Life As I Know It (20 page)

‘You can come and ride a few here,' he offered.

‘Thank you,' I said, and immediately set about preparing.

I really liked working with him. I had been blessed to spend time with true horsemen over the years and Darren was one of them, with his deep affection for horses, and his passion for training and racing. I started riding for him and everything felt right about it.

After a couple of weeks of work for him, Darren and his racing manager Jeremy said there would be quite a few horses going to trial at Colac, if I was interested.

‘Any good ones?' I asked.

‘There's a few there,' he said.

It was February 2013. Colac is grey and wet, dairy country for much of the year. It's where the long-distance runner Cliffy Young and his gumboots came from. But in mid February there's dust and flies around, and the galahs are screeching in the gum trees.

It was a pretty routine sort of day, just another trial. With the Autumn Carnival underway in Melbourne and Sydney, lots of horses needed a run, so it was busy enough. Darren had a few making their trial debuts. I was on a three-year-old bay called Prince of Penzance. When I first saw him I noticed his walk—an athletic, confident stride. He looks like a bold one, I thought. Let's see if he can run.

At the course following this horse were some pretty excited first-time owners, every new experience was a thrill. There were also some old campaigners who'd seen it all before. My horse jumped out okay and travelled along fine, but the track was starting to chop up by this stage of the day, though, and when we got to the corner he slipped and nearly fell over. He picked himself up, though, and got going, charging powerfully.

Geez, I thought to myself. Horses don't really do that. We might have one here.

As I came back in I met Darren Lonsdale and his daughter Emily. They had a small share in a syndicate that had a 10 per cent share in the horse. Darren owned just a small portion of this horse's tail, but that didn't dampen his enthusiasm.

‘What'd you think?' Lonsdale asked, as he patted Prince of Penzance on the neck.

‘You're going to have some fun with this one,' I said. ‘Don't you worry about that.'

D
ARREN WEIR IS
one of the great characters of Australian racing. You couldn't make him up, in the same way you couldn't make my dad up. You just have to meet him. Given the connectedness of Australian racing, and especially the fraternity of racing in country Victoria, there's a good chance you will if you have the slightest involvement in horse racing.

Under ‘Owner' in a race book you will often see, especially with horses trained by D.K. Weir, the name A. McGregor. Alexander McGregor, known to all as ‘Sandy', loves horses and has been involved in horse racing all his life. He and Darren go back a long way and he knows Darren's story as well as anyone. Stories of their past bob up from time to time. They've done a fair bit together and, although Sandy might try to tell you that having dinner with Darren Weir is a form of torture, they are good mates.

Sandy grew up on a wheat property at Callawadda just north of Stawell, near the Grampians National Park. It's good farming country that his great-great-grandfather selected in 1865. When it rains the paddocks are green with thick crops. By Melbourne
Cup time the growing is finished and the crops just mature in the summer heat until they're ready for harvest.

Sandy's father, Stuart McGregor, who is still trying to back a winner, was the president of the Stawell Racing Club for twenty years. He kept the club active and strong while running his farm and chain-smoking cigars. The club was formed in 1857 when Stawell was a gold town and prospectors were trying their luck, and Melbourne was a day's travel away. Stawell is a beaut track that conducts regular meetings. The time-honoured Stawell Cup is held on Easter Sunday during the world-famous professional foot-running race, the Stawell Gift.

The life of a country town revolves around its sporting clubs and other community organisations, pubs and churches. People know each other and they know the people in the next towns as well. Footy and netball are a big part of the life. Sandy played junior footy for Marnoo, 30 kilometres north of Stawell, until he gave it away for racing. But he still follows Richmond in the AFL. He says Richmond and racing horses have a lot in common: they provide a never-ending series of disasters punctuated by the odd miracle.

Darren Weir is from further up the bush at Berriwillock, on the railway line between Wycheproof and Sea Lake in the Mallee. It's tough country. Dry. The Mallee scrub only grows about 5 metres high. If you need a bit of luck to farm in the Wimmera, you need a lot more in the Mallee. The average yearly rainfall is about 300 millimetres. Farming on the dry plains is a punt. Some years more so than others. Farmers try to plant after rain and spend a lot of time and money to get a crop in. If it hasn't rained, you can plant in the dry ground—and hope. There's a lot of hoping in the Mallee.

Berriwillock was a thriving town in the first half of the twentieth century, when farms were smaller and it took a handful of blokes to work them. Photos of Berri from the late 1960s bear little
resemblance to the quiet town it is today. In 2014 they even shut the pub, a sure sign a community is shrinking. The farms in the area are become bigger and more mechanised, needing fewer people to work them, and so everyone is drifting to the larger provincial centres, or even Melbourne and Adelaide.

Darren grew up on the family's grain farm, where they also had a piggery. They still have the farm, which is the key measure of success in the Mallee. He and his brother Chris were good footballers for the Berri team, which eventually merged with other clubs in the area. They played their last game at the Berri oval in 2015—it had become too expensive to maintain. When your pub and footy team are gone, you're battling.

Darren grew up with horses. They became his first love and as a teenager he wanted to work with them. His parents pushed him to finish school but he wasn't having that. Jack Coffey was happy to take Darren on and helped him develop his skills as a horseman. Jack was a bush trainer based at Birchip, a dusty Mallee town that had produced Ray Neville, who won the 1948 Melbourne Cup on Rimfire, when Ray was a sixteen-year-old apprentice. It was his ninth ride ever! Darren was an absolute natural, but also a very hard worker, desperate to learn. He became great mates with Jack's son Austy.

