Racing: Culloty the quiet man aboard jumping's classiest conveyance

Jim Culloty is still a quiet character, but now a man for whom achievement has done a considerable amount of screaming. Inside a month last spring, the Irishman achieved a double which proved elusive inside a whole career for the likes of John Francome, Jonjo O'Neill and Peter Scudamore, champions all.

Culloty first won the Cheltenham Gold Cup on the imperious Best Mate, who returns his tall and noble physique to the race track for the first time this season today, and then, rather more remarkably, he further garnished his campaign with Bindaree's success in the Grand National.

In the space of 23 days he had accomplished jumping's version of walking on water. He had justified his initials. "It was kind of surreal, but, even during those 23 days I was still riding every day, sometimes on inferior horses," he says. "I couldn't get too carried away because, in the back of your mind, you know you're going to end up on your backside or your head about once in every 12 rides.

"The problem with racing is that the highs can be too high and the lows too low. You can only deal with that if you take everything in your stride and keep working hard."

There was no road to Damascus moment for Culloty during the Cheltenham Gold Cup, no blinding realisation that he was about to collect the prize that racing's professionals covet most dearly. He had convinced himself of victory much earlier, as he approached the course. It was more an A419 through Cirencester moment.

"I really, really fancied him and all I could think of was winning on the way to Cheltenham," he says. "I was always happy throughout the race and I always thought he was going to win.

"When everyone else was getting racing it was getting hard work just keeping him cantering. He's a very high class horse. He does find things easier than other horses.

"Of course, Liverpool was different, but even after the first few fences in the National I could tell my horse was loving it. I certainly could not have said then that I was going to win, but I thought I was going to finish. I just didn't know I was going to finish in front."

These victories were reward not only for Culloty, but also for Henrietta Knight and Terry Biddlecombe, the team behind Best Mate and the couple who have nurtured the rider from raw amateur to stable jockey at their Oxfordshire yard.

Biddlecombe is happier handing out barbed wire than bouquets and, on frosty mornings at West Lockinge Farm, Culloty has no problem in getting his ears warmed up.

"I still tell him," Biddlecombe says. "You never stop learning in this game. A lot of jockeys think they know it all in two minutes. I'm still learning myself by looking at jockeys' mistakes. Jim has come a long way. He used to fire his horses at the fences. He was a bit erratic, trying a bit too hard. But he's listened and he's improved. You couldn't wish for a better stable jockey. He's at his peak now."

It has been a circuitous route to get, at the age of 28, to this summit. Jim Culloty does not have the archetypal Irish background, for while his father did have horses in training, he was not a man of the turf. Culloty Jnr might himself have joined the family accountancy business in Killarney, in which his sister and two brothers are also involved, but, during a year off, he rode a few point-to-point winners. Suddenly, being an accountant did not seem quite so racy.

By the age of 18, Culloty was on the point-to-point circuit in Devon and facing a daunting realisation. "I left home thinking I could ride," he says. "But I couldn't. When I started riding in point-to-points I remember thinking 'Jesus Christ, this isn't as easy as people think'."

Culloty did not arrive on the bigger stage in an explosion of sulphur. It was another three years until fellow jockey Mick Fitzgerald introduced him to Ms Knight and, by the summer of 1995, he was the stable amateur. Next season he was champion amateur at 22 with 40 winners, more than double the score of his nearest rival.

By now, Culloty was fairly sure he was performing a little better. And around this time should be the most bountiful period of his career in the saddle. "I'm happy with the way I'm riding," he says. "Terry has given me a hard time in the past. After the Grand National I could hardly wait until Terry gave me my next bollocking just so that I could ask him how many Nationals he'd won."

For his seasonal reappearance Best Mate takes on four rivals in the Peterborough Chase at Huntingdon this afternoon. The domestic opposition looks covered, but a foreign ogre has emerged in the shape of the giant Douze Douze, who returns from the leg problems which have absented him from the racecourse for the last two years. Before incapacitation he was the best four-year-old chaser in France.

"Of course if Guillaume Macaire says he's the best chaser he's ever trained then I'll have to treat him with the utmost respect," Culloty says. "But if he goes and beats Best Mate I can tell you it will make him a wonder horse."

This is a notably different assignment from the Blue Riband. You get blue language though if you suggest to Culloty that his mount could now be damagingly inconvenienced by a flat, two-and-a-half-mile journey with the emphasis on speed.

"The year [2001] the Festival was called off with foot and mouth he was odds-on favourite for the Arkle months before the race. At that time they said he wouldn't get the Gold Cup trip in a million years. Now they're telling me two and a half is too short for him."

They used to worry about another horse like this, an animal who successfully stepped up and down in distance in defiance of the so-called knowledgeable. As they step out on the next leg of their great voyage today, Best Mate can probably bear comparison with Desert Orchid.