Racing: Maguire's Festival incentive

Sue Montgomery discovers why an unlucky rider will be avoiding ladders

TWENTY-THREE days to go until the Cheltenham Festival and Adrian Maguire is counting every one. Extraordinarily, one of the best jump jockeys in the business has missed his sport's showpiece occasion for the past three years. It would be cruel fate indeed should lightning strike for the fourth time.

Outrageous fortune is, however, part of any rider's lot, as Maguire knows more than most. He has already missed eight weeks of this season because of injury; his personal countdown could start only after his successful return to action on Tuesday. But after giving the arm damaged by two falls in December a thorough shake-down as he punched home two winners at Leicester he pronounced all systems were go towards Prestbury Park.

It was a combination of bad luck and over-ambitious judgement that gave Maguire his most recent spell on the sidelines. He cracked the radius of his right arm just above the wrist in a freak incident at Sandown, where his mount Mulligan came down after being distracted by an arm-waving spectator, but then, barely three weeks later, broke it properly in a fall from Hurricane Lamp at Kempton two days after Christmas.

"In retrospect, I probably was a bit too eager to come back," said the Irishman, "but it was a big meeting, and I wanted to ride. I took the chance, and it didn't come off. But it feels grand now. The last X-rays showed plenty of callus on the break, making it really strong. I could even have come back a bit sooner, but this time I wanted to be absolutely sure."

It was at Cheltenham in 1991 that Maguire, then 19, really burst on to the jump racing scene. That season's point-to-point champion in Ireland, he was called up at the 11th hour by none other than Martin Pipe, no bad judge of a horse or a horseman, to partner Omerta in the amateurs' Kim Muir Chase. The pair duly won and followed up in the Irish National the following month.

Once the wraps were off his talent, a move to the bigger stage of Britain was inevitable and his rise was rapid. Maguire joined Toby Balding and returned to Cheltenham a year after his first visit to force his stable's rank outsider Cool Ground to victory in the Gold Cup itself; a ride, though, that earned him an enforced holiday from the stewards for excessive use of the whip. By the 1993-94 season he had stepped into the No 1 job at David Nicholson's powerful yard and went down by just three winners to the man who had vacated it, Richard Dunwoody, in a memorable battle for the jockeys' championship, throwing his leg over a record 916 mounts in the process.

Maguire, a green-keeper's son, one of eight children, from Kilmessan, in Co Meath, has been fiercely competitive since the days when, as a tot with his age barely in double figures, he was booting home more than 200 winners on Ireland's pony racing circuit. Add now commitment, dedication and professionalism. To miss the most important three days of the season not once, but thrice, does not sit well with him.

The first time it was out of anyone's hands; Maguire had returned to Ireland to mourn the sudden death of his mother. In 1996 he was unlucky, breaking a collarbone 11 days before the Festival when a normally sound jumper fell and he was kicked by a following horse. Last year he broke an arm late in February, off a novice chaser.

He is taking nothing on chance on the road back to Cheltenham. "I always salute magpies and I will try not to walk under ladders," he said. "More seriously, I'll try to avoid dodgy jumpers. I won't be riding horses that have more letters than numbers in front of their names."

Most of the leading jockeys take a conservative attitude in the run-up to what they regard as not only their Olympics but a considerable potential earner; Tony McCoy, for instance, netted more than pounds 12,500 for his Gold Cup win last year. "You can't wrap yourself up completely in cotton wool," said Maguire, "and once you do decide to ride a horse you give it 100 per cent. But it makes sense to pick your mounts carefully."

Maguire, a great team player, gritted his teeth and turned up to support Nicholson and his staff and owners at the past two Cheltenhams, despite the agonising frustration of watching other men riding his horses. "It's not really the money, though the cheque at the end of the month is quite nice," he said. "It's the glory, that moment when you punch the air and hear the cheers. Cheltenham winners are the ones you remember, and the ones you are remembered by."

The meeting opens on St Patrick's Day this year. Perhaps, this time, Maguire will have the luck of the Irish on his side.