16/01/14
There is no question that one of the most amazing events that transpired in Australian thoroughbred racing in the post World War 2 era was Tommy Smith being defeated in the Sydney trainers premiership in the 1985-1986 season, after he’d been the premiership trainer for the previous 33 consecutive years.
Tommy Smith first won the title of Sydney’s premier trainer way back in the 1952/53 racing season and he won it each and every season from that year right up until the 1985/86 season finished on 31 July 1986 when a young up and coming trainer, Brian Mayfield –Smith, had amazingly dethroned the champion trainer. Thank God bookies didn’t bet on jockey and trainer premierships like they do now, or one can imagine at the start of the 1985/86 season that Tommy Smith would have been installed 50/1 on, or maybe even 100/1 on, to keep his title, as Brian Mayfield-Smith had also been in the Sydney premiership race the season before, but hadn’t got within cooee of Smith. In fact Brian Mayfield-Smith had finished the previous 1984/85 season under the whip in sixth place “nearly 70 wins” behind Tommy Smith, so really there was no comparison.
But as fortune would have it, Brian Mayfield-Smith’s training prowess with a small string of horses had attracted the eye of a high profile owner, Millie Fox, the widow of Stan Fox who had founded Nebo Lodge. English pools multi-millionaire Robert Sangster and Bob Lapointe, the former Canadian man who had brought the highly successful American based fast food businesses Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, Sizzler and Lone Star Steakhouse to Australia, bought Nebo Lodge for a reported $2million and entered into a racing partnership with Millie Fox. Brian Mayfield-Smith suddenly went from having eight horses in a rented yard at Randwick, to having 80 well-bred and expensive thoroughbreds in a modern stable called Nebo Lodge at Rosehill.
Interestingly, the trainer’s premiership boilover of Brian Mayfield-Smith defeating Tommy Smith was not the only amazing event that took place in 1986 in Sydney racing. In April of that year at the time-honoured Inglis Easter sale in Sydney, madness seemingly reigned supreme when a nomination to the New Zealand based Cambridge Stud stallion Sir Tristram fetched an extraordinary $155,000 when a bidding duel from many quarters erupted all around the ring. Sir Tristram was sure the flavour of the month and stood for a fee of NZ$100,000 – but nominations to him were like hens teeth – and in that era, stallions only served a fraction of the number of mares they do today. In fact it was written at the time that just one year earlier, Sir Tristram’s owner Patrick Hogan took only 12 “outside bookings” to the stallion, of the 78 mares that the stallion had served that year. At the same 1986 Inglis sale, a nomination to the stallion Bletchingly sold for an equally amazing $120,000.
But life in racing was not all beer and skittles for Robert Sangster though, as he’d paid a veritable fortune of $300,000 a couple of years earlier, for a Bletchingly colt, which grew up to be named Precentor, only to see his purchase suffer “recurring leg problems”. Sangster eventually gave up on Precentor and sold him for the princely sum of $1,000 in a good old fashioned financial tear-up.
Back to the score at the Test and in reality Tommy Smith was always under the whip right from the start of the 1985/86 season as he’d failed to win a solitary 2YO race with stable runners by late January of 1986 in what was an ominous sign that there was problem.
The final Sydney meeting for the 1985/86 season took place at Randwick on Wednesday 30 July. Mayfield-Smith had a seven-and-a-half win lead in the premiership on that final day and Tommy Smith had one or more runners in each of seven races, meaning if he won the seven races, he still couldn’t win the premiership. In a terrific effort by Tommy Smith’s stable runners though, on the day he won the first four races, courtesy of his stable runners Wolverhampton, So Will I, Rajamah and Newsboy.
In the wash-up when the judge called a halt, Brian Mayfield-Smith had trained 99 winners to Tommy Smith’s 95.5. Smith – ever the eternal optimist – had simply given away too much start via his two and three- year-olds, for some unexplained reason, letting him down early in the season. One month out from season end on 28 June, the then 67YO Tommy Smith was 9.5 wins astern of Mayfield-Smith, so he did a good job to narrow the gap to 3.5.
