4-Time champion jockey Boeuf retires on winning note

Controversial four-time French champion jockey Dominique Boeuf announced his retirement on Monday after riding a winner here saying he was not getting enough quality rides. The 43-year-old garnered all the wrong headlines when he received a three year suspended prison sentence in 1995 for his role in trafficking drugs particularly cocaine. Prior to the trial he had been jailed though the judge had permitted him to ride out on the gallops at Chantilly in the morning so long as he returned to prison by the evening. Boeuf - a popular presence in the weigh room - rode his first winner aged just 16 and was crowned French champion for the first time in 1991 before adding further titles in 1998, 2001 and 2002. However, the rides have progressively dried up and Boeuf who had complained on July 14 that he wasn't seeing enough of his family decided that having won here it was a good time to hang up his boots. "I have decided to retire after my success in the handicap here," he told his fellow jockeys after weighing-in following the victory. Later he confirmed this to the racing channel 'Equidia'. "It's decided. I will no longer ride competitively," said Boeuf, who numbered among his major racing successes two French Oaks and the 1993 Sussex Stakes on Bigstone. "90 percent of the horses that I ride these days are no-hopers. "The door is beginning to shut and the passion I had for the sport is ebbing away. "As for what I do in the future we will see." Boeuf was most famously associated with his role as retained jockey for the notoriously difficult owners the Wildensteins, first with the late scion of the dynasty Daniel and then his son Alec, who is also now dead. However, he was not immune from one of the withering attacks the Wildensteins were prone to delivering. His day of reckoning came in June 2004 after the hotly-fancied filly Vallee Enchantee was beaten in the Group One Coronation Cup at Epsom and Alec was asked whether he felt she had been unlucky. "We weren't unlucky, she was ridden by an asshole who didn't follow instructions," Wildenstein replied adding that Boeuf's contract was being terminated. Boeuf replied drily on hearing the news: "Apparently we don't understand each other anymore."