The Matthew Chadwick phenomenon might be horse racing's ultimate feel-good story. The teenage riding sensation has just completed the fastest first-20 winners in the 36-year history of professional racing and every expert in town agrees he has the world at his feet.
Chadwick is the real deal. He's racked up those 20 winners at a prodigious strike rate and despite his lack of experience, seems to be a natural on horseback. His allocated trainer, the great Tony Cruz, is trying to keep everyone's feet on the ground but even Cruz himself is getting excited at the raw ability of this extraordinary young prospect.
Change scenes and regress 21 years. On screen are Chris and Jenny Chadwick, a childless expatriate British couple who have just completed 16 frustrating years of trying to have a baby of their own. They are resigned to their unexplained infertility and begin to cut their way through nine months' worth of investigations and red tape towards adopting a Hong Kong-born, Chinese baby.
They eventually made it. The baby that was handed to them that fateful day in 1988 is Nicole Chadwick, a beautiful young woman, now 21 and in her final year of a psychology major at Swansea University in Wales.
The child welfare officers were so impressed with the success of Nicole's adoption that, two years later, they rang the Chadwicks and asked them if they were interested in taking a second child. 'Yes, but we'd like this one to be a boy,' said Jenny, who then took delivery of a tiny, underdeveloped child who looked like he might be just weeks old but was actually four months.
'He was very under weight, very pale and had terrible skin,' his adoptive mother recalled this week. 'We had a doctor on standby to give him a thorough medical straight away - there was nothing major wrong with him, he just needed some loving care.'
