By Mike Dillion
Okay, what would go through your mind?
You are 10 seconds from winning your biggest race, the Grand National Steeplechase, and you are carrying the financial hopes of more than half the country's punters.
The horse crashes through the last fence, shatters its leg and will be destroyed, punters are 20m away lining the outside running rail, half the country will see it either live or on the television news and you have got to pick yourself up and front the horse's trainer and owners.
There's nowhere to hide.
A friend would be a fine thing.
Twenty-year-old Jonathon Riddell admits he lost it completely when he looked up from the Riccarton turf on Saturday and saw raging favourite Any Question's leg flapping.
"I didn't know how to handle it," he said at yesterday's Foxton races, still sick in the stomach.
"As I was hitting the ground I was already thinking of bouncing up and catching him, maybe finishing the race, but when I saw him I groaned."
Riddell doesn't quite fit the popular image of a jumps jockey. You know, tough as a 20c steak. Barbed wire for dental floss.
He is a refined and polished rider who is over jumps solely because his body kept growing and he admits he is probably on his last-gasp year as a flat jockey.
He's not soft, just soft by comparison.
"I loved that horse," Riddell said with real feeling.
"I basically taught him to jump and he's the best jumper I've ridden.
"Losing the race was bad enough, but losing the horse was much worse."
Any Questions had the Grand National won well when he approached the last fence.
Having done a brilliant job of jumping Riccarton's fearsome live brush fences throughout, he almost looked confused as he came into the much smaller erected obstacle in the home straight.
It appeared he put in an additional approach stride and got in too close, striking the fence hard.
Riddell dismissed all that.
"I believe he did his leg in during the final approach stride. I think he broke it before he hit the fence, that's why he didn't rise.
"He had jumped brilliantly throughout. If there had been a big leap left in him he would have given it to me and cleared the fence.
"It simply wasn't there.
"He jumped Cutts' too big the first time, but picked himself up brilliantly. He was too clever a jumper to misjudge things."
Riddell couldn't sleep Saturday night, even after something he rarely does, having a bit of a session at the hotel.
"I lay on the bed and it went over and over in my mind. It was terrible."
He says he feels so sorry for Any Questions' part owner and trainer Sheryl Douglas, with whom he served most of his apprenticeship until Douglas moved north to Cambridge last season.
And things are not exactly at a yearly high for himself either. He has also lost access to another two jumpers that Douglas has lost the use of either permanently or until next year, Clem and Just Jojo, and his weight is starting to get up to the point where his flat riding could be in doubt.
"I'm hoping it's just the cold weather. I was walking 55kg between racedays last summer and I'm hoping it will return to something like that when it warms up again.
"If it doesn't I'm not going to kill my body."
Riddell has to pick his career up off the mat with the same determination he was looking for when he lifted his body off the Riccarton turf on Saturday.
And right now he could use a friend.
Horse Racing: Hot favourite destroyed
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