JAMIE SPENCER and Seb Sanders may have shared the 2007 Flat jockeys’ championship, but they have little else in common. While Spencer came from a racing background and was hailed as a future champion at the age of 17 when he won the Irish 1,000 Guineas on board Tarascon, Sanders has come up the hard way after being told early in his career that he would “never make a jockey”.

The contrast in their backgrounds manifests itself on the racecourse too. Spencer is laid-back and confident, often infuriatingly so for the liking of some punters, while Sanders is punchy and determined. The artist and the artisan.

Spencer has not always had it easy, however. At the end of 2004 his world was in tatters when he lost the job as retained rider for Aidan O’Brien’s powerful Ballydoyle stable, but he showed a hitherto unseen steel to bounce back and win his first British Flat jockeys’ championship the following year. The title seemed overdue for a rider who arrived on the big stage as a precocious teenager, having benefited from an upbringing in Co Tipperary that revolved around horses. His father, George, was a trainer, most famous for sending out the one-eyed Winning Fair for victory in the 1963 Champion Hurdle at Cheltenham.

Spencer was a month short of his 16th birthday when he rode his first winner, Huncheon Chance, at Downpatrick on May 11, 1996. Within two years he was a Classic-winning jockey with Tarascon and in 1999 he was Irish champion apprentice. He was Ireland’s senior champion jockey during his ill-fated year at Ballydoyle, which was littered with highs and lows. Ultimately it was the downs, including defeats in big races on One Cool Cat, Antonius Pius and Powerscourt, that helped seal his fate.

While Spencer continues the long tradition of Irish-born champion jockeys, Sanders is a rare British success story in the championship record books. Born in Tamworth, as a youngster his sporting obsession was Birmingham City, and he is still a passionate supporter of the club. Sanders’s break in racing came when his father, a plumber, was working at the stables of local trainer Bryan McMahon and asked if there was an opening for the young Sanders. After 10 weeks at the British Racing School in Newmarket, the end-of-term report concluded that Sanders was “a lovely lad, but he will never make a jockey”.

Sanders was undeterred and, after becoming champion apprentice in 1995, forged a career as what is commonly known as a journeyman jockey. In 2004 he made two big moves up the ladder, the most headline-grabbing being his first Classic win with Bachelor Duke in the Irish 2,000 Guineas. Sanders was 32, almost double the age of Spencer when he won his first Classic.

The more decisive breakthrough in Sanders’s career, though, was his elevation to No 1 jockey for Sir Mark Prescott, which guaranteed quality, quantity and a higher profile – all vital ingredients for a jockey with championship ambitions. Prescott’s support made other trainers take note of Sanders’s talent, and the backing of the Newmarket trainer was the most important single ingredient in Sanders’s championship campaign, as he provided 34 of his stable jockey’s 190 winners.

The patronage of the top stables has always come much easier to Spencer. Most notably, he is still in demand from Ballydoyle, for whom he rode Excellent Art to Group One victory at Royal Ascot this year. Nobody can deny that Spencer put in the hard graft this year too, especially over the gruelling final months. It is a testament to how hard Spencer and Sanders pushed each other that their winning total of 190 is 27 more than Spencer needed for his first British title in 2005.