Listed below is the list of final premiership figures for jockeys and trainers as at the end of the 1985/86 racing season from each of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Tasmania and Perth, as per the list that appeared in Turf Monthly Annual 1986”.
TRAINERS
JOCKEYS
SYDNEY
SYDNEY
B. MAYFIELD-SMITH (99)
T.J. SMITH (95.5)
N.BEGG (63)
P.SUTHERLAND (48)
L. BRIDGE (46)
J. DENHAM (33)
B.J. SMITH (29)
R.GUY (28)
R.THOMSEN (26)
M.LEES (24)
J. CASSIDY (82)
L. DITTMAN (73.5)
R.S. DYE (54)
J.MARSHALL (52)
R.QUINTON (46)
M. JOHNSTON (46)
B. COMPTON (43)
N. BARKER (42)
P. COOK (39)
D. BEADMAN (31)
MELBOURNE
MELBOURNE
C.S. HAYES (52.5)
G. MURPHY (27)
G. HANLON (23.5)
R. HORE-LACY (23.5)
T. HUGHES (16)
R. McGUINNESS (14.5)
L. FREEDMAN (13)
R.E.HOYSTED (13)
D. BAERTSCHIGER (13)
T.J. SMITH (11)
D. GAUCI (70)
L. MAUND (47)
M. CLARKE (41.5)
H. WHITE (40.5)
C. DINN (31.5)
G.WILLETTS (26)
M. BARLOW (24)
R. HEFFERNAN (22)
P. HYLAND (20)
G. EVAGORA (20)
BRISBANE
BRISBANE
B. McLACHLAN (64)
N. DAWSON (45)
J.ATKINS (32)
J.GRIFFITHS (22)
J. WALLACE (18)
A. BAILEY (17)
B. MILLER (15)
G.WILLIAMS (15)
E. KIRWAN (13)
T. DAWSON (13)
N. WILLIAMS (74)
K. RUSSELL (70.5)
G.DUFFY (39)
S. SCRIVEN (38)
C. SYMONS (36)
G. WATSON (35)
M.PELLING (31.5)
R. McGRATH (31)
S. SCHOFIELD (27)
L.BABIAN (23)
ADELAIDE
ADELAIDE
C.S. HAYES (54.5)
J. HAWKES (52)
E. CAMERON (41)
J.T. HALL (27)
L.J. SMITH (26)
J.V.HALL (16)
L.M. MacDONALD (15.5)
L.M. ARMFIELD (11)
P. BARNS (11)
P. HAYES (9)
J. COURTNEY (51)
P. SHEPHERD (43)
A. PEGUS (36)
A. MATTHEWS (32)
D. NYE (a) (31)
D. ESMONDE (a) (31)
J. LETTS (28)
D. McEVOY (a) (22.5)
D. TOOTELL (20)
R. BARONE (a) (19)
TASMANIA
TASMANIA
M.S.TRINDER (59)
L.T. DIXON (43)
C.E. BLACKER (41)
A.A. STUBBS (30)
S.G. MASKIELL (66)
K.J. MOORE (a) (50)
B.J. MASON (a) (43)
B. BUCKINGHAM (41)
PERTH
PERTH
F. MAYNARD (43)
B. O’MALLEY (39)
W. MITCHELL (24)
K. LEACH (19)
R. KEMP (86)
G. DONNELLY (30)
D. GUNDRY (25)
P. DYSON (23)
Of particular interest in the aforesaid is that Colin Hayes won both the Melbourne and Adelaide trainer’s premierships and that Sydney based trainer Tommy Smith also finished in the top 10 in the Melbourne trainers list.
Today on www.brisbaneracing.com.au there’s the third and final montage of photos from Magic Millions day last Saturday. On www.sydneyracing.com.au there’s the amazing story about how a Queensland based stud bought a weanling for $14,000 and sold him at a ready-to-run sale for $310,000, whilst on www.melbourneracing.com.au Sky Racing’s head of broadcasting Gerard Patane responds to criticism about his stations after speaking in-depth with Matt Nicholls.