THE big news this week is the Jockey Club’s plans to sell off Kempton, which may well make commercial sense, but I fear the real damage was done when the track’s assets were stripped years ago.

By that, I mean races such as the Queen’s Prize, Rosebery Stakes and Jubilee Handicap, which used to be highlights of the flat season, but have been allowed to drift towards anonymity, making Kempton’s programme look more and more homogeneous.

It’s no surprise that the track’s owners believe that such races could be run anywhere but that’s a crying shame for those who value both heritage and variety.

While the loss of a favourite racecourse makes me want to vent, there will be ample opportunity to do so with the story having the hallmarks of a long-running saga, and it’s the death of Brian Fletcher which resonates most with me this week, as he has long been a hero of mine, and I’d like to explain why.

A SCRUPULOUS RIDER

Fletcher is famous for winning the Grand National three times between 1968 and 1974, a feat matched only by Jack Anthony in the last 150 years, and it would have been more but for injury, bad luck, but most of all honesty.

It’s hard to cite a rider more scrupulous than Fletcher, who was a teenager when finishing third on Red Alligator in the 1967 National, a race he was well placed to win when disaster struck at the 23rd fence, allowing Foinavon to stroll home alone.

Fletcher and his mount needed two tries to renegotiate the infamous fence and had almost the whole field in front when eventually making chase.

That they managed to finish third showed how much the pair had to give, and that point was hammered home when Red Alligator and Fletcher won the race a year later to give the late Denys Smith his most famous success.

Brian will forever be associated with the great Red Rum, but he never let his fame turn his head, and preferred to take a crate of beer back to the family who provided his accommodation in Liverpool than join the festivities at the Adelphi Hotel, and in 1975 he sacrificed his chance of riding a remarkable fourth national winner when criticising Ginger McCain’s handling of Red Rum.

McCain and Fletcher were both men of humble origins, but chalk and cheese in terms of their attitudes to Red Rum – McCain saw a horse getting a little lazy with age, while Fletcher saw a hero who had nothing left to prove. Both were right in their ways, but after a race at Newcastle where Rummy finished third when he ought to have been second, McCain opined that his jockey had ridden “like a man sitting on the toilet”.

The trainer sought a change of rider for his star’s next race, and while McCain always maintained that he never meant to sever ties with Fletcher, the stubbornness of both ensured that the pair never patched things up, and Tommy Stack was in the saddle when Red Rum contested his last two Nationals.

For the record, Fletcher believed Stack would have won in 1976 by kicking on rather than waiting in a slowly-run race, and nobody had a better vantage point, as he kept his old mount company for most of the second circuit on John Bosley’s mare Eyecatcher, once again showing he had no equal as a rider over Aintree’s big fences.

OUT IN THE COLD

Red Rum may well have won in 1976 if Fletcher had switched mounts, but it was his fervent belief that Red Rum deserved retirement that saw him out in the cold.

It’s a measure of the man that he didn’t try to mend bridges for the sake of another shot at glory, and very much in keeping with his professional ethos – unlike most jockeys of his era, he refused to give what might be termed “handicapping rides”, which limited his opportunities and frustrated his employers, but was simply a reflection of who he was.

In retirement, as was his wont, he kept a low profile, moving from Durham to Wales where he continued to farm, and while he took an interest in harness racing in his new home, he typically eschewed the celebrity status that Grand National success confers.

His autobiography, My Rum Life, is shorter than most of its type, but then the author wasn’t a man who believed his own hype, and the contents are typically forthright, revealing a man who ought to have been champion jockey, but was simply too honest to play the game which would have brought him the kind of fame he despised.

He really was one of a kind.