and he literally won more than his fair share, 14 times in straight-track races at the Royal Meeting, when random expectation would be half that.

The copyright, nearly-right ride was as much proof of identity as his passport. Dropping Gabrial’s Kaka out and switching him off as only he managed through the season, the pair made their move in the right place at the right time, stemming from the rider’s innate sense of pace and positioning, and they powered through to finish first…on the stand side, frustrating for him that the far rail was the golden highway.

Frustration amid brilliance, epitomised by the Gabrial’s Kaka ride, might be the epitaph on the headstone of Jamie Spencer’s career as a jockey. The brilliance is easily demonstrated, as, it has to be said, is the frustration; the frustration that comes with those times when Spencer has played his own game, a dangerous game, and lost. But his legacy is the very fact he played his own game, and in effect changed the whole game.

The sort of high-risk strategy that, rightly or wrongly, will forever be associated with Jamie Spencer, because he believed in it if not pioneered it, is now part of the general jockey playbook, even taking his name like the Katchev or the Fosbury Flop, only it’s ‘classic Spencer’ when it comes off and ‘typical Spencer’ when it doesn’t; but it is characteristically ‘the Spencer’. For example, the best Spencer ride all year was the one Ryan Moore gave The Grey Gatsby when preying on Australia in the Irish Champion Stakes.

Spencer has been maligned and praised in equal measure for doing things against the norm, but the norm, by definition, is the mediocre. Win or lose, he challenged some existing preconceptions about effective race-riding, especially in respect of pace, the final frontier. The common belief is that Spencer will miss racing, to the point of known return, but the more consequential question is will racing miss him?         

He has his new advisory role in the Qatar Racing team, of course, where his creative thinking will have a value, but Spencer’s USP is the artistry of executing a plan as much as devising it, making for racetrack moments of pure theatre, sometimes the show-stopper, sometimes the pantomime villain, but always engaging and entertaining; and in racing’s manifesto there are no bigger buzzwords right now than engagement and entertainment. Put it like that, and the sport maybe will lose some of its already-meagre ration of magic dust when Spencer leaves the main stage.   

I’ve only met Jamie Spencer once, as part of the purposely-pompous-sounding Ipso Facto Syndicate comprising a Timeform-based rabble that included his then agent Andrew Sheret, hence why we could get him on a cold January day at Great Leighs. The only anxiety about Joe Jo Star, the odds-on favourite, was the lack of pace, with no front-runners in a field of just seven. It wasn’t news to Spencer, ever the thinker and planner: "Don’t worry, I’ve had a word with Ashley Morgan and he’s going to make it." "But Ruwain doesn’t normally-" [mischievous half-grin that itself is ©Spencer] "Ashley will be leading." We still don’t know to what extent Spencer had leaned on the young 7-lb claimer beforehand.

Ruwain made all, by the way.

Regards the reasons for his premature retirement, only he knows, and family is clearly the highest priority, but, increasingly so, it’s a dog eat dog world amongst jockeys, more about supply than demand, and the concentration of power is shrinking, almost the end of the footloose and fancy freelancing era, so that it’s now a daunting environment for those supplanted by the ageist natural order, as Spencer finds himself.

All bar one of the 72 Group 1 events in Britain, Ireland and France have been run this year, spread between only 27 jockeys. Virtually a third of Europe’s prestige races have been shared by just three superpowered riders: James Doyle (7) has the Juddmonte juggernaut, Joseph O’Brien (7) has the Ballydoyle bandwagon, and Ryan Moore (9) has the patronage of whichever planet he’s come from.

Each of the other seven jockeys who’ve ridden three or more European Group 1 winners in 2014 has either a big yard or bigger owner behind them, including Hughes (4), Dettori (3), Hanagan (3), Buick (3) and Spencer’s replacement Andrea Atzeni (4).

Spencer wouldn't be on the scrapheap, but he'd be further down that golden mountain for which the sponsored trams to the top are fewer and fuller. Although the beauty of racing is that every now and then a mould-breaker like Toast of New York comes along and ploughs a path to the peak. In the aftermath of their agonising defeat in the Breeders' Cup Classic, there was a melancholy tone to Spencer's reaction, almost as if reflecting on the situation and not just the moment: 'Some things are meant to be and some things aren't.'

The ride that helped Toast of New York go so close was a thoughtful, pro-active one that maximised the horse's chance, Spencer in essence if not in trademark style. He has won 33 Group 1 races around the world, which only an elite jockey can do, but to judge him on facts and figures alone is to underestimate his contribution to the craft of race-riding.

At times we must speak of one that rode not wisely but too well, to paraphrase Shakespeare, and the semi-stubborn belief in his methods meant some races got away, but the saying goes that the man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything, and only the great jockeys can do the reverse of winning races they shouldn't, something Spencer has achieved with regularity.

There may well be a few encores between now and the year's end, but Doncaster on Saturday - a day where he memorably forced a dead-heat with Seb Sanders in the title race back in 2007 - brings the main curtain down on the Spencer métier. It feels like a Wetherby of a career: slightly shorter than it should be. In that respect, there's a certain aptness to the name of his last ride on British turf. Dashing Star.