Horse Racing: Baby-faced Buick Has Hunger to Match His Talent

They appear like swallows in the spring, and all too often, they vanish like them too. Fresh-faced, bright-eyed and slim enough to take 7lb off a horse which had only eight stone in the first place, the hot apprentice will be everywhere for the first few weeks or months, before their claim shrinks, their star starts to wane, and their trainers start to notice the new jockey from down the road, who's going to be the next big thing.

Occasionally, though, they survive and prosper. It is a question of attitude as much as talent, a willingness to keep working and improving even when it seems the stream of winners will never end, and on that basis, there must be every chance that 18-year-old William Buick will endure as a jockey long after his claim has expired.

Even Pop Idol has rarely fast-tracked a talent to prominence as swiftly as Buick, who had his first public ride last August, and rode his first winner in September. Success has followed success ever since, culminating in his first Royal Ascot winner, in the ultra-competitive Wokingham Handicap no less, just four days ago.

Yet as he reflected on that victory at Brighton yesterday, it was with the smart, realistic attitude of a rider who knows that the hard work is still to come.

"Everything," Buick said simply, when asked what he still needs to improve in his riding. "I'm claiming 5lb, and what I have to keep thinking is where I'd be if I wasn't claiming. You have to be critical of yourself. There's no point in you saying that something's all right when your boss has given you a bollocking.

"I spend a lot of time watching videos of my races, with my dad as well, looking for where I might have gone wrong. Everyone makes mistakes, and you have to admit it when you do. The best jockeys are the ones who make as few mistakes as possible."

Buick's father, Walter, was Norway's champion jockey for many years, and is now a much-respected race-reader for the Press Association. There was no pressure on William, though, to follow his dad into the family business.

"I was always around racing while I was growing up, but I wasn't forced into it at all, it was always what I wanted to do," he says. "I had a bit of a break from it between about 10 and 12, when I was going to school and playing football, but after that I got a pony and it was really a question of when I got a license rather than whether I did.

"I surprised myself a bit when I had my first ride. We've got a mechanical horse at the yard and I'd been on that a few times, but it's very different from being on a horse in a race. In training, I'd never pulled my stick out and then really pushed a horse out like I did on my first ride. Not long after that, I won my first race, and that was when I thought, this is what I really want to do."

Buick is attached to Andrew Balding's yard, but has ridden winners for a total of 21 different trainers so far. Balding's father Ian, meanwhile, has backed Buick to be the champion jockey by 2020, at odds of no less than 500-1.

"He's never talked to me about that," Buick says, "It can happen, of course, Ryan Moore showed that, but how can a 5lb claimer like me even talk about being the champion jockey?"

Buick is now within 10 winners of reducing his claim from 5lb to 3lb, which makes every success even more precious. "My agent's looking after that and he's got it all planned," he says. "We'll take it slowly, maybe not even ride every day and try to make sure that I've still got a 3lb claim for the big handicaps next year, but at the same time, I don't want to let people down who've been supporting me from day one."

A few minutes later, Buick went out to ride Lawyer To World, a horse with very doubtful stamina for the 10-furlong trip, in a claiming race. The early pace was poor, but Buick found the fastest part of the track, and Lawyer To World won going away. Horses just seem to run for William Buick, as they once did for young apprentices like Frankie Dettori and Ryan Moore. They will be doing so, you sense, for many seasons to come.