Grand National winner Ryan Mania: how pressure to lose weight made me retire

Ryan Mania does not paint a pretty picture when he is asked about his day‑to‑day life as a jockey. If the public best remember him for winning the 2013 Grand National atop the 66-1 outsider Auroras Encore, privately the Scot’s career was blighted by dieting and dehydration as he attempted to make a competitive weight; an issue that ultimately led to him retiring from horse racing last November at the age of 25.

“On countless occasions I’d have to lose half a stone overnight,” says Mania. “As a jockey, you have no life. Everything is based around keeping your weight down. The whole time you’re always thinking about it. No one sees that.”

Now that he is detached from the sport, away from the pressure of owners and trainers, the 25-year-old is able to speak more candidly about the efforts jockeys continue to put themselves through simply to reach the starting gate. Weight-loss techniques would include “running with a sweatsuit, sweating in the bath, sweating in the sauna at the races. Basically just sweating, trying to lose as much fluid as you can.”

He adds: “I would pull it together going out and I would get by in the race because of the adrenaline. Immediately after the race, when I let myself down, that’s when I started feeling bad. I’ve had days where I’ve ridden and I’ve struggled to stand up after I’ve got off the horse. That’s just sheer dehydration. Complete exhaustion.

“The industry puts the pressure on you. And you do it to yourself. There’s a lot of time that I could have turned around and said to the trainer or the owner: ‘Look, I can’t move that weight, I can’t ride that horse.’ But if you turn that race down, you might lose other rides because of it. The whole time you’re trying to keep the trainers happy and ride lighter.”

Mania was not alone in his struggle – “the majority of jockeys are constantly dehydrated” – but standing at 5ft 11in, his bigger frame put him under greater pressure. “My parents are both quite well-built,” he explains. “Some people are just naturally skinny, naturally small. But no nutritionist is going to fix that when your body has to be two stone lighter than it wants to be.”

Mania may dismiss the importance of nutrition but a report this year by Dr Philip Pritchard, a former jockey and trainer, was scathing about jockeys’ eating habits and suggested that concentrating on breaking the starvation-stuffing cycle is key to jockeys mending their metabolism and remaining healthy.

Mania, however, would instead like to see an increase in the 10st minimum weight limit for jump jockeys. “If you raised it by half a stone, you’d help an awful a lot of people. People are always going to struggle, but I know if the weight had been put up I would have been able to race for another couple of years.”

Mania’s current weight is 11st 7lb. Working now for the Braes of Derwent Hunt in Northumberland, he says he is no longer the “grumpy, miserable bastard” that he was while riding.

This throwaway comment is said with a snigger, almost in jest, but there is a more serious point here: about the toll that such physical demands can have on jockeys. Indeed, 15 of the 20 jockeys tested by Pritchard were found to be suffering from depression and two were even thought to be potentially suicidal. Now Mania’s salary does not come at the expense of his health, he is able to go out for a meal with his young family and he does not spend his week travelling the length and breadth of the country “being judged”.

But for all the harrowing experiences, it is when Mania talks about racing itself that his voice comes to life. He revels in the memory of his unlikely triumph two years ago, in which he came through a 40-strong field to win by nine lengths.

“As we crossed the Melling Road for the last time, with two fences to go, I thought I might make the first four.”

Mania talks slowly here, as though he is reliving the moment. “Even as I was coming down the home straight, I thought someone would pass me. You never allow yourself to think you might win the National. There was a loose horse chasing me but I didn’t know that. For all I knew there was someone on it. Even when I watch the replay, I always think it’s someone else riding. I’m not sure it will ever sink in.”

It is obvious Mania retains a huge passion for the sport. Never was this more evident than on the day after his win at Aintree, when instead of continuing the celebrations, he rode on a low-value card at Hexham and suffered a heavy fall and with it a small fracture to the C7 vertebra at the bottom of his neck – “I felt paralysed, thinking: ‘Shit, what has happened to me?’” Two weeks later he was back in the saddle, doing what he loved.

Mania will watch Saturday’s Grand National with mixed emotions and he refuses to rule out a return to racing. “I miss it. There is no buzz like it. You’d have to be doing something pretty stupid to find that same feeling, skydiving or something. If my body allowed a return, you never know, but I doubt it. And if I was naturally 10 stone every morning, I would never have retired.”