Dropped, substituted, sacked: sport’s three horsemen of the apocalypse

Not everything in elite sport is hard to do. Getting sacked is easy, as the jockey Kieran Shoemark found in the 1 minute 37 seconds it took him not to win the 2,000 Guineas on the favourite Field Of Gold.

Even at the top you can be fired for being too old, too slow, too outspoken, too unsuccessful or, in the old days, too drunk too often. Often it says more about the sacker than the sacked. Bobby Robson deserved better than to read the news of his dismissal as Fulham manager on a newspaper billboard in a Putney street.

The important thing is not to get too down on yourself. The seven coaches dispatched by Emma Raducanu in four years can afford not to take it personally. They have safety in numbers in feeling the problem was with the 2021 USOpen champion rather than their coaching.

In Spain in 2003, Vicente del Bosque was within his rights to blame court politics at Real Madrid for him losing the manager’s job less than 48 hours after he had won the league title. In four years, Del Bosque had brought two La Liga trophies and two Champions League titles to the Bernabéu, but was culled for being insufficiently glamorous.

At his unveiling as Everton manager in 2019, Carlo Ancelotti pointed out the corridor where he was fired by Chelsea 12 months after winning the Premier League and FA Cup Double. In 1977 Tommy Docherty was escorted out of Manchester United for having an affair with the physiotherapist’s wife. Bizarre and heartless sackings are an internet subculture. Serial victims can amass huge compensation. José Mourinho is known in football as the payout king.

No golden severance deal will be heading Shoemark’s way. The cause of his downfall last week was the simple one of being too far back at the business end of the season’s opening Classic. The John and Thady Gosden training team are still using him but he is no longer the stable jockey, the automatic No 1. Witheringly, the Gosdens said they would use “the best available” pilot from now on. The same trainers sent Shoemark’s predecessor, Frankie Dettori, to the doghouse for a while for dropping below his customary level.

With each hoofbeat Shoemark was surging closer to winning the Guineas on Field Of Gold but was still half a length short of the winner Ruling Court when they passed the line. Easing up, in second place, he might have heard the great Green Bay Packers coach, Vince Lombardi, saying: “We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time.”

But you knew right away that his decision to launch his challenge from so far back was going to cost him, especially as the 2,000 Guineas is one of the few top races to have eluded the older Gosden. In the unsaddling enclosure the trainer avoided eye contact and shifted awkwardly as he told ITV Racing’s Matt Chapman that Field Of Gold should have been more “handy” (close to the leading group).

In those final strides, Gosden’s craving for a 2,000 Guineas win might have been satisfied. Field Of Gold might have been a Classic winner (he still could be, elsewhere), with a hugely enhanced stud value. It was expensive, painful and personal.

Those final moments when Shoemark runs out of racetrack are a textbook illustration of the tightrope walked by elite sportsmen and women. The context was that his suitability to be Dettori’s successor was questioned last year too – but he held on to the job, until perceived errors of positioning and timing returned him to the ranks of eight jockeys the Gosdens say they will now use.

As brutal firings go, Shoemark’s wouldn’t make the top 50, which is not to downplay his loss. Riders are frequently jocked off horses by angry owners. At Epsom in 1986, Greville Starkey committed the unpardonable sin of trying to win the Derby from the back of the pack rolling round Tattenham Corner. His late arrival on the scene deprived one of the best horses of the 20th Century, Dancing Brave, of a place on the scroll of the world’s most famous Flat race. Starkey rode him once more, but then Pat Eddery took his seat.

Instant dismissal inflicts the greatest shame. But the tackle not made, the yards not covered or the curfew not obeyed can have dire consequences. Dropped, substituted and sacked are professional sport’s three horsemen of the apocalypse. You can be taken off at half-time for being anonymous. You can stew on a bench for a month because your metrics have gone wonky. Or you can misread a big race and diminish in value the multi-million pound beast you were entrusted with in a 1m 37sec race.

All you can do in sport is keep riding, and keep riding well, until the memory of the sacking becomes a mere detail in your biography and not the defining event of your life.

Photograph by Alan Crowhurst/Getty Images