Silvestre de Sousa: Outsider who lost the top job – and found himself champion

From arriving in Europe with nothing De Sousa worked his way up to become Godolphin’s rider of choice, only to be dropped a year ago. Kevin Garside meets a boy from Brazil whose appetite for work has kept him on the inside track

Jockey Silvestre de Sousa at home in Suffolk, with horse Leo and Lucy the terrier (Si Barber)

This is a day for Hermes shoes and designer suits, and there is a wardrobe full of those, befitting a man at the top of his trade. Silvestre de Sousa’s father-in-law, Christopher, holds arms akimbo to illustrate the wall-to-wall nature of the champion jockey-elect’s sartorial indulgence, all made to measure in Dubai.

The passion for dandy threads appears anomalous when set against his appetite for hard graft. A day off for De Sousa is a lost opportunity. It is as though he has left a gap for someone to fill. This is perhaps a legacy of the pitiless sporting culture in Brazil and the oversubscribed racing milieu in Sao Paulo, where De Sousa rode out bareback.

“Everyone in sport at home is very hungry. If you are no good you get ignored. I grew up with that attitude. There are a lot of good jockeys but there is just not the same opportunity, maybe one ride a day in Sao Paulo. There might be 50 jockeys lining up wanting a ride,” he says.

We are sitting round the island in the De Sousa family kitchen, a space awash with a sense of family and community, fusing as it does Brazilian and Irish rhythms. De Sousa is married to Vicky, the daughter of a Kildare farmer and a horsewoman of some eminence in her youth when she was apprenticed to David Nicholls, and won the Gosforth Park Cup on the ungovernable giant of a horse, Peace Offering.

They worked within a couple of miles of each other in Ireland when De Sousa first took a punt on a career in Europe at Dermot Weld’s Curragh yard but never coincided. Yet on his first day at work with Nicholls in Yorkshire he was set to work in the same stable block and romance followed them through that sliding door.

De Sousa engaged patiently in a host of media obligations on Thursday relating to today’s Ascot showpiece, the stage of his coronation as the Stobart Flat Jockeys’ Champion on QIPCO British Champions Day. A Channel 4 Racing camera crew were in the house early, there was a phone interview with Radio 4 and, lastly, a sitdown with The Independent.

The kitchen of their Newmarket home is a nod to the farming background they share and it is always full of people. De Sousa does not mind the bustle, it is the pomp he could do without. “I’m embarrassed at the fuss,” he says. “I just want to get on and race.”

Indeed, a year ago he was on the wrong end of the fairy tale, let go by Godolphin after a three-year stint as retained jockey. “Losing the Godolphin job made Silvestre fight even harder. This year he has really done that,” interjects Vicky. That and the otherness that comes with feeling forever the outsider. “When you arrive from a different country people never quite know what to make of you. I still feel that I’m trying to break into someone else’s environment,” De Sousa says, sliding a scone in my direction.

His mother-in-law, Stephanie, offers me butter. Vicky offers me tea. In a distant corner sits his mother, Estelina, surrounded by other Brazilian family members. Estelina has not seen her son in four years and is making her first trip to England to share in today’s celebrations. She is overwhelmed by the green carpet covering the Newmarket landscape.

He had no idea when he returned from a meeting at Leicester last week that his mother had made the trip. She was hiding beneath the kitchen island, which was not hard since she is shorter than Silvestre and he stopped growing at 5ft. Vicky shows me a video she took of the reunion. Her husband enters the kitchen, pink shirt cut tightly against his torso revealing a Beckhamesque six-pack and pecs. “Shame he is not a foot taller,” she jokes. And then up pops mother, triggering in her son a smile as wide as the Amazon delta.

It is 13 years since he first set foot on European soil speaking not a word of English. “It was cold and wet. I felt like getting on the next plane home. You get up every morning, walk on the grass and get wet feet. I wasn’t used to it. The food was strange, mash potatoes and chips. I had no English, so that was hard. The first words I learnt were swear words, obviously. They began with an ‘f’.”

The experiment with Weld furnished him with a second language but not a single ride in two years. A chance meeting with Nicholls at the Curragh convinced him to give England a crack. He was notionally on his way back to Brazil, thinking he would give it a couple of weeks in Yorkshire before heading back across the Equator. Enter Vicky. Cue convulsions.

Their undeclared assignations proved awkward for their employer, as did the emergence of De Sousa as a proper player with a ferocious work ethic. Nicholls had a son who was just as eager to please in the saddle. In the end something had to give, and it wouldn’t be the scion.

De Sousa was cut loose again. As a freelance with an agent just as busy as him, he racked up the rides and the winners, passing the century mark in 2010 and falling just four short in the race for the champion’s crown in 2011. The pursuit of Paul Hanagan, though fruitless in one sense, did yield a dividend in the shape of Godolphin. Retention by a super stable is the holy grail of the jockey. That it didn’t develop as it might was an obvious disappointment.

De Sousa redoubled his efforts. “I’m not afraid of anything,” he says. “I stand my own ground. That is the key. If people swear at me I swear back. I have been doing that all my life. It is a Brazilian trait, maybe. I lost a big job, I have no back-up and then end up being champion jockey. It’s funny how things turn around.”

The stats heading to Ascot read 132 winners from 730 rides. His victory on 50-1 shot Arabian Queen, inflicting a sole defeat by a neck on the Derby and Arc winner Golden Horn in the Juddmonte at York in August, stands out. “You don’t have favourite horses as such, the good ones all give you good moments and it is them that you remember. It’s all about the moment.

“You ride a winner for a trainer today and tomorrow finish second. No good. It’s short-lived. You are only as good as your last win.”

Typically, De Sousa heads to Ascot thinking winners, not his meeting with Lester Piggott and last year’s incumbent Richard Hughes in the parade ring at the start of play. It is an attitude that must, you imagine, gain entry into one magic circle or another. De Sousa is demonstrably too good to be riding unattached for long.

“I will try to win all the races if I can,” he says. “We’ll see. It could open new opportunities. Maybe something comes along, someone will offer me a big job. Ultimately, you need the horses. If you don’t have them it doesn’t matter how good you are.”

The Stobart Flat Jockeys’ Championship concludes at QIPCO British Champions Day at Ascot today. For tickets go to www.britishchampionsseries.com