It is a grey, drizzly day at Plumpton, a pretty little racecourse in Sussex and an unlikely place to come to meet Tony McCoy, the greatest jump jockey of all time. Imagine meeting Sir John Gielgud backstage at the Spa Pavilion, Felixstowe, and you get the gist: despite its attractions and the enthusiasm of the small crowd, the stage cannot bear the weight of such individual greatness.
McCoy is defined in part by statistics: the greatest number of career winners by any jump jockey; the greatest number of winners in a season by any jockey, on the flat or over jumps; champion jump jockey for seven successive seasons. But he is also defined by performance: "the greatest", "unbelievable", "a living legend," said Channel 4's hard-nosed commentators when he drove Zafarabad to victory at Kempton recently. Everyone knew that Zafarabad was a beaten horse; everyone, that is, except his jockey, who virtually carried him over the last fence to win.
McCoy publishes his autobiography this week - or, to be precise, his second autobiography. He is 28 and to publish two autobiographies by that age seems, even in the overheated world of sport, a little presumptuous. But McCoy is a one-off: revered by regular racegoers and puffing punters in betting shops, he has rewritten the rules of his sport. Before McCoy, 100 winners in a season were enough to win the jump jockeys' championship; in the 2001/2 season, in which he broke Sir Gordon Richards's 55-year-old record, he won 289 races.
Our meeting at Plumpton - he rides so many winners because he will ride anywhere, anytime - is not propitious. His mount in the last race, Cowboyboots, headbutted him on the way to the start and knocked him out of the saddle. Typically, McCoy got back on and managed third, but he has a cut on his forehead and is waiting for the course doctor to patch him up. Though perhaps appropriate to this most dangerous of sports, it is not easy to ask coherent questions when the subject is bleeding over the tape recorder. This is one interview that will have to be a stitch-up.
Wearing silks and riding high in the saddle, McCoy is a giant; sitting in the weighing room in his civvies after racing, he looks like one of the Undertones - thin, hollow-cheeked, dressed in leather jacket and jeans. The blood on his forehead only emphasises the vulnerability. Everyone tells him he looks ill - he hardly eats because he has to stay around 10st, almost two stones below his natural weight - and he is tired of hearing it. His diet on an average day is a piece of chocolate, a few strips of chicken, and tea with heaps of sugar; he also spends an inordinate amount of time in the sauna and on motorways - in the week I meet him, he is riding at Plumpton, Ludlow, Fakenham, Exeter, Chepstow and Kempton. McCoy may have the least glamorous life of any sporting superstar.
He was born in Co Antrim, Northern Ireland, and had his first pony ("it was the ride from hell") at the age of seven. His father was a carpenter who also bred horses, and McCoy always wanted to be a jockey. He started playing truant at the age of 11 so he could hang out at a local stables, packed in school altogether at 14, and a year later was apprenticed to Jim Bolger, a famous trainer based in the south of Ireland. "It was like going to school again," says McCoy, "but a different type of school. I learned more in four and a half years at Jim Bolger's than I'd have learned at any school."
McCoy grew up in a largely nationalist area of Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, but seems remarkably unaffected by the experience. The blowing up of the local police station made for an exciting evening in an adolescent's life, and he says he rarely experienced sectarianism. Racing, like rugby, unites north and south, and when I ask him which country he identifies with after eight years in England, he uses one word: "Ireland".
The book exudes loneliness - he left home at 15, left Ireland at 19, and his long-time girlfriend left him because she couldn't bear his obsession with winning races, though they have recently been reconciled. Has it all been worth it? "I wanted to be a jockey and I knew that to be good I had to leave home. I couldn't do it at home because there was no one there big enough to do it with. I had to take my chance at 15, and there were nights when I cried because I was missing home, but I wasn't going to tell anyone and I wasn't going to go running back home because I missed it."
McCoy's singlemindedness - apparent even when he was a youngster, repeatedly falling off his first crazy pony - is legendary. Some interpret that as one-dimensionality - "He has no hinterland," one racing journalist told me - but to be supreme in professional sport now seems to demand an obsessiveness that both fascinates and repels. When I ask McCoy how his day at Plumpton has been, his response explains why he is a champion. "It's been an average day," he says. "Any day you ride losers is an average day, and I rode three losers today." What he omits to say is that he also rode a winner - a typically powerful, driving ride to get the top weight, Anatar, home.
McCoy never gives less than 100% in any race, but does he think the rest of his sport - under attack following Panorama's recent report alleging "institutional corruption" - is equally reliable? "I didn't think you could read anything into the Panorama allegations," he says. "The evidence was very unreliable. I don't know what happened years ago, but racing today is one of the most policed sports in the world. You should go into the stewards' room and have a look at all the bloody cameras they have - they've got every kind of angle covered. Maybe I'm blind and being naive, but from what I can see it doesn't happen."
He is known on the course as "AP", the use of his first two initials summing up that combination of respect and impersonality. Respect may only turn into true affection if he has a partnership with a horse that becomes a great popular favourite. He had a horse, Valiramix, which he thought had the potential to be just that, but it was killed in a fall in this year's Champion Hurdle at Cheltenham when it had the race at its mercy.
McCoy describes the accident in his book. "I moved him in behind the leaders as we freewheeled downhill after the third last flight and still had a tight hold of his head. There was no need to go just yet. Then, in a couple of strides, the dream died. Valiramix lurched on to his nose and came down. I knew the way he went down that he was gone. In those few seconds all the hopes of the year went."
His reaction gives the lie to the argument that he is nothing more than a machine. "I was gutted," he says. "I cried my eyes out for weeks afterwards. He was a beautiful-looking horse, he was wonderful to ride and he was going to be brilliant." If McCoy looks ill and sunken-eyed most of the time, in the weeks after Valiramix's fatal fall he looked desperate.
Some owners don't want McCoy to ride their horses because they think he drives them too hard. You would not think him sentimental about horses, yet his response to the death of Valiramix suggests otherwise. "People see me going out every day and they think it's just a job to me, and some days it is a job to me, but I got into horses because I loved them."
The doctor is ready to put in the stitches - a quick fix for an everyday accident. Does he worry about more serious injuries, such as the broken neck that has just ended the career of his fellow Irish jockey Adrian Maguire? "I don't ever think about the possibility of serious injury," says McCoy. "People who think about injury all the time don't do it. They get out. They haven't got the bottle."
McCoy, whose list of injuries reads broken leg, fractured shoulder blade, fractured vertebrae and broken ankle, says (touching wood, in the shape of his bloody forehead) that so far he has been "lucky", and compared with Maguire he has been. He says he worries far more about not being able to ride at the highest level than about career-threatening injuries. Either way he takes nothing for granted.
"You should never get too above yourself or too carried away with what you've done," he says. "It's all about what's going to happen tomorrow, not what happened today. I always feel that no matter how much success I've had today, tomorrow might be the end. Tomorrow might be the day when I'm not going to be champion jockey any more; tomorrow might be the day when I'm not going to be as good as I was; tomorrow might be the end."
· McCoy: The Autobiography is published by Michael Joseph, priced £18.99
