Always back the horse named self-interest, son. It'll be the only one trying
One night I am standing in front of Mindy’s restaurant on Broadway, thinking of practically nothing whatever, when all of a sudden I feel a very terrible pain in my left foot. In fact, this pain is so very terrible that it causes me to leap up and down like a bullfrog, and to let […]
If Group 1 winning jockey turned Group 1 winning trainer Mark Riley is not the hardest done by man in racing, he is at least in the top 5. Riley is serving an effective life sentence for the grand crime of presenting a horse to race when it was close to over the TCO2 limit. […]
I want to tell you a story, a true one. In 1999 I took a job as a union organiser in Central Queensland. It was a step up the career ladder for me, and a foot in the door, so when I was offered it I grabbed it with both hands and off we – […]
BY now you have probably heard the Shane Lewis story, or one of the terrible bit of it anyway. Former Olympic swimmer. Abused by a Swimming Australia funded elite performance coach. Told the peak body of the sport. They did nothing. Killed himself. Young kids left without a dad. It is tragic but all too […]
We started writing about Phoenix Thoroughbreds and telling you that they were money launderers 14 months ago. You can read those stories here. The brilliant UK racing writer William Jones – who I met and spoke to last night after reading his work – does it a whole lot better. His books about drug use […]
Last week an English trainer named Johnny Farrelly was permanently excluded – warned off – from racing after being found guilty of sexually abusing a 19-year-old apprentice jockey under his control and care. To protect the identity of the victim the reasons for his exclusion were suppressed, but that is what they are. The Australian […]
Daryl Maguire on the left, turning the first sod at the Riverina track. Do you reckon that Daryl Maguire is not going to become the most hated man in NSW outside of Supermax over the next 6-8 weeks? There is almost universal sympathy for suddenly departed Premier Gladys right now, from the public and from […]
Personally, I do not care for coppers, but I believe in being courteous to them at all times, so when Johnny Brannigan comes into Mindy’s restaurant one Friday evening and sits down in the same booth with me, because there are no other vacant seats in the joint, I give him a huge hello. Furthermore, […]
My wife Maggie is a Tokuma. This is her family. They didn’t descend from Solomon Islanders brought into Samoa as indentured labourers by the German colonial oppressors. They descended from an 11-year-old Papua New Guinean kid named Turaroe Tokoma, who lives just across the water from the start of the Solomons, an was down swimming […]
My personal assessment of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian is that she is a dishonest, greedy trougher who couldn’t lie straight in bed and shouldn’t be trusted any further than you can throw her, divided by ten. I also reckon her days as Premier are fast coming to an end, and that in no time at […]
