Sir Anthony Peter McCoy is a record-breaking jockey, with over 4000 career wins and an extraordinary list of achievements and honours, including an unprecedented 20 Lester Awards and a record 20 Champion Jockey titles. In 2010, McCoy was named BBC Sports Personality of the Year, becoming the first jockey to do so. He has officially been awarded three Guinness World Records, though his unrivalled achievements stretch far beyond this.

McCoy’s first win came in 1992 at the age of 17, at Thurles racecourse in Ireland. Moving to England in 1994, he earned the Champion Jockey title just a year later for the most race wins across the season. His career from that moment was one of unparalleled and often virtually unchallenged success. Race wins over his career include the Grand National, the Cheltenham Gold Cup, the Queen Mother Champion Chase, and the Champion Hurdle. He surpassed 4000 wins racing at Towcester on Mountain Tunes in November 2013, and would eventually accrue a total of 4,358. He had raced over 13,000 times across his career when he retired from the sport in April 2015.

With his win of the publicly-voted Sports Personality of the Year, McCoy beat competitors representing more mainstream sports and proved racing’s enduring popularity amongst viewers across the country. He was shortlisted again for the award in 2013, and won RTE’s Irish Sports Personality of the Year that same year. McCoy received an MBE and then an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, and was knighted in 2016 for services to horse racing. He has hosted for BBC Radio 5 Live, released several volumes of his autobiography, and has now turned his hand to fiction with the racing-world thrillers Taking the Fall and Narrowing the Field.