By PETER CALDER
The sun's just up, haloeing the treetops across the Clevedon flats, but it hasn't touched the roofs at Mark Purdon's racing stables at Ardmore.
Silently in the grey half-light, the men go about their business - moving horses out of their stalls, gearing them up with the complicated tangle of harness, lashing in place the poles of the finely balanced sulkies and leading them out to the training track behind the stables.
"Looking for Roy," I tell each one I meet. "He won't be far away," they reply, and turn back to their work.
And he isn't. He said he would be there by 6 am and two minutes early ("Here he is now!") Roy is heading across the yard in his distinctive swooping gait, barely pausing for a hello and a handshake before wheeling a barrow to an empty stall.
Mucking out, they call it, but it's a delicate process, not the slosh-and-mop procedure that name implies. With a finely tined rake, Roy combs the coarse sawdust in the stall, gathering the droppings and transferring them to the barrow.
"You've got to get in here quick, before the birds," he says, eyeing the chattering sparrows and starlings that hang hungrily from the wire mesh on the ceiling.
"They scatter it around and, before you know it, the sawdust gets very black and dirty."
Roy, dapper at dawn in spit-shined boots, wields the rake, the shovel, the broom with a surgeon's precision. Within moments the stall floor is clean, soft, smooth, awaiting the return of the horse that is out working on the training track.
Mucking out is the most menial of work in a racing stable, normally the domain of the lowliest teenage stablehand. Roy Purdon is 73, retired five years, but still not eclipsed as the country's iconic harness racing trainer. And he's hard at it.
"What else am I going to do?" he beams, when I wonder why he bothers. "I haven't got a boat to go fishing in. It's good to be able to get up in the morning and go and do something because you're used to waking up early. I couldn't sit at home all day. I'd just be thinking: 'I should be out there giving 'em a hand'."
If Roy Purdon had decided to rest on his laurels when he retired in 1995, they would have made a thick and comfortable cushion. Alone or in partnership with his eldest son Barry, who joined up with his Dad in 1977, Roy had trained 2013 winners and held the premiership (which marks the season's most successful trainer) for 21 of the 42 years he had spent in the business.
His success made the Purdon dynasty so dominant that the sport's ruling body - motivated, some say, more by envy than good sense - decreed it must break up.
Barry, 42, now operates from stables a few kilometres away and Mark, 36, runs the provocatively named Strike Won stables in Burnside Rd, where he is - technically, at least - his Dad's boss.
Roy Purdon was born to the turf. His grandfather, a Scots immigrant, worked for a horse trainer in Lyttelton and his father's plans to head north and strike out on his own were interrupted by the Depression. So the teenage Roy swept out buses at the Avondale Bus Company to raise money for harness for his father's nascent business.
"We started breaking in horses for people on a farm where we stayed in Mangere," he says, "and then we got given a couple to train and away we went."
Roy started out on his own in 1954 near Te Awamutu. "I stayed there six years, but when the night trotting started I thought I'd better get closer to the action."
He moved to Pukekohe and then, in the early '70s, to the flat land beyond Ardmore airfield, between Takanini and Clevedon. His middle name is Clevedon, which is just a coincidence, but it seems fitting to pretend that the area, home to many of the region's stables, is named after him.
Out on the track, drivers put the horses through their paces, rolling in tight formation so close they could spit on each other.
Then, team by team, the horses are led or driven back into the stables, where Roy and the others wait to strip the gear from them and lead them into wash-down stalls. Their flanks, marbled with sweat, heave with the pumping of their hearts.
They seem jumpy, too, eyes wild and nostrils flaring with the excitement of exertion. As the old man moves among them, some of the calm confidence he exudes seems to rub off and they settle.
Roy's career, as driver, trainer and owner, was carved out despite a physical handicap which might have defeated a lesser man. As a teenager he developed a crippling arthritis which froze his right hip until he finally had it replaced with an artificial one in 1991.
He's not really sure what went wrong, but he always attributed it to one of those barefoot playground rugby games "where there would be 50 kids and one ball and it just so happened I got the ball and about 20 jumped on top of me.
"I didn't notice anything at the time but about a week later I noticed a pain and it turned out to be arthritis."
He spent six weeks in hospital and another nine months, much of that time in plaster from the hip down, in the Wilson Home in Takapuna - "a marvellous place."
"You don't know how lucky you are," he says [the word "lucky" crops up a lot when Roy Purdon talks about his life], "until you've been through there and seen what some of those kids put up with."
The result was a life - until the hip operation - spent with his leg stretched in front of him whenever he sat.
"I couldn't bend it. I just used to stick it out from my chair and hope no one would trip over it."
Roy Purdon will tell you there's no secret to training a horse. It's just common sense, he says, care and attention.
"If you keep a horse happy in his surroundings he's bound to perform better - if he's got the ability. You learn to read them - you can tell what they're like as soon as you start to harness them up."
In one of the stalls a tiny horse - resplendent in a red silk cover - watches goings-on with wide curious eyes. He's Courage Under Fire, a former New Zealand champion but now Australian-trained, whose name even those ignorant of racing have heard. He arrived in the small hours of Wednesday to prepare for last night's Auckland Cup at Alexandra Park.
It seems remarkable that, in a race with so much riding on it, a stable would find room for a rival.
"We're a bit different, I suppose," says Roy. "When we go to Sydney, we always stay with Brian [Hancock, Courage Under Fire's trainer]. He gives me the loan of a car, everything. But once you're on the track, you've got no mates."
I bump into Hancock later, bleary-eyed from his pre-dawn arrival, brushing his horse down in the stall Roy's mucked out. I tell him what Roy said. He smiles.
"There's none better," he says, his smile widening till it seems he might cry.
"We're no rivals, mate, except for a couple of minutes. Roy's just one of those guys, your life's a lot richer for knowing him."
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