Always back the horse named self-interest, son. It'll be the only one trying
Merv Dean will long be remembered as the man who bought the great Cardigan Bay from the Todd brothers of Mataura. But there was much more to Merv than just that. Merv’s parents ran tobacconists in Hamilton, and in his youth Merv assisted his uncle, Henry Lee, one of New Zealand’s most notorious bookmakers. Lee […]
Copy That and Self Assured first met not in a race, but on a card, at Alexandra Park on 14 December 2019. They won separate races over 2200m, with Copy That running 1.6 seconds faster in his. It was a portent of things to come. The pair’s first actual race contest was in the 2020 Ashburton […]
It is with deep sadness and a broken heart that we advise the sudden passing of Norm McVitty. Normie was a talented and highly respected trainer, with the horses being a huge part of his life. It is with a smile that I look back on his career within the industry he so greatly loved. […]
It’s my wife Maggie’s birthday. She turns 5o today. Still looks as beautiful as the day I met her almost 3 decades ago, and twice as gorgeous again. Happy Birthday sweetheart. May medical science advance so quickly that we share 50 more. Every day is a joy when you are in it baby. Love ya […]
Only 10 percent of Weasels in the wild live longer than 2 years. Very few live more than ten years in captivity. Weasel the pacer is at last count 16 years old and still going strong. Well not really. After a seemingly incredible 423 starts the old bloke’s alive and well and – quite amazingly […]
The great Peter Wolfenden MBE passed away last night, at the age of 88. The man known far and wide as Wolfie won the New Zealand drivers’ premiership 14 times, including eight consecutive years from 1974, and twice won the Australasian Drivers Championship. He represented New Zealand seven times in the World Drivers Championship in […]
What you see above appears in the Harness Racing New Zealand 2021/22 Annual Report. The names of the four in the obituary section are never repeated again throughout the report. Neither are the names of other good trot people who over the course of the year went to the great race track in the sky. […]
Melbourne Merv Butterworth and his blushing bride Meg etched their names in Australian racing history last night by going where no owner had ever been before by taking out the elusive Cups double. No, not the Caulfield-Melbourne Cups one. Seven sets of owners had won that easy beat gimme already. We’re talking here about the […]
Brown Rice with some rather good riders that he trained, back in the days when he was still young and beautiful Within literally minutes of publishing our exclusive story breaking the news of RJW Johnson’s retirement from the fitness and weight reduction for jockeys game we began getting deluged with messages from tearful readers who […]
It’s official. Ronald James William Johnson – aka RJ, the jockey fitness guru also known as the Brown Rice Man – has officially retired. For the seventeenth time. The news has a come as a great shock to his close friends Wayne Gannon and Gary Nolan, who have spent the night in lockdown attempting to […]
