From the comfort of my armchair and with a cup of hot tea on the small table next to me I was quite content to watch two hours’ coverage of the ‘Sports Personality of the Year Awards’ on BBC1 recently.

I was also delighted that viewers ultimately voted for AP (Tony) McCoy (36), winner of more jump races in Britain than any other jockey and on his way to landing a 16th consecutive title as the season’s leading rider.

Despite the critics arguing that 2010 has been a terrible year for British sport (‘no great footballers or rugby players to nominate’), I’d argue that it’s about time a jockey won: the only other riders to win being David Broome (show-jumping) in year seven (1960); Princess Anne (‘equestrian’) in 1971 and daughter Zara Phillips in 2006.

So why not a National Hunt jockey? – Of all the people I’ve interviewed, McCoy is one of the most fascinating, not just because he’s a very endearing man to talk to; but more because I’ve never met a sportsman so obsessed; so hungry to excel in his sport.

At the time I spoke to him, for over an hour at the Hotel de France, he wasn’t married; instead he was driven by statistics; something he admitted with a shy smile, as if he knew he was half crazy with his relentless desire to be the best in the business.

Now a father as well as husband he admits that he was extraordinarily obsessive and said, recently, ‘For eight or ten years I got wrapped up in chasing records. Everything was a number. Didn’t matter what I won, every horse I rode was a number. I wouldn’t say I punished myself but I had to make myself suffer for it not happening.’

And, in pursuit of beating Richard Dunwoody’s record, at the time, for the most winners by a jump jockey, ‘made myself suffer’ was literal.

As it was, to fit Jersey into a schedule, for only an afternoon, before riding (one horse only!) at a meeting the next day, two races 250 miles further north the day following and two different meets, for two different races, before 4 pm on the Friday was a different kind of insanity.

McCoy had no social life of his own … and saw physical suffering as an annoyance; a blip on his way to riding as many horses or ‘numbers’ as he could before his body finally packed in.

Of all the stories I’ve since read, of his riding on with broken cheekbones, wrists, arms, legs … the two I recoil against most are his riding for six weeks with a broken back; and the time he fell, lost five teeth but rode the next race, despite a gummy smile and blood dripping off the end of his chin.

Again, as he was in my conversation with him; the day before he won the Sports Personality of the Year Award, according to the Observer’s Paul Hayward, he looked ‘half-ashamed’ when he said that: ‘I know that I’ve ridden with broken bones. That’s all mental. Same as in any sport. The mental side is the same for all those on the BBC list. When they go home at night and they’re not performing, it wrecks their heads, just as it wrecks mine.’

Maybe, Tony McCoy, but while they mean ‘mentally wrecks my head’ you would ride on even if it mean ‘physically wrecked my head’.

Yes, there are some sportsmen who carry on regardless … Bert Trautmann, for example, who playing for Manchester City in he 1956 FA Cup Final broke his neck but carried on, with 17 minutes remaining. It would be another three days before Trautmann’s injury was fully diagnosed.
But a broken back, and to carry on riding?

Anyway, 6ft tall AP McCoy, who wasn’t born the right size to race (he told me that he only ate an evening meal four nights a week), often gets by on a cup of tea and two jelly babies at lunch and can sweat 10 lb off his already unnatural body weight, by sitting in a sauna for up to three hours a day…is almost one of a kind.

I say ‘almost’ because the only other person I’ve interviewed, who wouldn’t say a word until he was first asked a question; the only other man who had that same distant, self-obsessed look in his eyes, was Lester Piggott. Both of them were and are remarkable men.

Both of them are also men who would offer any psychologist in the world a lifetime’s delight, in mapping out exactly what untapped powers the human mind is capable of doing.