New champion jockey Billy Loughnane will mark his historic achievement with a low-key celebration. The 20-year-old became the youngest rider in over a century to win the championship, beating five-time titleholder Oisin Murphy, and was presented with the trophy at Ascot on Saturday.
Loughnane rode 159 winners in the title race, which started on May 2, and is planning to mark the feat later.
Family dinner plans
"I'm going out for dinner with my family on Saturday evening and people who have been key to me through it all," he said on a Great British Racing media call earlier this week. "I'm not a big drinker or partier or anything like that."
When Flat racing is back in Britain on Monday, Loughnane intends to take seven rides at Southwell to aim for his next target. He matched his yearly best of 223 winners earlier this week but wants to better the record of 269 victories achieved by Sir Gordon Richards in 1947.
Record ambitions
"It's in my sights," he said. "I'm definitely going to be giving it my best shot until the start of December and hopefully I'll be in striking distance then."
Loughnane was booked to ride four horses at Ascot, which rounds off the season with £4.35 million in prize money on offer. As well as his championship heroics, the former pony racer enjoyed a brilliant partnership with three-year-old thoroughbred Bow Echo.
Guard of honour at Ascot
George Boughey's trainee was the first horse since Frankel (2011) to land Newmarket's 2,000 Guineas, the St James's Palace Stakes at Royal Ascot and Goodwood's Sussex Stakes in the same season.
Loughnane, who had his first success on Swiss Rowe, a horse trained by his father Mark, at Wolverhampton in November 2022, was signing autographs for his fans at the Berkshire course this afternoon. He was given a guard of honour by his weighing room colleagues as he went to collect his award.
"They (the racegoers) were queueing up like you're a movie star," said Callum Helliwell on Sky Sports Racing. "Look it's great I've got a lot of good people coming to see the racing today and anything I can do to get more people going is fantastic," Loughnane told him, before praising his agent Tony Hind for assisting his title bid.
