Richard Dunwoody now knows the horsebox and stabling area of Cheltenham racecourse more than he really needs to. The Irish Times knows this because after racing last week, The Irish Times made him drive around there for 20 minutes seeking The Irish Times.

"I'll meet you at the top of the horsebox road half an hour after the last," the great man had said. "Then you can follow me home to Farringdon. But we'll have to move it. I have to do something for BBC Radio from there."

"No problem," said The Irish Times, nonchalantly trying to disguise a geographical disability that possibly only Ronald Reagan could understand. The result was inevitable. The reaction less so.

"Where the hell are you," was the reasonable enough request from the mobile phone. "Er, ahm, I don't know," was the pitifully weak reply.

Thus it was that Richard Dunwoody, the greatest jockey of this or possibly any generation, spent an hour, in between such frivolities as talking to millions on national radio, guiding a rudderless and panicky reporter through south-west England. Rudderless because the hired car's lights only ran on dims and panicky, well, it hardly needs spelling out.

Dunwoody is possibly the greatest all-round riding talent the hardest game of all has ever seen. Champion jockey, multiple winner of nearly every race worth mentioning, known to all as a perfectionist, known to many as The Prince and among his hard-bitten and unceremonious colleagues as simply The Dude. And rather like not playing pool with anyone who is named after a city, you don't mess with anyone known as The Dude. Especially this one.

In a sport whose unique demands can sometimes produce vertically challenged young men with the in-your-face machismo of a Noel Gallagher, Dunwoody remains the sort of enigmatic figure that could on the surface be the central character Dick Francis has used for 30 years.

You know the type. Quiet, yet enormously self possessed. Teak tough, but with the mental agility of a Wittgenstein. In short the sort of man that every TV-glazed, pizza-gobbling, Dick Francis-reading punter imagines himself to be even as he rises wheezily from the sofa.

But it's never that simple. When we eventually reached his house, he produced a bottle of champagne (a favourite jockey tipple because of its few calories), but it was impossible to ignore the black weighing scales next to the fridge. To judge by its owner's lean, almost 5 ft 10 in frame, such positioning could do wonders for dieters everywhere. The effect right next to the cause. The duality of life as a jockey.

Dunwoody's antennae for weight changes is now so well developed, he can evaluate the effect of a meal just by looking at the menu. "I was 10st 3lbs leaving the races today, I'll be 10-5 when I get there tomorrow," he says, before adding that almost daily saunas and hot baths are de rigeur if wants to continue at more than a stone below what he estimates his natural weight is. If he doesn't, he can feel it immediately.

"I was 10-8 the other day and I felt almost bloated. It's a difficult feeling to explain but I just knew I was too heavy. Forty five minutes in the sauna and I was back to 104 and I felt better for it," he grins as if scalding himself in a sweat box is as normal as breathing and not a very personal harking back to the desperately-obsessive days of chasing the championship with the terror of the scales haunting his every move.

Now that the championship obsession is sated and that worryingly hunted look has been replaced by pleasant alertness, his weight is more settled, an irony not lost on Dunwoody. But that doesn't mean he can escape the sauna even on Christmas day. It is a brutal regime in itself but as a prelude to hurling your soul over fences five or six times a day and hoping the horse will follow it can beggar imagination.

Fences or hurdles, each one a real danger. Injury and pain inevitable. Beating the weight may be an effort of will but as nothing to the effort required to beat the mind. In the circumstances the unkind might suggest that a lack of imagination in a jump jockey is a positive advantage. As a thoughtful and articulate man, Dunwoody could never be accused of that and the battle is a real one, however airily discussed.

"I read some of the reports in the newspapers and see such and such a jockey was just `shaken' in a fall," he laughs easily. "He was "shaken'. I looked at Carl Llewellyn yesterday and he was in bits after being down in a novice chase. He eventually came back holding his arm and as white as a sheet but still went out again two or three more times. We are always riding for a fall. We can't look at it any other way.

"Sure, there is fear sometimes. Recently I said to someone at Taunton, a track I don't enjoy riding around, that for a two-mile novice chase there the best thing a jockey can do before going out is take his brain out and hang it on the peg, because if down at the start he starts thinking about what might happen, he shouldn't be there. You have to control the fear.

"The thing is I cannot be halfhearted because that's when it really can go wrong. If I accept a ride, I've got to give it a ride, not so much because of being fair to the owner or the trainer but to be fair to myself. The one thing I would hate is to get a bad fall off a bad horse in a bad race. That would be so stupid. If you get hurt off a good horse in a good race, fair enough.

