‘Being AP’ keeps the fires burning

To remind us of the legend – and pass time most enjoyably during lockdown – we have Being AP, a brilliant documentary film currently on offer on Netflix. Critic website Rottentomatoes gives it a full five stars and it’s won awards at several film festivals.

Steeplechase and hurdle racing is not everyone’s cup of tea and many a hardened flat racing enthusiast is appalled by the danger of it. Horses and jockeys get badly hurt and some die. Cruelty is the word that hovers over any talk of jumps racing.

However, this extreme branch of the game does have millions of devotees and champion horses and riders are idolised and worshipped more ardently than their flat-track counterparts. It’s a blood-and-guts, force-of-nature type of thing – and one either gets it or not.

There are few horrors in Being AP – one coming when the jockey tells an examining doctor of the injuries he has suffered in two decades of falling off horses, accompanied by X-ray pics of the metal plates and screws that hold his skeleton together.

The doccie shows him coming a few croppers, to illustrate how he defies injury and pain to get back on the next horse if he possibly can. When a horse steps on his chest as he lies prone on the turf, his sternum is cracked and a couple of ribs are broken (they all have been, at one time or another). Soon thereafter we see him playing football at home with his children, patently in a lot of pain, before swinging his leg over the next horse, as we wince in agony with him.

That’s the point of the exercise: to show a man’s obsession with doing his job better than anyone, even he, has done it before. That job is winning horse races, come what may.

The cameras follow McCoy throughout his final season of riding, with remarkable access to his family, agent and colleagues as he racks up his 20^th consecutive champion jockey of Britain and Ireland title.

It starts with him setting absurdly ambitious targets for himself, goes through the highs and lows of hitting some and missing others, dwells on wrestling with retirement, and ends with emotional tears and uncommon levels of national adoration.

The co-star is AP’s wife, Chanelle, a strong woman who supports the man in his career but longs for the day when he’ll quit and remove mortal danger from their family life.

Scenes of the McCoys arguing over the future are obviously unscripted and engrossing in their emotional intensity – they’re not actors, after all, and simply forget that cameras are present and rolling.

Director Anthony Wonke keeps watchers glued to the screen, despite AP being an undemonstrative character – Frankie Dettori he ain’t. Having said that, a determined set of jaw, notable lack of facial movement, taciturn interactions and monotone incantation of “numbers” to be registered in terms of winners all hold strange fascination.

The footage of live racing is just phenomenal – and keeps the fires of fandom burning during this long night of deprivation.

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