Champion’s heroic comeback

Press, 30 April 1981, Page 26

Champion’s heroic comeback

Jumping riders are hard to match for their stoical qualities and for their acceptance of outrageous changes of fortune. And in that regard Bob Champion, who won the Grand National on Aldaniti on April 4, is something special. Twenty months, ago Champion was ill with cancer in two parts of his body. After an operation to remove a testicle and part of a ril, he jvas told he had eight months to live unless he Agreed to try a revolutionary form of chemo-therapy treatment. His doctors were hopeful that he would live but they feared he would hot be a jockey again. He spent five months Intermittently in and out of hospital, and' the three main (drugs that saved his life Caused the most horrifying tide effects including con-

stant vomiting, painful constipation, serious lung damage, and anorexia. He was warned that the drugs would make him sterile. He lost three stone in weight and lost all the hair on his head and body. Once, when he caught septicaemia, he was rushed back to hospital with a ternperature of 105 and perilously close to death. But all through the illness ’v* was sustained by the thought of riding Aldaniti in the Grand National. “I’d rather die in a race doing something I love than waste away lingering in hospital,” he told one of his despairing friends, tre English racing writer, Jonathan Powell. Sheer courage helped him through the darkest hours, and on January 1, 1980, he was able to leave hospital.

At first he was so weak he could hardly walk, but he soon started on a painful struggle to regain fitness. In April of last year he flew to the warmer climate in the United States, where he rode as many as 16 horses each morning and went through punishing routines at a health spa. He would run barefoot for miles to try and force some feeling back into his feet; and his hands,, too, presented problems in those early days because he could not grip t lings properly. On May 31, in Maryland, he rode in a race for the first time in 13 months and won on Double Reefed. It was the first in a series of stunning victories over the next 11 months, culminating in that dream result to the famous race at Aintree earlier this month.