When Nico de Boinville was at public boarding school in Berkshire, while Best Mate was winning three Gold Cups in succession at the Cheltenham Festival between 2002 and 2004, he bunked off classes in an early sign of his obsession with horse racing. “I definitely snuck out of a couple of lessons to watch Best Mate,” he says. “It was then that Cheltenham came on my radar, because before that I was massively into Flat racing.”
The 32-year-old jockey, who is English racing’s best hope of challenging the domination of the annual Irish invasion at Cheltenham this coming week, laughs when asked if he would have been joined by any other rebellious public schoolboys during his illicit Festival-watching. “Not at all. No one else was fussed. It was all football and only I followed the racing.”
