Australia has its eye on champion Kiwi jockey Opie Bosson after he scooped one of its glittering racing prizes. But, as he tells Phil Taylor, Bosson nearly ate his way right out of the saddle.
You have to be hungry to do Opie Bosson's job.
A while back, sick of self-denial, Owen Patrick Bosson hung up his saddle. His weight soared to 78kg. "I was like a little beach ball," he says. Freed from the responsibility of maintaining the featherweight required of jockeys and at a crossroad in his career, he began to eat normally for the first time in his adult life. Within months, he'd added half of his previous bodyweight to his 1.56m frame.
Two months ago - when he won the richest race of his career, the A$3.5 million ($3.8 million) Caulfield Cup on New Zealand horse Mongolian Khan - Bosson had whittled himself down to 55kg of muscle and sinew. Fat boy slim.
Bosson answered his phone on a Tuesday evening a fortnight after that win. The line was bad. "Hang on," he said, "I'm in the sauna." Of course he was. It was the night before a mid-week country race meeting and he was wasting hard. He may be a lightweight but he has the knack, unfortunate for a jockey, of putting on weight when he eats. Some jockeys, he would later note, can have a meal and head to the races. Lucky bastards.
Yes, he said from the sauna, come to Te Aroha, we can chat between races.
In Melbourne, 32,294 screaming people watched Bosson ride the perfect race to win the Caulfield Cup and then heard him give thanks from the horse's back. It was the best day of his professional life, he said. "My parents, they will be so happy, and my girlfriend, Emily [Murphy], has been supporting me hard, getting my weight down and making sure I eat properly. Everything is paying off."
Wednesday, October 21. The cloud hides the 952m peak of Mt Te Aroha. The racecourse is at its foot, opposite the neat cemetery, down a long driveway lined grandly with phoenix palms. A crowd of a few hundred is at the course, stalwarts in tweed jackets and cheesecutter hats. Pies, chips and club sandwiches are on the menu.
A bread-and-butter meeting without much butter. The whips are cracking here in races worth just $7000, "It's ironical," said Bosson of the contrast. The jockey's five per cent cut of the winning Caulfield Cup stake was A$87,500. "It wasn't just the money," he said, "but to win it! It's one of the biggest races in Australia or New Zealand - top three."
Such days are the industry's shop window, while mid-week meetings like Te Aroha's reflect the daily grind of racing in New Zealand, where stakes money overall is declining and most everyone is feeling the pinch.
It's 3pm. Bosson has already ridden three winners but that's to be his lot today.
He's dapper and neat, his black riding boots sprayed in Pledge and buffed to a sheen, his handsome face creased into a smile. The trainer of his next ride tells him the horse - a first-starter - is fit, may be shy of the other horses, but is nevertheless a chance if it jumps well from the starting gate. The horse settles handy, fights, places fifth; a good debut.
4pm. Bosson eats a small, triangular sandwich, his first morsel for the day. In lieu of breakfast he spent an hour in a hot bath. He was 56.25kg when he needed to be 55kg. He made the weight after plenty of sweating.
"You don't get so much hungry as thirsty," he says. "Once you are on the horse, it's okay."
Lunch was a sip of water for the sake of lucidity but not too much, because water is heavy. Lucid is good - thoroughbreds weigh about 550kg and circle the track at 65km an hour.
The sun is like a visitor that won't stay put. Bosson, bare arms extending from a thickly padded crash vest, talks frugally. Everything about him is spare but his body is rock solid, as it needs to be. He's had his falls but is okay, he said, "touch wood". Always touch wood. A jockey's job is a balancing act, in more ways than one.
Opie Bosson riding Mongolian Khan when he won Race 9 at the BMW Caulfield Cup during Caulfield Cup Day in Melbourne, Australia. Photo / Getty Images
"Jockeys do not sit on a horse but rather stoop above it, perched like hood ornaments on a shimmying, lurching vehicle," wrote Barry Bearak, in his essay, The Jockey, for the New York Times. "Their weight is balanced with toeholds on thin metal stirrups. Their fingers clutch the reins and a handful of mane. Each race demands exhausting effort."
