Racing legend and human enigma: the Lester Piggott I knew

Precious few people ever got to know the real Lester Piggott. But collaborating with him on books over the last two decades gave me a front-row seat from which to observe his enigmatic personality.

He was by turns mischievous and taciturn, witty and surly, funny and grumpy, charming and exasperating. He could drive me up the wall, but I loved him.

The more I thought about our relationship, the more I identified with the lifestyle of the oxpecker, the small bird who perches on the top of a hippopotamus or other large mammal and helps the big beast out in various minor ways, to the advantage of both sides.

Or perhaps I was Boswell to his Dr Johnson – though Lester did not go in for portentous pronouncements, and I doubt whether Dr Johnson ever took a boiled sweet out of his mouth and asked his amanuensis to look after it while he was interviewed at Redcar racecourse.

Fabled almost as much for his social dysfunction as for his riding genius, he had serious difficulties with communication – exacerbated by his deafness and lifelong speech problem – which meant it was impossible to know just where you stood with him.

So when the former BBC racing commentator Sir Peter O’Sullevan, Piggott’s mentor since the early 1950s, told me that Lester had given me the highest compliment in his lexicon and pronounced me “all right”, it felt like our association had reached a fresh level.

That impression was enhanced soon afterwards when he insisted on taking me to lunch at a swish London gaming club. What was all this nonsense about Lester Piggott having a reputation for weapons-grade stinginess? The accounts of his meanness were legion, yet here I was told to eat what I liked and drink what I liked, and hang the cost.

Next morning Sir