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17 Sep 26
20:49
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07 May 10
Can someone paste the above article from the Post on here please, interested to hear how his life turned out the way it did.
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You do not necessarily expect someone who once rode to victory in the Cheltenham Gold Cup and then won some of jumping's biggest prizes as a trainer to have also enjoyed success at Brighton. You certainly do not expect that same someone to be working as a stalls handler and waiting to load the runners in a Brighton sprint handicap.
He might have one of the most famous surnames in racing, but Mark Pitman is very much doing things his own way, including on a sunny afternoon at the seaside track.
Hard as it might be to believe, 35 years have passed since he captured the Gold Cup on Garrison Savannah, one of the many mighty chasers trained by his legendary trailblazing mother Jenny Pitman. Working as a pundit for the BBC that afternoon was his father Richard Pitman, who was once again on duty for the corporation a month later at Aintree, where the then 24-year-old jockey and Garrison Savannah were caught in the final strides of the Grand National, just as Pitman snr had been on Crisp in 1973.
The misery that came from battling his own body to make weight ensured Mark Pitman's riding career was relatively short. Thereafter, however, it was followed by a highly productive nine-year stint training stars such as Hennessy Cognac Gold Cup hero Ever Blessed and the prodigiously talented Monsignor, who followed up his Champion Bumper triumph with a tour-de-force performance in the following season's Royal & SunAlliance Novices' Hurdle.
Although only six at the time, Monsignor never ran again. Pitman continued training for a number of years before embarking on a new life in Spain. There was another short period training for Monsignor's owner Malcolm Denmark but, when his boss sold Weathercock House, the Lambourn yard inextricably associated with the Pitman family, the now twice former trainer needed something else to do.
Former Cheltenham Gold Cup winning jockey Mark Pitman is now a RaceTech employee
Credit: Edward Whitaker (racingpost.com/photos)
"Back in my twenties I got an HGV licence, so I used that and fell into doing a bit of agency work," he says from the driver's seat of a RaceTech van. "I then got a job with Harrods and spent six and a half years driving for them. For a lot of that time I enjoyed it, but I ended up doing two runs a day from their Thatcham distribution centre to the store in London and the traffic was horrendous, so that came to an end.
"I didn't know what I would do after that, but then in January this year someone told me RaceTech was advertising for Class 1 drivers. I applied and got the job."
The job includes much more than simply driving sets of starting stalls in between racecourses. Pitman also works as a stalls handler, which is why he is now driving forwards and backwards to get a bay of stalls into the correct position at Brighton's five-and-a-half-furlong start.
"Although we're doing the same job every day, no two days are the same," he says.
"The job has been a real eye-opener. Until you're right in among things down at the stalls, you have no idea what it's like. You don't appreciate what can go wrong, and how quickly it can go wrong.
"We might have ten or 15 minutes chatting between races, but come game time it's like flicking a switch. Everybody is on it and everybody is looking out for everybody else because what we're doing is intrinsically very dangerous."
Mark Pitman worked for Harrods before beginning his role with RaceTech
Credit: Edward Whitaker (racingpost.com/photos)
Proof of that came on the Saturday of Royal Ascot, where Pitman had been interviewed for ITV by his old weighing-room colleague Luke Harvey just over an hour earlier.
"Myself and Graham Campbell, who is also in his first year, jogged over to load a French horse who didn't seem overly happy to be there," says Pitman.
"As soon as we got behind him and put a quoit on him, he lashed out backwards twice. As his foot came down the second time, he chopped the back of my leg. Fortunately, I was wearing good safety boots, but he still sent me flying left, while Graham went flying right. We both ended up rolling around the ground like beached turtles."
It was a reminder of what can go wrong and why the team of stalls handlers is so greatly valued.
"Ninety-nine per cent of the time the job is easy," says Pitman. "You might need to give the occasional horse a bit of a cuddle, but everything basically goes well. The problems come that one per cent of the time when you might have a horse who wants to kick your ears off, one who is rearing up with his legs on the metalwork, or one who wants to dive under the stalls.
"I remember during my interview I was told they only employ experienced racing people because when it kicks off, it really can kick off. Things can go wrong in a fraction of a second – but when things do go wrong everyone stays calm and deals with the situation."
