Quotes from Tony McCoy

I never had a written contract, was never officially a stable jockey.

During every race, an ambulance trails the riders around the course. You know that sometimes you are going to end up in the back of that ambulance.

If you ask most trainers who have ridden which pressure is greater - watching your horse or riding it - they will tell you it is harder watching it because you have no control over what happens.

If summer racing didn't exist, I could go on holiday, yes, because nobody else would then be riding winners; but as long it goes ahead, I'll do it for the reason that I want to ride more winners than anyone else.

A lot of healing is in the mind. I'm not talking about serious illnesses like cancer. I'm talking about ordinary broken bones. Healing begins in the head. You have to convince yourself you can do it.

When I'm injured, I eat everything - proper junk. That's the one thing about being injured so much, I get to treat myself.

When I was 18, I broke my leg, and my shin came right through - like I had two knees.

In my opinion, the power of the mind in sport is vital. If you can overpower those physical risks mentally, you can get your body round it physically. I've made my body do things because of my mind that it shouldn't have been able to do.

There are many tough sides to being a jockey. Injury is something we all dread, but spending lengthy periods in the bath or the sauna just to shed a few pounds can be an exhausting and draining experience.

I was told that there's near on a million to one chance that I would be able to have children.

I am quite hard to live with, and I know that if I go through a bad run, I'm not the best company and am best left alone. But I'm not nearly as bad as people like to make out.

When you give someone a commitment to ride their horse, you do it - unless, God forbid, something serious has happened. It would be laziness not to do it.

I suppose I'm happy when I know I've given a horse a good ride, no matter where it is. I like playing golf in the summer; I'm happy when I hit a good shot, and I enjoy watching Arsenal playing beautiful football, but overall I can't believe you can be happy when you're not winning. I honestly can't accept that.

The criticism does not hurt because I have always been my own worst critic. I wouldn't say I don't respect other people's opinions, but my opinion is the most important.

By the nature of the sport and the danger we face daily, we are very close knit. Some of us have spent most of our lives together. To give you an example, having spent two decades sitting next to Richard Johnson and seeing him virtually every day, I have probably spent more time with him than I have my family, and he the same.

I don't know which is stronger: the thrill of winning or the fear of failure. I don't know which one affects me most. I don't know where the middle is.