There was one heart stopping incident in the mid seventies which could have halted Dean Chapple’s love affair with harness racing before it got off the ground.
There’s nothing I’ve enjoyed more over the years than the many conversations I’ve had with veteran horsemen - especially harness horsemen who were around in the days when the sport was drawing big crowds all around Australia.
Wayne Dimech was in his mid-teens when Hondo Grattan was dominating the harness racing headlines in the early 1970’s. He had obviously inherited the harness racing genes from his Maltese forebears.
In the days when I was getting to the trots on a regular basis, Amy Day was one of my favourite people. The petite blonde daughter of Neil and Vicki Day was at the mercy of genetic forces from the time of her birth thirty two years ago.
Laurence Dawson is one of many young horsemen who’ve worked hard to carve themselves a niche in harness racing rather than turn their backs on a sport they’ve grown to love.
David Brown is one of several trainers alarmed by recent rumblings about the future of the Penrith Paceway. The regular Thursday night meetings are the lifeblood of those trainers who work day jobs.
Stephen Conroy has never forgotten the moment he realised just how much harness racing meant to him. It was a regular Friday night meeting at Harold Park in the mid 1980’s and he’d just won a trophy race with his consistent gelding Saint Albans.
Greg Coney had barely reached his teen years when he first set foot in the bustling north western NSW city of Tamworth - the state’s second largest inland city.
“The only certainty about luck is that it will change” - a quote attributable to nineteenth century American short story writer Bret Harte. Gavin Fitzpatrick isn’t into philosophical quotes but he’ll relate to this one.
Bruce Harpley was as happy as a dog with two tails when daylight savings resumed in NSW on October 3rd. For the last thirty years daylight has been a precious commodity for the personable Harpley…
It’s widely accepted that the offspring of harness horsemen and women are apt to follow their parents into the sport. Many prominent trotting trainers and drivers around Australia are third and fourth generation devotees of the standardbred.
A galaxy of star trotting horsemen assembled for this photo in the Penrith Paceway Function Centre at the end of the 1976/1977 racing season - a season which marked two significant milestones in the remarkable career of P.J. “Perc.” Hall.
Teenagers in the 1950’s were no different to their modern day counterparts when it came to planning their futures. Bill Ellis was a student at Sydney’s historic Fort Street High School around 1956 and had given very little thought to his likely future.
To family and friends Tony Turnbull always seemed indestructible. On non race days during his training career, he’d work from dawn to dusk before trying to catch up on badly needed sleep.
Most trainers are discouraged when one of their horses goes out at much longer odds than anticipated. Julie Henman certainly didn’t expect her veteran gelding Don Kee to be the rank outsider in a field of eight at Club Menangle on Tuesday March 23rd.
Every now and again fate produces a result in the racing codes that inspires the little man to keep trying. Such a fairy tale moment occurred at Menangle on Saturday night when Silk Cloud totally outclassed a handy bunch of juvenile fillies in the Fran Fitzpatrick Cheryl McDowell Pink Bonnet.
You’d be hard pressed to find a person in harness racing who wasn’t delighted to see Ben Settree train the winner of the Junee Pacing Cup last week. If a detractor does exist, he or she is obviously living on another planet.
Jack Trainor didn’t expect to have two runners in the same race just five weeks into his professional training career. Even more bizarre was the fact that he has only four horses in work at his Menangle base.
