Rolling Back The Years !!

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He may turn 90 next month but Sir Peter O’Sullevan’s passion for the sport he has served all his life burns as brightly as ever

It’s beating the odds that pleases him most. As a man who has always revelled in exploiting loopholes in bookmakers’ calculations, Sir Peter O’Sullevan is even happier to find himself proving the actuaries fallible: “Reaching 90 has to be a long shot in any lifetime but, considering the health troubles I had when I was young, you couldn’t have invented a price about my chances of making it. A million to one might have been about right. Mind you, the birthday is on March 3, so I’m not over the line yet. Still, I think we could risk a punt at this stage if anybody will accommodate us.”

Nobody will. O’Sullevan is heading into his tenth decade with a vigour reflected in a diary scarcely less crowded than it was when he was at the height of his career as the greatest of horse-racing commentators and perhaps the most accomplished and evocative reader of hectic action that sports broadcasting has produced. He came late to retirement (he delivered his 50th and final Grand National commentary in 1997, having decided calling the horses home in his eighties would be “obscene”) and he tends to think of it as no more than a shifting of the emphasis of his energies.

These days his appetite for work mainly benefits the charitable trust that bears his name and supports a wide range of causes associated with animal welfare. His enthusiasm for socialising, too, remains formidable and those of us who are in the habit of trying to keep pace have good reason to regard him as a thoroughly unconvincing nonagenarian.

Some people whose faculties are in no way eroded by exceptional age nevertheless convey the impression that their personalities are going into soft focus but none of that is detectable in O’Sullevan. The years have done nothing to blur his presence and his arrival in any group is liable to have a sharpening effect on the conversation (and certainly on the dress standards, for his tailoring invariably exudes the understated influence of Savile Row).

Impeccable manners don’t inhibit him from occasionally putting a sardonic sting in his verbal observations, and the odd expletive may be judiciously deployed, but if something or somebody pleases or annoys him particularly he resorts to a letter-writing style of incisive eloquence. Its penchant for the impaling phrase reminds us that for most of his professional life he combined print journalism with his service to the BBC and that a consistent distinction of his performances at the microphone was the ability to build a crescendo of urgency while continuing to speak in recognisable English sentences.

Obviously it wasn’t the articulacy that prompted Lester Piggott to say of O’Sullevan as a commentator: “Compared with him, the rest are all amateurs.” Nor would the splendid, unmistakable vocal instrument have been nearly enough on its own to bring acceptance as the Voice of Racing. A major part of the basis for the accolade was the authority of interpretation – as opposed to mere description – that O’Sullevan imparted to his accounts of races. He often seemed to have the capacity to judge at a glance how each competitor in a big field was faring (“and back in ninth place but going ominously well is...”), and as he smoothly infiltrated the rattling narrative with an accumulation of such assessments his listeners were persuaded they had an informed awareness of how the climax was about to unfold.

His standards, which owed much to prodigious preparation, invited hyperbole and it still strikes me as forgivable to have suggested 35 years ago, in the first piece about him to appear under this byline, that “had he been on the rails at Balaclava he would have kept pace with the Charge of the Light Brigade, listing the fallers in precise order and describing the riders’ injuries before they hit the ground”.

Perhaps his armoury of technical brilliance, comprehensive knowledge of his subject and marrow-deep feel for the dramas of the track was plenty of justification for the credibility he established among devotees of the Turf, from aristocratic owners to betting-shop scufflers. But some of us were further drawn by the evidence of a sophisticated nature behind the voice. Though the speaker could become excited over a photo-finish, it was a controlled excitement, with no hint of spraying saliva. What we imagined we were hearing in his general tone was a cool worldliness and, as it happened, we were right.

It was hardly surprising that a sense of perspective about racing, and about everything else, should have been a strong suit for somebody who had come through those medical traumas he recalls with a shudder of vividness as his 90th birthday approaches. They took him to the point where he didn’t much care whether he lived or died.

It was severe asthma that first plagued him in his youth, and recurring bouts of pneumonia constituted the deadliest menace to his survival, but the affliction that was to do most to torture his spirit was the virulent form of acne related to his respiratory weakness. However, neither the ill-health that began to envelop him soon after his birth in Co Kerry nor the divorce of his English mother and Irish father, which sent their only child to live with his maternal grandparents, Sir John and Lady Henry, could prevent his early boyhood from giving him memories with far more light than shadow. It was an indulgent upbringing in a Surrey country house whose servants included grooms, a chauffeur and a Russian chef.

