Born in Hereford on July 21, 1977, Richard Johnson rode his first winner under Rules, Rusty Bridge, owned and trained by his parents, Keith and Sue Johnson, in a hunters’ chase at Hereford on April 30, 1994. As conditional jockey to David ‘The Duke’ Nicholson, he won the conditional jockeys’ title in 1995/96 and, as a fully-fledged professional, finished runner-up in the senior jockeys’ championship no fewer than 17 times, 16 times to Tony McCoy and once to Brian Hughes. McCoy retired on April 25, April and Johnson won his first senior jockeys’ title in 2015/16, with a career-best 235 winners on British soil, before successfully defending it in 2016/17, 2017/18 and 2018/19.
Johnson rode his last winner, Camprond, trained by Philip Hobbs, in a maiden hurdle at Taunton on March 23, 2021, before tearfully announcing his retirement, with immediate effect, at Newton Abbott on April 3, 2021. He told the ‘Racing Post’, “It was particularly important to me to finish on one for Philip and Sarah Hobbs [Brother Tedd, who finished third] who, like Henry Daly, have supported me for over 20 years. I’ll never be able to articulate what their loyalty has meant to me.”
At the end of his career, Johnson had ridden 3,819 National Hunt winners in Great Britain and Ireland, making him just the second man to exceed 3,000 winners – he reached that landmark on St. Saviour, trained by Hobbs, in a juvenile hurdle at Ludlow on February 3, 2016 – and the second-most-prolific National Hunt jockey in history, behind only McCoy. At the Cheltenham Festival, he rode total of 23 winners, including Looks Like Trouble, trained by Noel Chance, and Native River, trained by Colin Tizzard, in the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 2000 and 2018, respectively. He also rode in the Grand National a record 21 times, without success, although he did finish second on What’s Up Boys and Balthazar King, both trained by Hobbs in 2002 and 2014.