Thoroughbreds have small gas tanks and no fuel gauge. Good jockeys "feel" what they have under them by the animal's action, the sound of its respiration. Bosson does this as well as anyone through a kind of sixth sense he struggles to explain. He rides as though born to it, as he was. His great grandfather was a trainer, his parents, Owen and Glenda, dabbled with a few racehorses in Rotorua, and Bosson was apprenticed to his godfather, trainer Stephen Autridge, at 14, riding in his first race a year later.
Nothing fazes Bosson bar this question: what makes a great jockey? Fast horses, he quips. Pressed, he offers this: "I just try to think quick, put the horse in the best position." It's a hard question to ask a jockey, he says, better to ask a trainer.
"He's kind," said Danica Guy, on whose horse Bosson won at Te Aroha. "He is a humble person, a thinking person, he's relaxed, he has great hands." Great hands means soft hands - a racehorse can't abide the bit being pulled through its mouth.
"Horses just run out of their skin for him," says Murray Baker, trainer of Mongolian Khan. "He's got a great sense of timing, [is] a great judge of pace, and [he has] very good hands. [He's] a kind horseman, he balances them."
He is tactical, unflappable, strong and ultra competitive, says his girlfriend. "You wouldn't pick it because he's so mellow but he wants to be the fastest, be the winner." An afternoon out go-karting and her boyfriend is "hard-out trying to run me off the track".
The year Bosson became a beachball was 2003. Fed up with the weight battle, he quit. He played rugby, halfback for a country team, a game he loves and played from the age of 5 until he became a jockey. He was 23. "You can let yourself go from time to time," he says. "I just wanted a break." He earned a crust pre-training horses and ate and drank like the rest of us.
It is a long way back when you have put on half your body weight. "Yes, but I'm not much good at anything else," is his laconic reply. His talent has never been in doubt. He has won New Zealand premierships for most wins in a season even though he rides fewer races than many. In recent times he has added consistent professionalism to that talent. Eating light and living right, sweating, turning up, time after time.
"I just worked out it was easier making money when you were a better jockey."
For a treat he and his girlfriend visit their favourite restaurant, Masu. When you can't eat much, it might as well be quality. "Why would you eat that?" he retorts when asked when he last had a drive-through burger. "He is taking care of himself," says Murphy. "He gives me a lot of credit but it's him. He wants it so much and he has such an opportunity with Mongolian Khan."
The spring was kind until it was cruel. After the Caulfield Cup, Bosson turned in another perfect ride on another Baker horse, shooting Turn Me Loose clear on the last bend to pluck another Aussie plum, the Crystal Mile at Moonee Valley. There is a hierarchy in horse racing. At the top in this part of the world are places like Flemington and Moonee Valley, both in Melbourne; Randwick and Rosehill in Sydney.
The Aussies are fawning. Bosson rode for Godolphin, the world's biggest racing stable, during the Melbourne Cup carnival until he was suspended for accidentally causing interference. The suspension would have meant he lost the ride on Mongolian Khan in the Melbourne Cup but calamity had already played its hand. Five days before the race the horse was taken to Werribee Vet Clinic with an infection in his intestines and was scratched from the Cup for which he was the third favourite. It's a serious condition for any horse let alone a thoroughbred who has won $4 million in just 14 months of racing. Fears were held for its life.
"The main thing is that the horse recovers," Bosson told the Herald soon after the news broke. (The horse is on the mend and will be aimed at the autumn racing carnival in Sydney.) Bosson was entitled to be personally gutted. It was to have been his first ride in the $6.3 million race in 15 years, his first since the race became one of the world's greatest, contested by a truly international field, and his first on a favourite. His partner, parents and brother were booked to go to cheer him on.
The 35-year-old's future is likely to lie in Australia and sooner rather than later. A cup race at a bush meeting there might be worth $150,000, he says. "You could win every race on the card at a country meeting here and still not win as much. I don't have too many years left. I don't want to be riding when I'm quite old. Make money while the sun shines."
