JOCKEY A P McCoy celebrated being the first to ride 4,000 winners with a party at The Outside Chance in Manton.

The 18-time champion reached the milestone on Mountain Tunes at Towcester, cheered on by his wife Chanelle and children, five-year-old Evie, and new-born son Archie.

Straight afterwards McCoy, 39, who lives in Lambourn, headed to The Outside Chance, which he owns with Harold Spooner and Guy Sangster, to celebrate with his friends, family and colleagues last Thursday evening.

He said: “I’d invited all my colleagues and the valets to come.

“I’m not looking forward to picking up the bill – I don’t drink, but I imagine the lads will have drunk it dry.

“I could eat because I didn’t have to do a light on Friday and the great thing is, with only a ride in the last at Southwell, I could sleep until mid-morning.”

Staff at the pub had been on tenterhooks for days waiting for the race results so they could get everything ready for the party just hours after the win.

The bash, which was organised by Chanelle, kicked off at 7pm and came just a day after the pub celebrated its fifth birthday.

Manager Sarah Spooner said: “It was brilliant, it was absolutely packed but it was such a lovely celebratory atmosphere.

“He is a lovely guy, they’re such a nice family and he’s so modest about his achievement. He doesn’t drink and everyone else around him was getting stuck in, but he just kept going.

“Chanelle first spoke to us on Sunday when she said ‘we might have a bit of a party for A P’s 4,000th’. The marquee went up on Tuesday and we did a great big booze order with the brewery on Monday to make sure we had enough alcohol.

“We were just waiting but actually we were lucky because we had balloons and stuff like that for our birthday and it was just a case of all hands to the pump.

“It was really exciting to watch the race; there were only a few of us because we’d watched his last race waiting for it to happen and obviously it didn’t.

“The phone has not stopped ringing, our Twitter following has gone up by about 200 per cent.”

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