Frederick Thomas Winter, CBE (20 September 1926 – 5 April 2004) was a British National Hunt racing racehorse jockey and trainer. He was British jump racing Champion Jockey four times and British jump racing Champion Trainer eight times. He is the only person to have won the Cheltenham Gold Cup, Champion Hurdle and Grand National as both jockey and trainer. Winter won the Grand National four times, as a jockey in 1957 (Sundew) and 1962 (Kilmore), and as a trainer in 1965 (Jay Trump) and 1966 (Anglo).
His most famous victory as a jockey was on Mandarin in the 1962 Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris at Auteuil. His victory despite his illness, a broken bit and Mandarin breaking down in the last half-mile was voted the greatest ride ever in a 2006 Racing Post poll. The race was listed in The Guardian as one of the greatest races ever.
From The Telegraph (2005)
On a steamy June afternoon in Paris, the same horse and jockey made sporting history in the Grand Steeplechase de Paris. This race is run at Auteuil, in the Bois de Boulogne, around a four-mile figure-of-eight. There are 30 fences, among them “Le Bullfinch” (a nine-foot-high hedge) and “La Riviere”, the huge water jump. Very few of the fences look familiar to English chasers and, two years earlier, Mandarin had thrown away a winning chance by trying to stop at the white-painted post and rails.
Winter had wasted hard during his summer holiday to do 9st 10lbs on Beaver II, which he was to ride in the big four-year-old hurdle race later that same day. He was also suffering from a severe stomach-upset, and he arrived at Heathrow Airport for the flight to Paris feeling, and looking, very ill.
When it came to the race itself, at only the fourth fence the rubber-covered snaffle broke in Mandarin’s mouth, leaving Winter without either brakes or steering. Fulke Walwyn’s wife, Cath, later recalled: “Fred had no proper means of steering him in the right direction. It was a miracle he went round with the others.”
To their great credit, the French jockeys took no advantage of their English rival’s plight; one even swung in on Mandarin on the first bend, using the pressure of his horse to steer Winter’s mount around the turn. And only once, four fences from home, did Mandarin threaten to go the wrong side of a marker. It was almost certainly there, as Winter wrenched him back, throwing all his weight to one side like a racing cyclist, that Mandarin broke down, faltering in his action and losing some four lengths. As they turned for home, they bored through the Bullfinch, miraculously landing upright. They then held Lumino’s challenge by a head.
As Mandarin hobbled back, lame, he and his rider were the heroes of Paris. Winter himself could scarcely walk to the scales, and his fellow jockey Stan Mellor had to help him change to go out to ride in the next race on Beaver II – on whom he won in a driving finish.
As a jockey Fred Winter rode a then-record 923 National Hunt winners before his retirement in 1964.
Fred trained at Uplands in Lambourn from 1964 to 1988.
