16 June 2026
The real excitement with Billy Loughnane is not what he has already done but what is up ahead. Starting at Royal Ascot on Tuesday.
Mind you, at 20, he’s already got plenty on the slate. Champion pony racer, champion apprentice, a record 223 winners last year and 5 weeks ago becoming the youngest jockey this century to land a British Classic when he won the 2,000 Guineas on Bow Echo whom he rides again in the St James Palace Stakes tomorrow.
That’s not all. Over the five Royal Ascot days his agent Tony Hind has him booked for 21 rides and declares him a generational talent. Hind is no dreamer. He has won 9 jockeys championships with four jockeys Richard Hughes, Ryan Moore, Jim Crowley, and William Buick. Hind confidently declares that Loughnane will be his fifth rider giving him his 10th championship. “I told his father that jockeys like him only come along once every 20 years,” says Tony who is a force in his own right having started his agent’s career when still a stable lad booking jockey’s rides from a telephone box. With 89 winners so far Billy Loughnane leads the whole years standings by numbers but is currently 20 behind the super talented Oisin Murphy in the official April to October Flat Championship. “Billy can still win it,” says Tony, “you’ll see him hit a hot spot. I have been 20 behind and still won. I never say it’s over until it is mathematically impossible.”
When so much is happening so quickly you must go to the source and in Billy’s case it means crossing the Severn at Bewdley and travelling on past the old Norman Church at Rock Cross to where Mark and Clare Loughnane now train in 100 Worcestershire rolling acres and it’s immediately clear from whence their older son’s talent’s stem and how strong his quite astonishing commitment has been from the beginning.
Mark is a tall, outgoing Irishman whose link with racing came from his father knocking in the hurdles at Thurles. The addiction has seen him work his way up through various trainers before starting on his own in Tipperary and winning with his first runner at the Galway Festival, moving to Shropshire in 2011 and to the present 50 horse base three years later.
Clare is a calm, clear-eyed bus driver’s daughter from Winchester bright enough to become an international buyer at Debenhams with zero interest in racing until a friend persuaded her to go to the 2005 Cheltenham Festival where she fell for this lanky Irish charmer. “She manages, me, Billy, Billy’s brother Jack, she does everything,” says Mark. “We wouldn’t be anything without her.”
What they had in their younger son soon became apparent. “He was a dream of a child,” says Mark, “and horses always came first. When he was seven or eight, he was already into analysis. He would watch the TV and say someone rode a great race or someone should have kicked. He knew more about horses than I did.”
The start of Billy’s climb may have been obvious, Lester Piggott, Frankie Dettori and Ryan Moore were all jockey or trainer’s sons, and his own ability and determination may have got him to the top anyway, but beyond his parents, there are two other people without whom young Loughnane would not have been where he is today.
George Boughey’s is Bow Echo’s cool, calculating public school educated trainer who forswore his degree in business management for a racing education in Australia and Newmarket before setting up seven years ago with just four horses and a portacabin.
His Loughnane connection is well known albeit not the start which saw Mark asking him if apprentice Billy could come and ride out a couple of mornings a week and the boy duly turning up at 6 o’clock next Monday having been driven over by his mother starting at 6 am which met Clare getting him into the car at Rock Cross three pre-dawn hours earlier.
But Richard Prince is a name new to those outside pony racing circles. He is a Dorset farmer who wanted to remain in the sport when his son Philip graduated to racehorses so kept the ponies and lent them to aspiring pilots on the terms that they must look after the ponies themselves, they must ring him up every week and win or lose, they must come back with a smile on their face.
It’s an extraordinary piece of altruism and Harry Cobden and Tom Marquand are amongst the many jockeys who have benefited. “It’s very rewarding,” says Richard Prince by explanation. “You see children grow up to be young men. Billy was the best of all the kids. At 14 he kept a handicapping book of all the ponies, he was the most tactical.”
If that sounds extreme so too is the routine Billy devised as a 15 year old to manage two ponies, ride with the racing string and deliver on his mother’s agreed deal to take (and pass) his 9 GCSEs. “I used to set my alarm at 4 am,” he remembered smilingly in George Boughey’s now capacious new office building, “ride the two ponies up the gallops with a head torch to finish by 7am. Then the two racehorses, rush to the shower and run in my pants and socks to my Mum with the engine running and my uniform in the car.”
He had been riding Bow Echo that morning, would be off to his usual hour’s work out at Peter O’Sullevan House before the trek for 6 races at Wolverhampton in a car which has done 85,000 miles in his last 1300 ride year. That’s the physical commitment but the intellectual one is even more striking. There weren’t many ponies to keep a book on but the racehorse jockey still keeps a log on every ride every day.
“Yes,” he says pulling out his mobile to reveal and endless list of names and comments and neatly dialling up the filly Soprano who gave him his second Royal Ascot victory two years ago. “I have a driver so the car is my down time and I type these in on the way home.”
It’s an extraordinary schedule for a young athlete on the highly rationed diet his tall frame demands. Is there not danger of burn out trying to handle the twin ambitions of the grind of the championship and the finesse of the elite events. “I am only 20 years old,” he says wide-eyed and disarming. “I’m not worried about it. I’ll have as much attention this evening at Wolverhampton, as I will have going to Ascot on the Tuesday. I want to ride winners every day and I’m bored when I’m not riding.”
So talent, ambition, charisma and connections give Billy Loughnane a real chance of making it to the top. But the racing game can be the toughest of snakes and ladders. 37 years ago I wrote, all too prophetically in view of his subsequent uniquely wonderful highs and unhappily public woes, that for the young Frankie Dettori the sky was the limit “if the snakes don’t bite.” Wish Billy Loughnane climbs not cobras up ahead.