Collaboration with the head groom afforded the seven-year-old O’Sullevan the chance to fantasise about steering in the Derby winner as he rode his Welsh pony down the hill to Tattenham Corner and into the straight while trespassing on the Epsom course soon after dawn in the spring of 1925. The chauffeur taught him to drive before he was 10 and implanted a love of the experience that still puts him behind the wheel of his Mercedes at every opportunity and makes him proud of having driven in 42 countries and racked up 2¼ million miles on the road.

Another taste encouraged by alliances with the staff at Gatton Park was for betting on horses and once his first wager, sixpence each way on Tipperary Tim in the 1928 Grand National, paid off at 100-1, lifelong engagement with the bookies was inevitable.

When the boy was breathing freely he played both football and cricket well and it was sporting rather than academic prowess that swung his admission to Charterhouse. His time at the school was ended by an alarmingly serious attack of double pneumonia (his housemaster wrote to his stepfather praising “Peter’s sustained and courageous battle against his delicacy”) and subsequent attendance at Collège Alpin in the more lung-friendly climate of Switzerland was in turn curtailed by the devastating onset of skin troubles that made looking at his face in a mirror an agony.

For months, as his 17th birthday came and went, his home was a room at the Middlesex Hospital. When we have talked over the years about that ordeal he has described it as his Phantom of the Opera time, telling how he took refuge in a medicated mask through which he could see but not be seen. After leaving the hospital, his outings consisted of resolutely seeking the coffee bars and milk bars where the lights were dimmest.

“That was an indescribably painful period of my life but I am convinced that a serious illness, for anyone who comes out of it in reasonable shape, can be profoundly enriching,” he once told me. “My experiences, for instance, took me further into literature than I might ever have been and taught me an appreciation of the visual arts which may not be acute but is an important sustaining element in my life.”

But when our conversation stirred the old bad recollections again the other day, at the Chelsea flat where he and his wife Pat have lived for nearly 60 years in the company of covetable paintings and a succession of cherished poodles, he admitted he had been well beyond his teens before he could draw any philosophical consolations from the acne nightmare. Automatically unfit for the armed forces, he opted for driving stretcher parties in the Blitz and amid the death and destruction the young man who declined to wear a tin hat gathered a reputation for a devil-may-care scorning of risks. “The truth was that my life had been going through such misery that dangers to it didn’t seem worthy of any concern,” he said.

Yet from a distance it appears that his morale climbed steadily during the war, helped by developing involvement with racehorses (he had made an initial, precocious foray into ownership in 1940) and the profitable endeavours of a greyhound he called Slim, who was a home-based pet when he wasn’t doing duty as Rosebud at the flapping track in Staines. O’Sullevan is sure he won’t die with the name of Rosebud on his lips but he remembers the animal fondly and is delighted to possess beautiful drawings inspired by him. The drawings were bought for £15 from their creator, the renowned artist John Skeaping, O’Sullevan’s friend across four decades, after both had suffered a losing night at White City dogs.

Emerging from the war, O’Sullevan concentrated on the journalistic ambitions he had nurtured since the days of the Tipperary Tim coup and once he had gained a foothold in the racing department of the Press Association and followed up by convincing the BBC, in 1948, that he could do television commentaries, the journey towards the status of national institution was under way. At least historians of the media can say so now.

At the time thoughts of overcoming the racecourse broadcaster’s primitive, unsheltered working conditions sufficiently to maintain basic communication with the public qualified as delusions of grandeur. For a while his writing for the Daily Express, which he joined from the PA and served for 35 years, largely in an unbeatable partnership with the late Clive Graham, was his principal source of celebrity.

But in the spreading of fame nothing is as telling as the telly and – though shyness persisted long after his skin ailment had been subdued, making him less than eager to perform on camera – millions became so captivated by the voice and interested in the man delivering it that they made themselves familiar with his lean, distinguished figure. He has transcended racing in the country’s consciousness but is content to think of the sport as the defining context of his life.

“I once had aspirations to be a film director but that was just a boyish conceit,“ he told me. “I don’t think life is all that serious a business, so I considered it a bonus to be earning a living doing something that appealed to me and allowed me to be associated with such a marvellous creature as the horse.

