Harry Cobden: 'I came home that night and half thought, right, I've had enough of this - but that's a coward's thing to do'

In this interview first published in April exclusively for Racing Post Members' Club subscribers, top jumps jockey Harry Cobden talks to Peter Thomas about early catastrophe, the wrath of Paul Nicholls and not winning the jockeys' title. This has now been made free to read for users of the Racing Post app as our Sunday Read.

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Halfway down the back straight at Newbury, Harry Cobden is travelling easily, three lengths clear of his nearest pursuer, although given that this is only me and my dodgy hip, it's nothing to shout about.

At the next plain fence, Nico de Boinville comes sailing past and quickly opens up a five-length lead. Surely he's gone too soon – or maybe he knows something we don't. It turns out to be the latter.

Harry has invited me to walk the course with him before racing, on a brisk but sunny spring morning. He's in a heavyweight navy suit and a sleek navy gilet, topped with a smart flat cap, all set off by a silver-tipped walking stick that completes the look he's probably not going for: rakish clerk of the course with a going report to file.

We walk purposefully, zig-zagging inquisitively as Harry pokes his stick in at intervals, quite possibly formulating a cunning plan for his ride in the opening novice hurdle but, by the time we turn for home, the clouds have opened, bright and breezy has turned to wet and ill-advised and we're in the process of getting drenched.

"Should have worn coats," says my walking companion, with belated perspicacity, as I spy Nico in the distance, high-tailing it to the jockeys' room. "Don't worry, I can put your jersey in the tumble dryer if you like."

I shrug off the soggy inconvenience with as much nonchalance as I can muster, happy not to have kept Harry from his crucial act of reconnaissance, keen to know what he's learned from it.

"Not much," he says, rather dispiritingly, "but I like to do it whenever I'm riding because every now and then it gives you an edge. It's the little things that make the difference between winning and losing."

For me, it's made the difference between wearing a hat and coat next time or getting soaked. It's a little thing, but it'll give me an edge.

This morning may not have yielded much of use for Cobden, but it's shone a light on how a rider can achieve so much while appearing to do very little. Our walk has been almost leisurely, but the whole procedure was surely evidence that the rider's seemingly effortless rise to the top of the jumps tree – topping £2 million in prize-money in three of the last five years and notching his 21st Grade 1 winner at the age of 24 – is founded on more dedication and attention to detail than at first meets the eye.

It may look and sound as though his life is little more than a swim on a millpond, but there's plenty going on below the surface for this easygoing son of Somerset beef farmers William and Sarah, even when he's out of the saddle – for example, when he's serving a ten-day riding ban for contravention of the new whip rules, which we'll come to later.

Harry Cobden is all smiles at DitcheatCredit: Edward Whitaker

"I may go for a long weekend somewhere, but otherwise I'll just go and do a load of fencing on the farm [in Lydford, Somerset, crucially not far from Ditcheat]," he says. "That's about as exciting as it'll get. I've bought a post-rammer and a Quickfencer to go on the tractor, and I've got a few young horses at home that I like messing about with, to sell on as three-year-olds.

"It's not as profitable as riding, but we're all grafters in one way or another."

Cobden has a tractor, but also a digger, some land of his own, a few cows and a shoot – he's as evangelical about his country pursuits as he is about his racing – but don't run away with the idea that he's the kind of rider who will be wearing Gucci wellies around the farm.

"I wouldn't be wasting money on anything," he insists in his relaxed West Country brogue, almost 'Francomesque' in this as in so many other things. "I'm not into fancy clothes or watches or huge holidays – I want to get set up before I start enjoying life. If I have a few more good years and get to a stage where I'm happy, maybe that might change, but what's happy? Are you happy with 100 acres or do you want 300? When you've got 300 do you want 600? You've got to find your own place where you're happy."

Cobden seems to be happiest when he's working towards a purpose, and that purpose seems mostly to be about big races rather than lots of races. Stage Star (in the Turners) and Stay Away Fay (Albert Bartlett) were his latest top-level successes, and they brought with them not only welcome cash but also a sense that a long festival drought was over and deep-seated ambitions were once again being fulfilled.

