Success and longevity are two routes to greatness in sport, but few in any line of it have ever married the pair quite like Lester Piggott.
The 11-time champion jockey, who passed away at the age of 86 this weekend, rode the first of almost 4,500 British winners in 1948, before he had even entered his teens, and the last in 1994, a year shy of his sixties, at the end of a career that began in the black and white aftermath of the Second World War and outlasted the division of Europe.
To stay afloat in any sport for that period of time is almost unheard of, but to remain at the top of one for so much of it nigh-on impossible, given the natural churn and evolution of climbing standards and growing professionalism.
Yet Piggott was not merely hacking around at Haydock (though, coincidentally, that is where he enjoyed his first and last successes) but for so long lighting up Flat racing’s biggest stages, and at a time when they were far grander, with a far wider draw than they are today.
He won the first of his record nine Epsom Derbies in 1954, the same year Sir Roger Bannister ran the world’s first sub-four-minute mile, and the last of them 29 years later, by which time the likes of Seb Coe, Steve Cram and Steve Ovett were clocking those for fun. At the time of his first British Classic win, his national sporting contemporaries were gentleman sports stars like Stirling Moss and Jim Laker. By his last, they were rockstars like Gazza.
In terms of transcendency beyond racing, only Frankie Dettori has come close in the near-three decades since, and still going strong at 51, the Italian is having a fair crack at his close friend in the stamina stakes as well.
“He was 20 years in front of anyone else,” Dettori said, leading the tributes this weekend. And usually a good few lengths, too.
