• Alan Tyers

AP McCoy jumps ahead of Ronaldo, Woods and Federer

AP McCoy secured his 200th winner of the season at Newbury © Getty Images

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Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Roger Federer, Tiger Woods, Usain Bolt, Ronnie O'Sullivan, Phil Taylor and Michael Jordan. They all have their claims but none can match 19-time Champion Jockey AP McCoy - the greatest sportsman of his generation.

AP announced last weekend that he will retire at the end of the season and by then he will be the 20-time Champ.

He rode his first winner in 1992 in Thurles for Jim Bolger; by the 1995-96 season he was the Champion. That year, Jordan was MVP in the NBA Finals, as he was on five other occasion to go with 14 honours as an all-star. Even the astonishing Jordan cannot quite match AP for longevity.

McCoy's major attributes have been incredible skill, physical bravery, iron self-discipline, an unparalleled will or need to win, and some luck.

McCoy finally won the Grand National in 2010 © Getty Images

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He's big for a jockey at 5ft 9in and his professional life has been a quarter century of hunger. Not just for winners, but for food: they say he's about one-and-a-half stones under the weight someone his size should naturally be.

The self-denial alone is remarkable. He has made his body the servant of his will in a way that, for example, Tiger has been unable to do. AP is getting out before his body has let him down. He has also become the master of his own mind and destiny in a way that poor old Ronnie has not been able to be. McCoy's freakish personality has been harnessed, not crushed him under its load.

With body and mind, there has to be an element of luck as well. All those falls, the smashed teeth, the punctured lungs, the broken vertebrae, a medical dictionary full of cracked arms and legs and collar bones. In a sport where any day on the job could be your last, he has kept showing up through the pain, never flinching. Many others have not been so lucky.

Of course, AP has all the big titles on the mantelpiece - the Cheltenham Gold Cup, the Grand National (at last, in 2010), the Champion Hurdle. But his unique greatness has been the way he treated every tiny race, hacking around Wincanton in a novice hurdle on a Thursday in January, the same as he would chasing the biggest prizes in sport.

If you had your fiver on AP, you knew you were getting absolutely every last damn penny of it, whether the prize for him was the Grand National or just one more win under the belt. You never, ever - as with, for instance, Usain Bolt - got the impression that he was going through the motions or saving the big show for the big day.

One man who has dominated his sport like AP is darts legend Phil Taylor, but, for all the risks of liver disease or a sore elbow or ripping your trousers while bending over, the element of physical danger in darts is small. Unless you're standing near the board and playing with people who are really bad.

And, great though Taylor has been, he set a standard and the pack have caught him. AP has never been caught - and he still remains one of the boys. Jump jockeys experience an unusual blend of rivalry and camaraderie and maybe that's because they feel that they're all in it together, that their lives and their fortunes are intertwined as they leap those frighteningly large fences on horses together. Yet, AP is first among equals and is hugely respected and admired by those men who have spent two decades looking at his backside a few lengths ahead.

The other greats cannot claim indisputability like AP can. We've been greatly privileged to have Federer and Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic at the same time, as well as Ronaldo and Messi. Brilliant though all those have been, you could make an argument for any of the three as the best tennis player, just as you could debate the merits of the Real Madrid man over his Barcelona rival as the best of the era. With jumps racing there is just no debate.

In longevity, commitment, sheer weight of numbers, bravery and dominance, AP McCoy cannot be beaten as the greatest of our time. And now he brings down the curtain, the sporting world hopes he has a successful Cheltenham and makes it through the rest of the season in one piece, and finds some sort of rest and peace in a happy life afterwards - although that might yet be his greatest challenge of all.

We will never have another one like him, in racing, or in any sport.

McCoy has enjoyed success in every season of his career spanning almost a quarter of a century © Getty Images

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