KEY POINTS:
The bloke patting Xcellent is a horseman's horseman.
It's Rodney Heaslip, one of the most respected racing figures in New Zealand for decades.
The shame is, we haven't seen his talent in 20 years.
For the past six weeks Heaslip has put two decades on the sideline behind him for a management role at the Mike and Paul Moroney stable at Matamata.
And they're pleased to have him.
"Rodney's stablecraft is superb," says Paul Moroney.
And it should be. Heaslip was brought up and taught by some of the best - the late George Greene and Colin Jillings - and he was widely respected for his horsemanship by many of the big names of New Zealand racing.
Despite battling crippling weight problems at times, Heaslip rode the winners of the Railway, Easter Handicap, Avondale Cup and the Grand National Hurdles at Flemington. But that's another story.
Through it all, the 59-year-old has been a gypsy-type character, with a similar mystical sense around a horse.
That all ended in the stipendiary inquiry room in Queensland in 1986.
Heaslip re-located to the Gold Coast in 1984 - he remembers the date because he arrived the day before the infamous Fine Cotton ring-in race in Brisbane.
His association with racing ended when he had a run-in with steward Ray Murrihy, then in Queensland, now in Sydney, following a race ride.
"Shane Scriven fell when racing inside me. I didn't cause it, but Murrihy was adamant I did.
"I asked for the rear-on film to be shown, which I knew would clear me, and he wouldn't show it."
When Heaslip mentioned to Murrihy that one day he might not make it to work, the New Zealander copped a year and said that was the end of his association with racing.
"I did a lot of commercial cleaning on the Gold Coast, but my wife developed a heart problem so we recently came back to New Zealand to get out of the heat, which helped."
The couple ran a dairy just outside Thames and a couple of months ago Paul Moroney was playing around on an internet chat show and was surprised to find that Heaslip was on air at the same time. The pair ended up talking on the telephone and Moroney offered Heaslip a job at Ballymore Stables.
"You can see in everything Rodney does he's part of the old school," says Moroney. "I actually thought Rodney might be over-qualified for what we could offer him."
The enlarged Heaslip shape has suddenly changed.
"I was 14 stone [89kg] when I came here in October and now I'm 11 stone 3 and that's just from walking the horses to and from the track each morning. All I was doing was eating pies in our dairy all day."
If the weight keeps dropping off he hasn't ruled out the possibility of jumping back into the training saddle. He hadn't been on a horse for 18 years until last year when he bought Crack King at a bloodstock sale with an idea of making a jumper out of him.
"I rode him myself, but all he wanted to do was pig-root around the paddock. I walked him up the road and he wouldn't go past the goats tied up, so I got rid of him."
The tough ones never worried Heaslip - he rode over fences when he didn't have to.
When he won the 1979 Grand National Hurdles at Flemington on Somoy it was the same year he rode the Don Sellwood-trained Al Donte to win the Railway at Ellerslie at 49kg.
"'I had to borrow a one-stone [5.5kg] saddle to ride Somoy in Melbourne - I was 49kg."
Heaslip has been associated with some great horses and many racetrack victories (880) and doesn't excite easily, but like the rest of us he was staggered by Xcellent's comeback victory at Ellerslie last Monday.
"It was magnificent, first because he actually came back and second because I thought he was two races away and I was certain he was at least one race away. But horses like him know what it's about and just go out and do it.
"He's improved out of sight with that race."
To have a horse like Xcellent to fuss over is the perfect welcome back to racing for Rodney Heaslip.
Racing was without him too long.