"Sure, I do think sometimes `this is flippin' stupid' but if I kept thinking like that I'd have given up long ago. Somewhere along the line a rider has to lose that imagination, if there's any there to lose!"

All of which begs the obvious question, why does Dunwoody keep going? What, after achieving everything anyway, is there to gain? Channel 4's Secret Lives programme on Lester Piggott hinted that that great jockey's competitive instincts were heightened by honest-to-God greed, but while Dunwoody easily admits to making a good living, it isn't just the money.

"I mean, you look at Lester and all these accounts around the world but where would he ever spend it anyway? I think it's the competition. Okay, a jockey wins and he gets his rewards but it's possibly more about putting one over on someone else in a race. I got a great kick out of winning two close finishes today, I'd have been gutted had I been beaten. I had plans for both and they worked and that is very satisfying," he says.

Plans for a £5,000 novice chase and a £3,500 handicap hurdle. Proof that the game still holds its grip and how Dunwoody intends to keep on grasping it back for the forseeable future. There may be no more championship races, but as one Irish trainer recently observed admiringly after Dunwoody manoeuvred his way on to a pretty ordinary ride in a pretty ordinary race: "That is one hungry hoor."

The response to such a suggestion is immediate. "I have to be hungry to do what I do. If I ride, I want to ride well and I want to ride winners. It's the same for Pat Eddery, it was the same for Lester Piggott going racing at 59. Yes, I've won races but they're not relevant now. They're in the past," he says before admitting that while defeat may not now send him into agonies of analysis as much as it used to, this is only relative.

"I don't brood on losing as much as I used to, but sometimes I head off by myself and deal with it myself. It's the best way. Any jockey worth his salt hates losing," he says. So much so that last summer, Dunwoody off-handedly said to his agent "wouldn't it be nice to give Anthony (McCoy) a run for his money in the championship".

Dunwoody, after epic battles with Peter Scudamore and Adrian Maguire, has more right than anyone to have the title T-shirt and ponder where he's been and what he's done, but the remark, while casual, shows how near the surface the competitive instincts bubble.

So maybe it isn't that surprising that when Dunwoody leaves the racetrack, he goes to another one for kicks. Last year was Dunwoody's first attempt at driving Formula First racing cars in the EuroCar series. Next month he starts testing for the new season, which will last from March to September.

Two crashes in testing last term, one when a joint in the front suspension snapped sending him off at almost 100 mph and another when he braked too late and sent his car barrelling three times, haven't broken that famous nerve and have only encouraged him to keep improving.

"It's a hobby, but a serious one and one I feel I can get better at. Next season will be vital if I continue in the game," he says before animatedly discussing the nerve of drivers such as Gerhard Berger, Damon Hill and his friend David Coulthard, while dismissing queries about whether it's wise to spend precious free time pursuing even more thrills. Is normality that boring for him?

"What's normality though?" He smiles, before conceding he does have a very low boredom threshold. "It's competition and it's a kick. A challenge to see if I can improve."

In the wonderful triviality of horse racing, though, there are those who feel there is no better package of all the skills that make a jump jockey, especially in the greatest skill of all, the setting up of a racehorse at 35 mph to cross a fence with the minimum of disruption. The further away from a fence that you see the correct stride for your horse, the better. A split second can make all the difference. In a game of guts and drive, it's a task that requires the touch and feel of a surgeon.

"There's no advice about how to do it, really, or no book to read, and some days I'm not tuned in enough and I don't see the stride as well as I should. For me, through a race I'm always looking at the ground line, the bottom of the fence ahead. There's no point looking at the top of it," he declares.

It's such a talent that has seen his services in even more demand in Ireland in recent seasons, leading a string of English-based riders here on a regular basis and causing some resentment among the locally-based jockeys.

"I remember there was tension about it through the 1980s with Tom Taaffe and all those boys, and while comments now about us going over are tongue-in-cheek, there is a little bit of edge to them too. But I've got my business to run and if it takes me to Ireland I have to go. There are a lot of Irish jockeys moving to England to ride and nobody says anything, so I think it's just ordinary resentment at being taken off certain horses," he says.

It is, after all, a tough game, the hardest show in town. The one consolation to his fellow professionals, however, is that without The Dude, the show really would be Hamlet without The Prince.