After a couple of years with Jack, and people talking about his potential, Darren got a job with respected Stawell trainer Terry O'Sullivan. Driving to work on his first day, pulling a float carrying two horses, Darren had an accident. A kangaroo had burst out of the stand of trees on the road north of Stawell and Darren couldn't avoid it. The horses were safe but the car was buggered. Unperturbed, Darren rode one horse bareback while leading the other the 8 kilometres to the Stawell Racecourse. When he arrived Terry was amazed. He knew then that he had a genuine young horseman on his hands.

Darren was keen to learn from a very capable country trainer who had a good strike rate, when he took one of his better horses to race in Melbourne. Apart from learning the training game, Darren played footy at Stawell, where he was a hard nut with a textbook case of white-line fever. Before long he bumped into Sandy McGregor. They both had dreams, and they were both starting out. Sandy wanted to own racehorses; Darren wanted to train them. It was a perfect match; only Darren had no money.

The race book doesn't tell the story of the friendships and collaborations and projects and all the theorising that goes with it. At the O'Sullivans' there's a photo of two fresh-faced young blokes on the back of a couple of horses in the water at Lake Lonsdale. One is Darren Weir, the other is Brett Prebble. While I was now riding for Darren I also did so occasionally for the O'Sullivans. I am good friends with Terry and his daughter Karina, who train together these days. Family, friendships and partners.

The Stawell Racing Club helped Darren establish his own facility at the racecourse. Jim Holmes made chicken coops but could turn his hand to anything, so he built the Weir stables out of discarded railway tracks, creating what Sandy describes as the most over-engineered structure in racing—‘It will still be standing in two thousand years,' he says.

Learning quickly as he went, Darren's obvious skill as a horseman won him respect and clients. People in racing could also see how genuine he was. When he first started training in the mid 1990s he would shoe horses, work and feed them, attend to their every need and still find eight hours in the day to work as a farrier and a barrier attendant. He had incredible drive. He also got results.

Like all the top trainers, he was on a mission to understand horses, to be kind and friendly to them, to train them to be the best they could be. He trained a lot of winners in the country and then started to have success in the bigger centres. And he wanted to win the Melbourne Cup, just like anyone else. Early in his career he very nearly did.

Worrall ‘Woggsy' Dunn owned the boat and fishing shop in Horsham, and later the White Hart Hotel. Woggsy was one of those old characters you see on country racetracks. People would point to him and say, ‘That's Woggsy Dunn. His horse ran second in the Melbourne Cup.' He had the racing bug and had his horses with D.K. Weir. He got hold of a good one called She's Archie, which won the South Australian Derby in 2002, Darren's first Group 1. She was an ideal cups horse and Darren got her cherry ripe for the 2003 Melbourne Cup. She flew home brilliantly but missed out by a length. Had she not been baulked at the top of the straight she might have run down Makybe Diva and got her first Cup victory.

Darren's skill as a trainer brought him more and more winners. Good judges thought he was gifted, a special talent. With those winnings came more owners, more horses and more resources, and the need for a bigger training complex. Rather than go to Melbourne he wanted his horses to have the country life, so he set up the complex at Miners Rest, just a stone's throw from Home. He also set up stables at Warrnambool, where horses seemed to thrive on the beach. He could move his team to and fro according to their need.

As I got to know Darren I could see that, like Bart Cummings, he was a thinker, someone who was consistently developing his understanding of horses. He knows his horses—like they're his own children. That's the sort of relationship I value, and that I wanted. Horses just don't get the better of him, no matter how naughty the horse might be. He wants his horses in peak physical and mental
condition and to do that he has created an environment where they can thrive. He believes that horses will perform for you when they are happy and content, so he tries to get them in the best order with the least stress.

He also trains his horses his own way, on the 1400-metre straight track up the hill at the Ballarat Racecourse. Turning corners at pace puts stress on the legs of thoroughbreds, and the theory is that running up an incline is easier on their legs. Everything for Darren is about being as gentle as possible, about treating horses as best you can. At the same time his theory is they have to be fit to win races, so it's a very fine line, a balance. It's also a pleasant environment to work in, with trees on either side, that always reminds me of Chantilly in France and Newmarket in England.

While Darren loves horses, it's the owners, he says, he finds difficult. But I think that's his shtick, because he's always rapt for them when they have a win. If his post-race interviews are any indication, he likes it when larger syndicates have a bit of luck because he knows that will make for a good shindig. Darren is quiet and driven but he will come to life after a few drinks. Owners like him. I think they are fascinated by the understanding he has of horses and like that he is so successful.

These days he has to be very well organised because he has to manage so many horses and so many staff. The staff love how loyal he is. They give their all because he looks after them. He also has an incredible memory, which stores so much information about his horses—their starts and performances, their work and what's coming up for them.

About ten years ago Sandy and Darren were having lunch together. Sandy had had a number of good horses over the years. He was a huge fan of jumps racing and loved the Warrnambool carnival. He and Darren then decided they'd go one better.

‘Let's win the Melbourne Cup,' Sandy said.

‘We're all trying to win the Melbourne Cup.'

‘No, have a real go. Target it. Plan it.'

So they did.

Darren, the master trainer, would prepare the horse; they just had to find the right horse. Some give you a better chance than others. They bought six.