He's never taken more than 582 rides in a campaign and was down to 427 last season. His season, clearly, is measured not so much by numbers as by a sense of sporting wellbeing and, while this may come at some cost in terms of his ranking, it seems to suit his singular outlook.

"I'm much more for quality over quantity," he confirms, "and my agent Sam Stronge knows that. I'll ride anything that jumps well and has a chance – I'd rather be earning money than sitting in the weighing room – but my focus isn't winning a title, and I probably never will, although that doesn't bother me the way it probably bothers Brian Hughes.

"He'll have nigh on 1,000 rides a year, he's a very good jockey and a top professional, but he'd be completely and utterly obsessed, and I'm not sure that's a good thing sometimes, certainly not for me.

"I want to win every race I ride in, but if you said to me would I rather ride 150 winners and be champion jockey, or ride 80 winners and win a Gold Cup, I know what I'd go for. I don't know what Brian would go for, although I've got a pretty good idea."

Underlying the easygoing demeanour, there's another side of Cobden, a steelier one, formed from the kind of self-confessed selfishness that he suspects his partner Olivia probably doesn't regard as an asset, and from a 'brattish' streak that first manifested itself in early childhood but has thankfully been channelled to good use and buried deep in the psyche.

When did he first think he'd 'arrived' as a jockey? I ask, expecting a Grade 1 anecdote to wing its way towards me. Not a bit of it.

"It was probably at the age of 14, because I was a chippy little bastard," he confesses. "I remember when I was 17, I rode a horse called Old Guard to win the Greatwood Hurdle. I went down to the last upsides Barry Geraghty and beat him, and back then it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. I'd made it, I was on the scene and everything was easy.

"The following week I rode seven favourites and they all got beat. I soon learned that you never know what's round the corner."

The chippiness manifested itself long before Cobden had even taken out a licence – or started wearing long trousers, for that matter. He wasn't a great loser even then and wasn't averse to a tantrum when things weren't meeting his elevated expectations.

His first racing venture was doomed to failure from the outset, according to family friend and leading West Country trainer Ron Hodges, who warned that a fat little mount like his would be tailed off in a pony race at the local point-to-point. Cobden ploughed on regardless and finished both tailed off and with what his mentor described as "the right hump".

"Ron asked me what I thought," confirms the rider, "and I said I didn't want to carry on if I was going to finish last every time, so we needed to go and buy a faster horse or we were wasting our time."

His next was a smart, unraced show pony called Ninfield Millionaire's Delight, bought out of a field in darkest Kent. "Dad and Ron paid eight grand for it and it turned out to be highly strung but a real machine," recalls Cobden. "I ended up winning 33 races on it."

"I wasn't happy losing that first race, but then I don't like losing a game of cards," says the now better-adjusted rider. "I'm quite laid-back and relaxed but I've always been a competitive person. Winning's nice, isn't it?"

Cobden's first winner under rules was controversial, not because of any breach of the whip rules – we'll get to that, don't worry – but because of something far more alarming: the wrath of his enraged mother.

He'd been due to sit his English GCSE but had a more pressing engagement, with a horse called El Mondo in a hunter chase at Leicester. Sadly, he hadn't informed his mum about the clash of dates, and she wasn't best pleased when the school called her to inquire after his whereabouts.

"She went ballistic," says the presumably now-forgiven rider, "but my dad had 20 quid on it at 33-1. All round, it would have been bad news if it had got beat, but it's still a big regret that I didn't pay any attention for the last six months of my time at school.

"What's six months, after all? But when you're 16 it seems like forever. Luckily I turned out all right as a jockey because I don't know what I'd have done otherwise. I wouldn't have enough qualifications to work in McDonald's."

The cornerstone of his success has been his association with Paul Nicholls (Cobden was a pony-racing pal of the trainer's daughter Megan), who snaffled him from under the noses of the Tizzards, for whom he'd ridden plenty of nice winners after a formative spell with Anthony Honeyball.

Harry Cobden and Jackpot D'Athou (left) jump alongside Natalie Parker and Blueking D'Oroux watched by Clifford Baker in the grass schooling field at Paul Nicholls' stables in DitcheatCredit: Edward Whitaker

Nicholls can have had few doubts along the way that he'd made anything other than the right move in securing the services of the teenage prodigy, but for the boy himself there were moments when his seamless progress appeared to be unravelling.

