Richard Riakporhe is a British boxer on the up. In the near future, all being well, the 33-year-old from south London — nickname: The Midnight Train — will fight for his first world title, in the cruiserweight division. Riakporhe’s professional record of 16 fights, 16 wins, 12 by knockout, makes him one of the most exciting homegrown talents in recent memory. Once he’s world champion, his ambition is to unify the cruiserweight belts and then to move up to heavyweight. Meanwhile, Riakporhe has a successful side-hustle as a model for fashion brands including Burberry and Dior.
On a Wednesday in July, Riakporhe drove from his training base at Loughborough University to rural Wiltshire, and Hillwood Stud, where racehorses of the future are bred and those who are already competing spend their summers in pre-training for the season ahead. Here, Riakporhe posed alongside another potential sporting legend: six-year-old sensation Constitution Hill, the champion hurdler many fancy to be the most talented racehorse to appear in a generation. Last March, Constitution Hill won the Champion Hurdle at Cheltenham, his sixth race and sixth victory. His owner, Michael Buckley, and trainer, Nicky Henderson, must now decide whether he will move on to steeplechasing or continue to dominate the hurdles for another year.
An unlikely pairing, perhaps, for a fashion shoot: the boxer and the racehorse. But Riakporhe said he sees similarities. Neither he nor Constitution Hill was marked for greatness from a young age. Constitution Hill’s start was inauspicious. Buckley was taking a chance when he bought him. He now calls him the horse of a lifetime. Riakporhe grew up on a council estate in Walworth. His early years he describes as troubled. The scar running down his torso is the result of a stabbing that very nearly ended his life at 15. It’s a cliché, perhaps, to say that boxing saved him, but the gym, he says, is where he turned his life around. He turned pro in 2016, after a successful amateur career, and with a marketing degree to fall back on. Today he runs the Richard Riakporhe Foundation, touring schools across the UK speaking about the dangers of knife crime and the power of education.
Did Riakporhe have previous experience with horses? He did not. Was he nervous? Not in the least. And Constitution Hill? According to all who know him, he exhibits none of the skittishness characteristic of racehorses. And so it proved.
When their close-up was done, and they were allowed a moment alone, neither boxer nor hurdler seemed inclined to leave the paddock they were slowly circling together, sun breaking through clouds, bathing them in gold.