Mark Pitman (right) helps to load a horse at Brighton
Credit: Edward Whitaker (racingpost.com/photos)
That sense of calm is obvious as the six runners in Brighton's opening contest begin to assemble behind the gates. Saffie Osborne complains of being smacked in the face by her mount Em Four, while Billy Loughnane asks if the stalls handlers are all well. The most famous of those handlers puts a hood on Em Four and then places a hand lightly on the horse's left flank. He enters the stalls without a murmur, behaving every bit as well as Pitman's next customer, the Ray Dawson-ridden Kento. "Come on, my little bubba," says Pitman. His little bubba then enters the stalls and comes out of them at speed. His race has just started. For Pitman and his colleagues, the race is over.
Also now behind Pitman, who turned 60 in August, is his time as a high-profile and high-achieving jockey and trainer.
"It almost feels as though all that happened to a different person," he says. "I look back to when I was a jockey and trainer and I know that I've changed. I think I'm now a different person, and hopefully a better person, too.
"When you're riding or training, it's all-consuming. The job is your world and you become so wrapped up in it. My opinion is that as a jockey, you're also quite selfish – and I think you have to be. I took the jockey's mindset into training. I was under the misconception that the harder I worked, the more successful I would be. That mindset isn't necessarily bad, but there has to be some balance."
Harder work than anything during his time as a jockey was maintaining a weight that allowed him to ride the likes of Garrison Savannah, Royal Athlete and Toby Tobias.
Garrison Savannah and Mark Pitman return in triumph after winning the 1991 Gold Cup
"For me, the wasting was brutal," he says. "I had to sweat every single day. I used to dehydrate myself to the point of madness. One of the reasons I packed up at such a young age was I reached the stage where just the thought of getting in the sauna made me physically ill. I would feel like I was going to puke.
"It was so hard that I couldn't have done the job if I hadn't been riding good horses. On the big days, a lot of it for me was mental. I would wake up in the morning and immediately start pumping myself up and getting into the zone. By the time the race came along, I would have done anything to win. I would have walked through fire."
The wasting not only affected his mind. It also had an impact on his body.
"If I wasn't doing light and I had a fall, it didn't seem too bad," he says. "If I was dehydrated and right down at my rock-bottom weight when I had a fall, you could tell the difference. It didn't half hurt."
Also painful was the treatment that followed injuries, particularly physiotherapy sessions with John Skull.
"I got to the stage towards the end of my career when I would go in for a treatment and start sweating because I knew what was coming," says Pitman. "I would be flat on my back with my head in his hands and then John would twist it. At other times he would virtually fold me in half, and then there would be a crunch."
After too much sweating, twisting and crunching, Pitman began assisting his mother, eventually taking control at Weathercock House following her retirement in 1999. Before that, though, he had left the family fold.
Monsignor storms to victory at the 2000 Cheltenham Festival
Credit: John Grossick (racingpost.com/photos)
"People think I inherited so much when I began training," he says. "The truth is I started with five horses. I had two slow ones, two lame ones and one mad one.
"I look back on the things we did right and wrong when I was training, and I think we did a lot right. The main thing I did wrong was I wasn't good at delegating. I wanted to see all the work, I wanted to go racing every day and I wanted to feel all the legs every night. I worked with some good people and I should have leaned on them more.
"I enjoyed training, but I tortured myself when things didn't go well. I used to beat myself up pretty badly. I also used to struggle with losing horses – and there was one straw that broke the camel's back."
Pitman then tells the story of Fireball Macnamara, a Cheltenham Grade 2 winner who ran as a nine-year-old in a Newton Abbot handicap hurdle in June 2005.
"He had been absolutely flying at home and it looked like he was going to hose up in the race when he sustained a fracture," he says.
"When the racecourse vet showed me the x-ray, we both knew it was obvious he couldn't be saved. I then remember looking at the horse and him looking at me. It was as though he was trying to say, 'Help me'. When I looked at his face, I could see into his soul. He was asking me to help him, but I knew it was curtains. I then held him when they put him down.
"I haven't thought about this for a long time and it's making me quite emotional. I'm not actually an emotional person because in this sport I think you have to batten down your emotions. That's your coping mechanism when things go wrong. That horse looking at me hit me hard, though. Without a shadow of a doubt it influenced my decision to stop training. It cut me deep."
