Thornton assortment

IT’S nearly 25 years since Backtrack carried a piece on Andrew Thornton, then a promising apprentice jockey with the legendary (and laconic) Arthur Stephenson.

The interview was at his parents’ home – the exquisitely named Bog Hall, near Sedgefield – and proved a jolly occasion.

“I’m the one who reads your column,” said Andrew, then leading the amateur jockeys’ table with 11 winners from 37 rides.

It was December 1992 and he was 20. Almost a quarter of a century later, he’s still in the saddle, approaching 1,000 winners and facing a bit of a dilemma over just when that champagne moment might be.

“The Racing Post says I’m on 986. My dad says it’s 988 and he’s kept a record of every winner I’ve ever ridden,” he tells Marcus Armytage in the Telegraph.

Whatever the total, he’s determined to stay in the saddle until that grand moment arrives.

Andrew was a Barnard Castle School boy, played fly half for both school and county, left at 16 to muck in – and muck out – with Stephenson at Leasingthorne. Still he rates Stivvie the greatest influence on his career, still considers him “a genius.”

He’d ridden his first winner, Wrekin Hill, in a steeplechase at Sedgefield and again featured in Backtrack in 2003 after completing the set – a winner on all 40 National Hunt courses – with a close-to-home triumph at Catterick.

He’s had five broken collar bones, a broken leg – “two plates, 17 screws” – twice broken his arm, twice several ribs and partially ruptured a cruciate ligament.

Clearly a man who believes in getting back on the horse, he’s also one of the few jockeys who rides in contact lenses – known in the weighing room as Lensio or, less sympathetically, Blindman. “I always tell them I’m going down the inner because there’s a white rail there,” he says.

He was also in the paper last year after he and his partner Yvonne Dennis, a florist in Easingwold, kept secret from guests at their son Harry’s baptism that it was to be their wedding service, as well.

“People gasped,” said the Echo.

“I didn’t want to get carried away,” said Yvonne. Their “honeymoon” was a day’s racing at Sedgefield.

Though he chiefly rides for stables in the south, they now live at Rainton, near Thirsk. Andrew has also become a speaker and broadcaster, engaged by 5 Live to help cover this year’s Cheltenham Festival.

Frustratingly, however, efforts to catch up with one of the racing game’s great stayers – or, indeed, with his dad – have thus far proved fruitless. These days, probably, he doesn’t just not read my column, he doesn’t read my emails, either.

KATE Avery’s equally elusive, though it was great to see her on the national news on Sunday evening – her first major international cross-country win, in an event in Edinburgh, after twice taking silver in the European Championships. Mo Farah was but second in the men’s race.

Kate’s still with Shildon Running Club, a relatively small outfit making huge strides. Her victory, she told the BBC, was in memory of her dad, Brian, who died last year.

“He’s still my biggest supporter. I know he’ll have been pushing me around out there. That’s why I ran so well.”

The family’s from Newton Aycliffe. Kate’s been at Iona College in the US, is now at Loughborough University, is acclimatised to altitude training – even higher than Eldon Bank – and aims for Rio in the summer.

“She’s been with us since she was 11 or 12 and I think it was quite easy to spot that she had real potential,” says former running club secretary Neil Wood. “It’s great that she’s retained her loyalty to Shildon.”

Sadly, it hasn’t been possible to catch up with her. Messages to current club officials have gone unreturned, even Twitter falls silent. The young lady from a small town athletics club has done wonderfully well: we wait with much interest to see what Kate does next.

DEREK Newton, one of the nicest men in sport – and the most indomitable – has died. Once said in the Backtrack column to have been a veteran of more operations than the US 7th Armoured Division, he was 82.

He’d had a quadruple heart bypass 26 years ago. “It took an awful lot to get my dad down, but he was beaten in the end,” says Graeme, his son.

Derek kept goal for Shildon and Evenwood in the Northern League, for several village teams around his North Yorkshire home and was also an enthusiastic village cricketer – simultaneously chairman, groundsman and treasurer of Colburn CC and broadening his CV by playing for them when he was 65.

“Football was his first love,” says Graeme. “He’d sometimes fall out of love with the way that football had become, but he never fell out of love with football.”

Periodically, he’d pop up in the column, a fund of good stories – like the one about the North Riding Cup semi-final between Brompton and Grangetown Boys Club, from Middlesbrough, abandoned when the score was 7-6.

That’s how many players had survived the cold before the referee had mercy. Brompton, Derek’s team, won the replay.

Ever cheerful, he still rode his motorbike around his home in Gayles – above Richmond – and, in summer, his push bike, too.

His best tale – once shared in the middle of Reeth Showfield – may have been about a Northern League match up at Stanley United when some of the women behind the goal made disparaging comments about Derek’s legs.

“They’re better than you lot’s,” said Derek – perhaps unwisely – an observation swiftly followed by a high-heeled shoe hurled in his direction and, over the fence, by its owner and several of her coven.

Derek sought the protective custody of the ref. “And to think,” he said, “that people only remember Stanley because of the cold.”

His funeral is at Hipswell parish church, near Richmond, at 11am tomorrow.

THREE other former Shildon players of Derek’s generation – Eddie Swift, Keith Hopper and “Little” Alan Brown – will be back at the Dean Street ground tomorrow night for a nostalgic talk-in organised by the indefatigable gentlemen of the Durham Amateur Football Trust. Admission’s free, kick-off from 7pm, and we’ll doubtless raise a glass to Derek.