Once upon a time Edgar Britt rode for royalty. Now he is racing royalty.
The dapper 98-year-old returned to Randwick for Saturday’s Sydney Cup, reliving memories of the day he won the big race himself in 1934.
Asked if he backed any winners, Britt said: “Every day I wake up it’s a winner. I’ve had a lucky life.”
He watched with keen interest live TV coverage from Adelaide of the record-breaking 20th win by Black Caviar.
Asked if he would liked to have ridden the champion mare, he said: “It would be good, wouldn’t it. All it would need to be is a steering job.”
Britt, inducted into Australian racing’s Hall of Fame eight years ago, won a big name riding for maharajahs and kings in a career that took him from Australia to India, Britain, France and the US.
He won over 2000 races, including all the English Classics bar the Derby.
Britt said good jockeys were born rather than made.
“You’ve got to have good judgment of pace, but there has to be something else there. I don’t know what it is,” he said.
“Not much has changed. They ride a bit shorter now, but I believe in short stirrups.”
He met the current Queen, and her sister Princess Margaret, many times as he saddled up in the late 1940s as the King’s jockey.
“On one occasion at a course near Hampton Court,” he once recalled, “Elizabeth and Margaret came to see me before a race and said: ‘Do you think you will win?’.
“I said, ‘I think so, but she is a pretty temperamental filly. I might have to hit her with the whip’.
“There was silence from both of them, and I thought I had said the wrong thing. The Royals don’t go in for beating animals with whips.
“Then the call came for the jockeys to get mounted. As they left, Princess Margaret said, ‘If she needs one, give her one’.
“I went out and won with plenty to spare, and I did not have to hit the filly once.”
