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BBC radio racing commentator John Hunt is back calling the sport he loves after suffering a horrific ordeal - Getty Images/Alan Crowhurst
There is no template for navigating unfathomable loss, no manual for facing the desolation wrought by a crime so heinous as to defy comprehension.
“Do I really need,” John Hunt told Cambridge Crown Court, in a challenge to the coldly procedural concept of a victim impact statement, “to detail the impact of having three-quarters of my family murdered?”
Nobody can hope to understand how the BBC racing commentator feels about the savagery visited upon his Hertfordshire home eight months ago. What is universally relatable, though, is his courage: a quality expressed through his resolve to carry on living for the sake of his surviving daughter, to let their lives stand as a rebuke to Kyle Clifford’s unspeakable cowardice, and to find sanctuary, ultimately, in a return to what he loves.
John Hunt was in the radio booth 21 years ago to call home Best Mate’s third consecutive Gold Cup triumph, and he was back here at Cheltenham once more to see if Galopin des Champs could repeat the feat.
His Festival had begun amid desperate torment, as he read out a 1,900-word statement that reduced even hardened trial-watchers to tears, seeking to convey the experience of spending four hours with his wife and two daughters in a funeral parlour room so large that the partition had to be taken down. But he ended his week delivering a moment of pure, understated humanity, feeling the love of his racing family and channelling the old Atticus Finch credo of seeing life through “no matter what”.
His narration of Galopin des Champs’ unexpected defeat to Inothewayurthinkin would be best described as consummate. But in the circumstances, it was colossal. Boisterous, passionate, with Just a Minute standards of never repeating, hesitating or deviating, Hunt articulated the three miles and two furlongs of drama to perfection, spotting the struggles of Willie Mullins’ favourite at an early stage. He noticed that Galopin des Champs was not jumping as fluently as usual, that he lacked his customary rhythm, that the only time the two-time Gold Cup winner looked like his composed self was when hampered by the fall of Ahoy Senor. “Just six or seven per cent off it,” Hunt said. It was the judgment of a true aficionado and eerily prescient, as Inothewayurthinkin surged clear to win by six lengths.
Naturally, Hunt had offered the same measured expertise thousands of times before. It is a common trait among masters of the microphone: do it often enough, and broadcasting even a sport of this endless unpredictability becomes a form of muscle memory. But never had somebody tried to do so against a backdrop such as this. Barely 72 hours had elapsed since he gave his devastating account of the events of July 9, 2024, when Clifford, armed with a crossbow, walked into Hunt’s house in Bushey and subjected his family to inconceivable horrors. “Over a period of four hours you brutally killed Carol, waited over an hour until Louise came into the house,” he said. “You incapacitated her, raped her and when you realised Hannah was coming home, you shot Louise in the back. I can’t imagine a more cowardly act. You couldn’t look her in the eye. You murdered Hannah minutes later.”
The effect of reading that testimony is profound. The temptation is to ask how he could summon the strength to enunciate the words, especially when Clifford did not even attend the court to hear his sentence of life without parole. That is before you contemplate the infinitely fraught question of how you continue when almost everything precious to you has been destroyed. Hunt, though, is discovering a path. Just as he eased himself back into work on a quiet day at Brighton last September, his response to the anguish of the trial – a trial that would never have happened had Clifford confessed the rape of Louise, as he had to the triple murder – was to seek the solace and comfort of the racecourse, the place where he has refined his art.
What does Hunt’s story have to do with sport, you might ask. The answer is everything and nothing. Where sport can seem numbingly trivial in the context of an act so horrendous, it is also one of the surest forms of escapism that exists. “Whilst I am so badly damaged, I am determined to see what my future is, surrounded by so many amazing people,” he has said.
Admiration feels inadequate as a response. Indeed, the only appropriate reaction – as sports psychologist and racing devotee Michael Caulfield suggests, heralding Hunt as a “shining example to us all” – is one of quiet awe. You will not find, re-listening to Hunt’s Gold Cup commentary, a more stirring study in bravery in sport this year. In the shadow of absolute evil, Hunt has given an impeccable demonstration of what it means to live.
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