'The good thing about me is I'm healthy, light and my heart's still in the game'

It seems like a long time now since the lightweight jockey joined the giant panda and the mountain gorilla on the list of endangered species. These tiny people, indigenous to the weighing rooms of Britain and Ireland, have yet to suffer the fate of the dodo, but their numbers have dwindled to the point where extinction is an inevitability once the current generation packs it in.

"You don't have a Franny Norton coming through these days," says Franny Norton, one of the last of the lightweights still surviving in the wild. "Where back in the day you might have had an Allan Mackay, a John Lowe, a Gary Bardwell or a Nicky Carlisle, these days you have lads that look like they should be working on doors, not riding horses.

"You don't have midgets like us any more, because times have changed, nutrition has changed and the average baby now weighs in at 10lb, so it's just me and Jimmy Quinn, and that's it.”