There was the serious fracture of his C2 vertebra in 2018 that could have ended his career forever – "I was very, very lucky to be all right" – but this was as nothing compared to the day at Exeter three years earlier, when the 7lb claimer dropped his whip when leading at the last fence and was beaten half a length in a race worth more than £15,000 to the winner.

The good news was that somebody found his whip. The bad news was that it was Nicholls.

"If anyone was going to pick up that stick, I'd have wanted it to be anyone but him," says Cobden, "and there were a few things said. I came home that night and half thought, right, I've had enough of this, but my dad just said, 'If you don't want to ride, don't ride – come back here and do what you want to do.'

"I thought to myself, that's a coward's thing to do, and I've never looked back. When there are high-pressure moments and things go wrong, you have to remind yourself there's always tomorrow."

In which respect he hopes to resemble Geraghty – "the coolest rider I've ever seen".

"I remember seeing him being beaten at 1-4 on Buveur D'Air in the Christmas Hurdle and he walked in smiling, sat down, had a sandwich and was ready for the next one. That's the way to be, isn't it?

"Yes, I'm lucky that I get plenty of chances, but I also think this game is only as hard as you make it. People put a lot of unnecessary pressure on themselves, worrying about things they can't change."

Pushed for the highlight of his career to date, Cobden nominates his second King George win on Bravemansgame, "because first time round I probably didn't realise how big the occasion was – when you're riding good horses at that age, I don't think you appreciate how hard they are to find".

The same horse came not too far from providing him with an even brighter moment at Cheltenham, when he went toe to toe with Galopin Des Champs in the Gold Cup only to come off second best. Fortunately, by then he and Nicholls already had two in the bag, even if the gloss was later taken off one of them by a four-day suspension that leaves him teetering on the brink of an extended 'holiday'.

Harry Cobden with Bravemansgame at Paul Nicholls' stables in DitcheatCredit: Edward Whitaker

"It had been a long time between festival wins, so it was a brilliant meeting for us," says Cobden with lingering relief. "I don't think I'd left any behind – we just didn't have the ammunition for a while – but I feel I'm getting better all the time and my improvement from last year to this year has been pretty big, both physically and mentally.

"The only downside to the meeting was the ban on Stay Away Fay. I thought it was a strong but sympathetic ride on a horse that was responding, and I don't believe it looked bad at all."

Cobden's ban was for using his whip above shoulder height and, as it was his second under the new guidelines, he might have received a 21-day ban for another breach before September but for Thursday's announcement that totting-up referrals for technical infringements will now apply after five offences rather than three. But he still has a major issue with the rule itself.

"I'd say there wouldn't be a jockey in the weighing room who has an issue with going to seven hits, because it's really not that difficult and racing probably looks better because of it, but the shoulder height rule really gets me," he explains.

"It doesn't affect some people, but I'm low in the saddle, I've got long arms, and if you want to hit the horse in the correct place, that's a problem. You end up hitting them short, and that's what really looks bad.

"It's a rule that wouldn't take much tweaking, but I think some tweaking needs to be done."

The trouble is, he believes, racing often suffers in the public eye because it "ends up highlighting the bad about the sport rather than the good". It's a lesson that needs to be learned as we jostle for our place in the nation's affections.

Whip infringements notwithstanding, the Ditcheat team head for Aintree "high on numbers with good chances".

Bravemansgame, the subject of five seconds of high excitement heading for the last fence in the Gold Cup, receives a favourable mention from Cobden, but when he says "the track would suit him, it's an easier race than the Gold Cup, dead on three miles rather than just over three miles, and I wouldn't shy away from taking on Galopin Des Champs again", he's talking about Punchestown rather than Liverpool. (Betting disclaimer: this is a personal opinion and doesn't necessarily reflect the trainer's beliefs.)

Near the top of the Aintree list seems to be Il Ridoto, "who I could see running a big race in the Topham . . . he's lightly raced, jumps well, the track will suit him and I don't think the fences will be a problem".

The rest of the squad, though, are queuing up behind him, many heading for the biggest races, and it promises to be a season's end packed with opportunities. One thing's for sure, Cobden will be better prepared than most for whatever chances come his way, and he won't be caught out without a coat this time

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