Mark Pitman, pictured during his first stint as a trainer in 2003
Credit: Edward Whitaker (racingpost.com/photos)
Earlier in his career he had been hit hard by the death of a promising young bumper horse Devil's Advocate, who worked superbly in preparation for his planned outing at the Grand National festival but was then found to have a spiral fracture.
"Things like that are very hard to take," says Pitman, who was also scarred by the fact Monsignor was never able to race after his dazzling second victory at the Cheltenham Festival.
"Not being able to get him back on a racecourse broke my heart," he says. "I would have loved to have seen him over a fence because he was electric when we schooled him. He was an incredible horse with such a massive engine."
The five runners in Brighton's second race lack Monsignor's natural ability. They are, however, extremely well behaved and enter the stalls without the handlers having to break sweat. Their compliance makes Pitman's job look almost easy. The truth, however, is there are ups and downs, much as with one of his previous roles.
"Over the last five or six years I can think of three opportunities I've had to go back into training with three good backers," he says. "I talked to some current trainers and they all told me not to do it. They said the game has changed."
Mark Pitman: "It's never really bothered me what people think"
Credit: Edward Whitaker (racingpost.com/photos)
For Pitman, change has become the norm, yet few have seen as much change as the man who surprised many by entering a profession not hitherto associated with former top jockeys and trainers.
"It's never really bothered me what people think," he says. "What does it matter? I'm loving the job, it pays a good wage and it's an important job, too. It's nice being part of a team, and the job is also a lot better than driving to London twice a day in an 18-ton truck.
"I think as you get older you also start to realise that a lot of material stuff doesn't matter. What really matters is your health. Without your health you've got nothing. I've started to see people I knew and worked with become ill and die. I have to thank my lucky stars that as far as I know I'm relatively fit and healthy. You have to embrace that because time goes so quick."
As Pitman could attest on this sunny afternoon by the sea, it goes even quicker when you're having fun. If the fun is had while doing a vital job that gives you a sense of pride and identity, so much the better.
"I always wanted to be seen as Mark Pitman," he says. "I spent a lot of time being introduced as, 'Mark Pitman, son of Richard' or 'Mark Pitman, son of Jenny'. I wanted to be introduced just as me. I wanted to stand on my own two feet."
To his great credit, that is exactly what Mark Pitman is doing now.
He might have one of the most famous surnames in racing, but Mark Pitman is very much doing things his own way, including on a sunny afternoon at the seaside track.
Hard as it might be to believe, 35 years have passed since he captured the Gold Cup on Garrison Savannah, one of the many mighty chasers trained by his legendary trailblazing mother Jenny Pitman. Working as a pundit for the BBC that afternoon was his father Richard Pitman, who was once again on duty for the corporation a month later at Aintree, where the then 24-year-old jockey and Garrison Savannah were caught in the final strides of the Grand National, just as Pitman snr had been on Crisp in 1973.
The misery that came from battling his own body to make weight ensured Mark Pitman's riding career was relatively short. Thereafter, however, it was followed by a highly productive nine-year stint training stars such as Hennessy Cognac Gold Cup hero Ever Blessed and the prodigiously talented Monsignor, who followed up his Champion Bumper triumph with a tour-de-force performance in the following season's Royal & SunAlliance Novices' Hurdle.
Although only six at the time, Monsignor never ran again. Pitman continued training for a number of years before embarking on a new life in Spain. There was another short period training for Monsignor's owner Malcolm Denmark but, when his boss sold Weathercock House, the Lambourn yard inextricably associated with the Pitman family, the now twice former trainer needed something else to do.
Former Cheltenham Gold Cup winning jockey Mark Pitman is now a RaceTech employee
Credit: Edward Whitaker (racingpost.com/photos)
"Back in my twenties I got an HGV licence, so I used that and fell into doing a bit of agency work," he says from the driver's seat of a RaceTech van. "I then got a job with Harrods and spent six and a half years driving for them. For a lot of that time I enjoyed it, but I ended up doing two runs a day from their Thatcham distribution centre to the store in London and the traffic was horrendous, so that came to an end.
"I didn't know what I would do after that, but then in January this year someone told me RaceTech was advertising for Class 1 drivers. I applied and got the job."
The job includes much more than simply driving sets of starting stalls in between racecourses. Pitman also works as a stalls handler, which is why he is now driving forwards and backwards to get a bay of stalls into the correct position at Brighton's five-and-a-half-furlong start.
