Oisin Murphy: 'It scared me and I haven't had a drink since. I've stopped'

Oisin Murphy has received a mountain of advice since the night three weeks ago when he disgraced himself in a Newmarket pub and ended up as the latest plaything of the tabloid newspapers. It seems everybody these days is either an amateur psychotherapist, a concerned moral guardian or just an online troll with a need to vent, but only one of the members of that very public jury struck a chord with the wayward three-time champion jockey.

"A friend of mine said to me: 'You're like a cat with nine lives but you've used up all nine of them.' And the long and the short of it is that he was right, which is sad at 26, but when I went to my first AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] meeting they were all saying to me they wished they'd started coming at 26."

The insight hit home like a hammer on the head of a shiny new nail and forced him to re-evaluate his life. Here was a bright young man with the racing world in his grasp, but with a dangerous compulsion to put it down on occasion while he picked a fight with the demons around him. He'd already fallen foul of a drugs test in France, and a second failed domestic breathalyser was almost an inevitability given the Thursday night he'd had, but when he woke up at 7.30 on Friday morning that had become the least of his worries.