“Animals were always likely to be central to my existence. I suppose being alone a lot in childhood made it natural for me to have an affinity with them. The same applied to Lester, with more spectacular results. He was also an only child and he had a closeness with horses that he didn’t have with his mother and father.

“He communicated with horses, found he had more rapport with them than with the adults around him. Mind you, I wouldn’t say he was overwhelmed by compassion. As a jockey, he regarded them as fellow professionals and admired them on that basis. He gave horses hard races but, even as somebody unforgivingly opposed to excessive use of the whip, I have to concede that he almost always hit his mounts in the right stride, in the right place at the right time. A glaring exception was how he dealt with Roberto in the 1972 Derby. He simply lost his rag that day because Roberto wasn’t meeting his demands as he wished.

“Lester surprised me by insisting that Sir Ivor was the best of his nine Derby winners, for I believed Nijinsky had to be

top of the list. But Sir Ivor was his ultimate equine pro, a partner who responded instantly to every call on his talent. And, you know, when Lester went out to see Sir Ivor at stud in Kentucky the old horse made a real fuss of him. One great was glad to be reunited with another.”

We can assume that Piggott and many other hard-core racing people would have difficulty empathising with the extent and vehemence of O’Sullevan’s campaigning for animal welfare but everybody respects the depth of his feelings. “I just can’t see harmony breaking out in the human race until we start treating the lesser species better,” he said. “I think our willingness to put animals through living hell, mainly because of the relentless focusing on production of the cheapest possible food, is inseparable from our readiness to visit appalling behaviour on each other. I am no condoner of the animal rights fanatics, and I am no more likely to stop eating good meat than I am to turn off fine wine, but we can’t claim to be civilised while we are brutally abusing fellow creatures as we do.”

The hours we spent chatting in his flat naturally embraced the less significant version of abuse suffered by punters at the hands of the bookies. O’Sullevan has endured his share of it (he suggests that for every “touch” he has had there have been numerous near-misses) but his habit of refusing to throw away any piece of paper affecting his life, least of all betting vouchers, supplies proof that he is ahead of the game.

That’s how it should be, given that over 70 years he has enjoyed the trust and friendship of a battalion of geniuses of the Turf, from both the training and the riding ranks (Vincent O’Brien, Paddy Prendergast, Alec Head, Scobie Breasley, Rae Johnstone and, of course, his awkward but treasured ally Piggott are prominent examples). It’s no shock that he has never had need of an overdraft.

He even defied the usually crushing economics of horse ownership. “Last season was the first since 1940 that I didn’t have a horse running in my colours [black, yellow crossbelts, with a yellow cap]. I’d like to think I’d have another one but if I don’t I’ll accept that I’ve had more than my quota of good fortune, after an inauspicious beginning. I went through 15 years and 16 horses without seeing those colours finish in a place.

But that harsh apprenticeship simply intensified the elation of eventual successes, above all the glory gained by Be Friendly as champion sprinter of Europe in the late 1960s and later by my home-bred Attivo, who in 1974 sluiced home in three hurdle races, one of them the Triumph at the Cheltenham Festival, and won two big distance races on the Flat, the Chester Cup and the Northumberland Plate. The pleasure those two marvels gave me was priceless.”

Sir Peter O’Sullevan devoted Friday to drawing up post positions for the birthday lunch he will be hosting at the wine shrine of Berry Bros & Rudd in St James’s Street and word of his deliberations caused some of us due to be in the field to reflect on his tendency to emulate the staying powers of Attivo. The Voice will get the trip but there is anxiety about several other runners.

Sir Peter O’Sullevan: the voice of racing

- Sir Peter was a BBC racing commentator for 50 years, retiring in 1997. His fi nal commentary was the Gold Cup

- His father was Colonel John Joseph O’Sullevan, DSO, Resident Magistrate at Killarney in Ireland

- His binoculars were from a German submarine

- He owned Attivo whose win in the 1974 Triumph Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival was described by O’Sullevan as the most difficult race he had to call

- He now does charity work, raising money for the protection of horses

- He backed his first Grand National winner as a 10-year-old when he wagered sixpence each-way on the 100-1 shot Tipperary Tim with the local butcher in 1928

- The Sir Peter O’Sullevan Annual Award is presented for a lifetime’s contribution to the sport and recipients have included Lester Piggott, Vincent O’Brien, the Queen and Dick Francis

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