"Although we're doing the same job every day, no two days are the same," he says.
"The job has been a real eye-opener. Until you're right in among things down at the stalls, you have no idea what it's like. You don't appreciate what can go wrong, and how quickly it can go wrong.
"We might have ten or 15 minutes chatting between races, but come game time it's like flicking a switch. Everybody is on it and everybody is looking out for everybody else because what we're doing is intrinsically very dangerous."
Mark Pitman worked for Harrods before beginning his role with RaceTech
Credit: Edward Whitaker (racingpost.com/photos)
Proof of that came on the Saturday of Royal Ascot, where Pitman had been interviewed for ITV by his old weighing-room colleague Luke Harvey just over an hour earlier.
"Myself and Graham Campbell, who is also in his first year, jogged over to load a French horse who didn't seem overly happy to be there," says Pitman.
"As soon as we got behind him and put a quoit on him, he lashed out backwards twice. As his foot came down the second time, he chopped the back of my leg. Fortunately, I was wearing good safety boots, but he still sent me flying left, while Graham went flying right. We both ended up rolling around the ground like beached turtles."
It was a reminder of what can go wrong and why the team of stalls handlers is so greatly valued.
"Ninety-nine per cent of the time the job is easy," says Pitman. "You might need to give the occasional horse a bit of a cuddle, but everything basically goes well. The problems come that one per cent of the time when you might have a horse who wants to kick your ears off, one who is rearing up with his legs on the metalwork, or one who wants to dive under the stalls.
"I remember during my interview I was told they only employ experienced racing people because when it kicks off, it really can kick off. Things can go wrong in a fraction of a second – but when things do go wrong everyone stays calm and deals with the situation."
Mark Pitman (right) helps to load a horse at Brighton
Credit: Edward Whitaker (racingpost.com/photos)
That sense of calm is obvious as the six runners in Brighton's opening contest begin to assemble behind the gates. Saffie Osborne complains of being smacked in the face by her mount Em Four, while Billy Loughnane asks if the stalls handlers are all well. The most famous of those handlers puts a hood on Em Four and then places a hand lightly on the horse's left flank. He enters the stalls without a murmur, behaving every bit as well as Pitman's next customer, the Ray Dawson-ridden Kento. "Come on, my little bubba," says Pitman. His little bubba then enters the stalls and comes out of them at speed. His race has just started. For Pitman and his colleagues, the race is over.
Also now behind Pitman, who turned 60 in August, is his time as a high-profile and high-achieving jockey and trainer.
"It almost feels as though all that happened to a different person," he says. "I look back to when I was a jockey and trainer and I know that I've changed. I think I'm now a different person, and hopefully a better person, too.
"When you're riding or training, it's all-consuming. The job is your world and you become so wrapped up in it. My opinion is that as a jockey, you're also quite selfish – and I think you have to be. I took the jockey's mindset into training. I was under the misconception that the harder I worked, the more successful I would be. That mindset isn't necessarily bad, but there has to be some balance."
Harder work than anything during his time as a jockey was maintaining a weight that allowed him to ride the likes of Garrison Savannah, Royal Athlete and Toby Tobias.
Garrison Savannah and Mark Pitman return in triumph after winning the 1991 Gold Cup
"For me, the wasting was brutal," he says. "I had to sweat every single day. I used to dehydrate myself to the point of madness. One of the reasons I packed up at such a young age was I reached the stage where just the thought of getting in the sauna made me physically ill. I would feel like I was going to puke.
"It was so hard that I couldn't have done the job if I hadn't been riding good horses. On the big days, a lot of it for me was mental. I would wake up in the morning and immediately start pumping myself up and getting into the zone. By the time the race came along, I would have done anything to win. I would have walked through fire."
The wasting not only affected his mind. It also had an impact on his body.
"If I wasn't doing light and I had a fall, it didn't seem too bad," he says. "If I was dehydrated and right down at my rock-bottom weight when I had a fall, you could tell the difference. It didn't half hurt."
Also painful was the treatment that followed injuries, particularly physiotherapy sessions with John Skull.
"I got to the stage towards the end of my career when I would go in for a treatment and start sweating because I knew what was coming," says Pitman. "I would be flat on my back with my head in his hands and then John would twist it. At other times he would virtually fold me in half, and then there would be a crunch."
