Tony McCoy is Roy of the Rovers on horseback. Tiger Woods in silks. His rise to the pantheon has been so sudden that those outside racing are just beginning to sample the extent of his celebrity. His supremacy has been so great and so unruffled that we are only now beginning to catch up with it and survey it.
Fastest jockey to 100 wins in a season, fastest to 200, maybe the first ever to 300 in a season. Youngest champion jockey since 1962. The man who took a 20 to 1 shot steaming home in the Gold Cup. Quickest (by a year) to ride 500 career winners. The future of jump racing lies hanging before him, waiting to be picked from the peg like this afternoon's racing silks.
In England, McCoy has never known a time when he wasn't champion jockey. Since becoming Champion Conditional Jockey in his first season he is so far ahead now in his pursuit of his third consecutive Champion Jockey title that he might retire tomorrow and still win.
In the weigh-room, McCoy loses his tie and scans the valets table for a copy of the Racing Post.
"No Post boys?"
"They never sent it in, Tone."
He shakes his head and returns to his corner.
Luke Harvey and Carl Llewellyn, the characters of this precinct, have yet to arrive and light the morning up with endless running gags about the night before. The boys compare bad dates like bad horses, stringing long losing runs together.
Then there is the steam-room set, the big men who struggle with their weight. McCoy spends half his life with Richard Dunwoody, Andy Thornton and Mick Fitzgerald. Melting.
The wonder of it isn't lost on him yet. Richard Dunwoody and Tony McCoy sitting in a sauna together. Men from either sides of a fractured place who worship one god, the one with four legs and a swishy tail.
"I idolised Richard," says McCoy, quietly lest the valets hear him and the slagging starts. "He was always the one for me. Trouble never touched us in Moneyglass and it would never occur to me that there were two sides. When we sit in the sauna we talk horses, owners, trainers and jockeys. With Billy Rock there'd be a bit of crack about the differences. With Woody it's just horses. He says to take it easy. Richard Dunwoody tellin' me to take it easy!"
Dunwoody, 10 years older and a few broken bones wiser, has a point and McCoy has half-heeded his old idol and eased off a little since the days when he shunted up and down the motorways of Britain in an elderly Peugeot van. He doesn't ride the wild ones anymore either.
"I've been lucky so far. A broken leg, fractured shoulder blades, a broken collar bone, done both wrists. Not too bad. You think about poor Shane Broderick and you can't imagine anything worse. I try not to get up on a bad horse anymore, although a good one will do you just as badly."
The day will bear him out. He rides two horses he hasn't ridden before in the last two races and wins on one. Earlier the shortest odds favourite of the day, ANC Express, throws him off at the third. No broken bones. He shrugs and walks away.
In the longer term he has tried to cut back on a lot of things which devoured his time and concentration. He tries to focus on the rides. Less of those jarring journeys which gross £85. More of those races which yield 10 per cent of the winner's cheque.
"I have somebody driving me to races. Dave Roberts, my agent, fixes up all my rides and keeps the trainers happy, Ronnie Beggan and Cameron McMillan do all my promotional stuff. Anything I can get somebody else to do for me I get them to do."
If he could get somebody to relax for him while he went racing he would probably do that too. Besides the odd meal in the company of jockeys, and the odd spin on a go-kart track, McCoy's life is Scandinavian monastic. Saunas and solitude.
He lives near Farringdon, with the Limerick jockey Barry Fenton, in a house fitted out for jockeys. That is it has two baths and a sauna and is scarcely lived in. Men Behaving Ascetically sort of thing.
"We'd hardly ever see each other, Barry and me. There's not much of a social life with racing. I don't smoke, I don't drink and women, well women are bad news."
Lest you think he is about to take out a harmonica and squeeze an aching blues tune out of it all, he brightens up, laughs at himself and offers qualifications and clarifications.
"You get to meet a lot of people and do things other people don't get to do. I had a girlfriend for about two years and she dumped me, so I'll give all that a miss now for a while. It's hard. She was living in Ireland. She wasn't getting as much time as she deserved so she just jumped ship. Can't blame her."
Can't blame her, indeed. The thing about Tony McCoy's brilliant career is that the past three years are merely prologue. He talks of his idols and mentions their ages by reflex. "Woody is 33. Graham Bradley, well Brad is three years older again. If you ride good horses and keep the discipline you can go till you want to stop really."
By the time Tony McCoy wants to stop the world may have stopped spinning.
Cheltenham, that frenetic world of horseflesh and hard cash, beckons. Last spring it was the scene of his greatest triumph as he piloted Mr Mulligan up the hill for a long-odds coup. One of the good weeks. He took home £36,400 in winnings.
You wealthy yet, Tony?
"Not really. The taxman is the only punter who never loses on me."
He has hired a house near the course and for company a few members of the Derry Senior Football team are coming over to spend the week. Where precisely their leisure needs will intersect with Wee Auntany's is anybody's guess, but McCoy (already related to the hurling Elliotts of Dunloy) has another sister marrying into Derry football and the distraction of GAA talk won't be unwelcome.
"Cheltenham. What a week. Everyone wants a piece of you. I can still hear that in my head, the noise of the crowd as you come up the hill in Cheltenham. The run in is so long and the crowd just gets louder and louder, till your head is full of it. That's the best feeling in racing." Tomorrow Tony McCoy plans a day off. He'll sit in the bath, sweat some and let his daydreaming head fill up once again with the sounds of glory.
