Their main seasons start in September and October and I think there’s a

Their main seasons start in September and October and I think there’s a good possibility you’ll see Lester riding those circuits.”Lester’s brain is still there, he’s needle sharp, but the old bones do get weaker and when it comes to a slogging match you can’t lay up with an 18-year-old. “He’s still a very big name out in the Far East, a living legend if you like, and you might find that he waits until the season starts abroad.”You’ve got the Indian circuit of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras; Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh and Penang in Malaysia and there’s Singapore and Hong Kong. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t ride here again because I know Lester doesn’t want to be going round the back on bad horses,” he said. I think he’ll get himself fit, maybe come back to the racecourse in the autumn and then go to Australia and Singapore.”Similar messages have been received by another former rival, Jimmy Lindley.

“He feels that if he rides here he’s just going to get the old scraps and if he had a bad season he might not be quite the draw abroad as if he hadn’t had a ride at all. What Piggott seems to be missing is the thrill of having the best horse in a race beneath him and the knowledge that those on the other side of the running rail are following him above all others. Piggott gets neither in Britain these days, and has his thoughts trained on arenas where he still has respect.”Lester wouldn’t tell his left hand what his right hand was doing, but I saw him at the July meeting and I got the impression he’s just freshening himself up for a winter tour overseas,” Geoff Lewis, a long-time weighing- room colleague, said yesterday. Michael Watt, his business manager for 10 years, once said: “If you could design the perfect sportsman, motivated by success and the money it brings, it would be Lester Piggott.”The finances may play as insignificant a role now as they ever have done, however. Now, though, Piggott is no further on and, in the interim, his wife Susan, who has provided him with the most rides since he returned to the saddle in 1990, has announced that she will retire at the end of the season.The current numbers at Eve Lodge on Newmarket’s Hamilton Road are barely into double figures and are certainly not of either a quality or quantity to interest “The Long Fellow”. “We just haven’t got many,” he said this week.Piggott now inhabits the desperate twilight that comes to many great sportsmen.

Unlike Joe Louis, who ended his days as a pathetic greeter, glad-handing casino visitors at Caesar’s Palace, Piggott will not die penniless. But, like the Brown Bomber, he has returned to a trade he once bestrode with his abilities severely impaired.Over the past three years his mounts have decreased (329, 298, 205), as have his victories (35, 39, 19), and owners have started to use him not on any great grounds of merit, but rather to tell others they once came into the great man’s orbit.In just under two weeks’ time it will be the 47th anniversary of his first winner, The Chase at Haydock, and along the way he has developed a reputation as a man par excellence at saving ground on the racecourse and saving money off it. Piggott, who last raced in this country in November, said he would review his position at the end of May. Indeed, his friends think the man who will be 60 on Bonfire Night may have gone for ever.
The first signal that the 11-times champion jockey was no longer consumed by British racing came at the beginning of the Flat season in March, when he declined to renew his riding licence. Those days, though, have gone and it is unlikely that Lester Piggott will ever sit on an outstanding thoroughbred on a British racecourse again. There were times when Piggott did not have to rely on others, decades when he picked up the phone and informed owners and trainers that he would be on their good horse.