After too much sweating, twisting and crunching, Pitman began assisting his mother, eventually taking control at Weathercock House following her retirement in 1999. Before that, though, he had left the family fold.
Monsignor storms to victory at the 2000 Cheltenham Festival
Credit: John Grossick (racingpost.com/photos)
"People think I inherited so much when I began training," he says. "The truth is I started with five horses. I had two slow ones, two lame ones and one mad one.
"I look back on the things we did right and wrong when I was training, and I think we did a lot right. The main thing I did wrong was I wasn't good at delegating. I wanted to see all the work, I wanted to go racing every day and I wanted to feel all the legs every night. I worked with some good people and I should have leaned on them more.
"I enjoyed training, but I tortured myself when things didn't go well. I used to beat myself up pretty badly. I also used to struggle with losing horses – and there was one straw that broke the camel's back."
Pitman then tells the story of Fireball Macnamara, a Cheltenham Grade 2 winner who ran as a nine-year-old in a Newton Abbot handicap hurdle in June 2005.
"He had been absolutely flying at home and it looked like he was going to hose up in the race when he sustained a fracture," he says.
"When the racecourse vet showed me the x-ray, we both knew it was obvious he couldn't be saved. I then remember looking at the horse and him looking at me. It was as though he was trying to say, 'Help me'. When I looked at his face, I could see into his soul. He was asking me to help him, but I knew it was curtains. I then held him when they put him down.
"I haven't thought about this for a long time and it's making me quite emotional. I'm not actually an emotional person because in this sport I think you have to batten down your emotions. That's your coping mechanism when things go wrong. That horse looking at me hit me hard, though. Without a shadow of a doubt it influenced my decision to stop training. It cut me deep."
Mark Pitman, pictured during his first stint as a trainer in 2003
Credit: Edward Whitaker (racingpost.com/photos)
Earlier in his career he had been hit hard by the death of a promising young bumper horse Devil's Advocate, who worked superbly in preparation for his planned outing at the Grand National festival but was then found to have a spiral fracture.
"Things like that are very hard to take," says Pitman, who was also scarred by the fact Monsignor was never able to race after his dazzling second victory at the Cheltenham Festival.
"Not being able to get him back on a racecourse broke my heart," he says. "I would have loved to have seen him over a fence because he was electric when we schooled him. He was an incredible horse with such a massive engine."
The five runners in Brighton's second race lack Monsignor's natural ability. They are, however, extremely well behaved and enter the stalls without the handlers having to break sweat. Their compliance makes Pitman's job look almost easy. The truth, however, is there are ups and downs, much as with one of his previous roles.
"Over the last five or six years I can think of three opportunities I've had to go back into training with three good backers," he says. "I talked to some current trainers and they all told me not to do it. They said the game has changed."
Mark Pitman: "It's never really bothered me what people think"
Credit: Edward Whitaker (racingpost.com/photos)
For Pitman, change has become the norm, yet few have seen as much change as the man who surprised many by entering a profession not hitherto associated with former top jockeys and trainers.
"It's never really bothered me what people think," he says. "What does it matter? I'm loving the job, it pays a good wage and it's an important job, too. It's nice being part of a team, and the job is also a lot better than driving to London twice a day in an 18-ton truck.
"I think as you get older you also start to realise that a lot of material stuff doesn't matter. What really matters is your health. Without your health you've got nothing. I've started to see people I knew and worked with become ill and die. I have to thank my lucky stars that as far as I know I'm relatively fit and healthy. You have to embrace that because time goes so quick."
As Pitman could attest on this sunny afternoon by the sea, it goes even quicker when you're having fun. If the fun is had while doing a vital job that gives you a sense of pride and identity, so much the better.
"I always wanted to be seen as Mark Pitman," he says. "I spent a lot of time being introduced as, 'Mark Pitman, son of Richard' or 'Mark Pitman, son of Jenny'. I wanted to be introduced just as me. I wanted to stand on my own two feet."
To his great credit, that is exactly what Mark Pitman is doing now.
Not at all.
Why should I provide freeloaders like you for a service I pay for?
Why should I provide freeloaders like you for a service I pay for?
You Don`t have too, but some punters on here are a bit more generous, if you want to be an old misery that`s fine too.
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