Racing: Walker challenging the racing establishment

Michael Walker says the pukana is to do with identity, but racing officials think it's off-course behaviour. Picture / Amos Chapple

There are two things to notice about top jock Michael Walker - he is young and he is hip. He's also casual about punctuality, in the way of young men.

He's 21, and wears his cultured sideburns long and pointy. A rhino image decorates his T-shirt, a Von Dutch cap sits atop a dark thatch. He carries himself with the assurance of those that know they are good at what they do. And he has been very good from a young age - top apprentice five years in a row and top jockey overall in two of those years.

There's life's bumps and bruises too, but we'll come to that.

First we talk about the pros and cons of keeping one's tongue in one's cheek.

Walker made the front sections of newspapers - a rare event for the sport of kings, coverage of which is usually confined to the racing pages - by saluting a big-race victory by poking out his tongue, a pukana.

Although Walker describes himself as "cocky", he says this was no act of cheek but a deliberate salute that, for him, fits the bill in that it says something about who he is.

He intends it to be a Michael Walker hallmark when he's successful in major races.

And that doesn't please officials. They don't think that a brash and talented young man sticking his tongue out for the camera as he passes the winning post is a good look for racing.

They told him so when he was called into the judicial room after his last pukana. There had apparently been complaints and the stewards were scratching their heads about whether Walker's action might contravene the rule which makes it an offence to bring the industry into disrepute.

Walker can't believe the fuss it has caused in an industry battling a seemingly inexorable decline in all the important yardsticks: participation, on-course attendances, share of the gambling dollar, and stake money.

"It's stupid," says Walker, who thinks an absence of fun may have something to do with racing's decline. "Something so little and racing officials have made it into something bigger than it is."

He sees it as adding colour to a staid industry run by old-fashioned people. "They try to keep it as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Well, it's time for a change."

Young people don't find the idea of a day at the races appealing, Walker says, and they're the ones the industry needs if it's to thrive.

Walker says New Zealand could learn from Australia, which is good at promoting the razzmatazz of racing, part of which is celebrating its characters.

"If you are a good jockey in Australia you are pumped up and made like a movie star, here [a lot of people] want to knock you down.

"You always know that you have to be level-headed but there's times when you would love to be a bit jubilant and show off a bit. I think that's good."

There should be room for that, he thinks, even though racing is a serious business with serious money.

Look at the seriously successful business of top rugby. The era when a try-scoring All Black would look as though he'd just been exposed as Jack The Ripper has given way to displays of joie de vivre.

So Walker plans to continue to mark big occasions with a pukana despite the veiled threat from officialdom.

There are valid safety reasons why jockeys are banned from flourishing their whips until past the post, so Walker says the pukana is a safe way to celebrate. "It's something I could do without getting into trouble - I thought."

It fits the bill in other ways. The pukana is derived from war - warriors would make fierce faces - but has evolved into a symbol of Maori pride.

Maori party co-leader and kapa haka expert Pita Sharples interprets Walker's gesture as saying "Hey, look, I am Maori and I have won."

Walker says he wants to be seen as a Maori succeeding as a jockey. Of Ngati Porou, Ngati Whakaue and Scottish descent, he wears his whakapapa on his arm - a thorn representing his mother's Scottish heritage.

He learned Maori at the knee of his grandmother, a woman who had a powerful influence on him even though she died when he was young.

Walker lights up when he speaks of her, telling me he slept in her room the night she died and hasn't spoken Maori since. Nor does he eat fish. He spoke Maori to her; she fed him fish. It was their thing.

Born in Rotorua, Walker's family is vast and convoluted. He has a half-brother and two half-sisters who follow his career, and plenty of cousins.

Racing writers refer to Walker's bad start to life - a reference, Walker says, to "a lot of abuse". He's spoken about it before and does so now to a counsellor, but does not wish to trawl over it here save to say he survived. "It will take a lot more than that to keep me down." He says that in a tone that puts a lid on the topic but also offers a glimpse of the resolve that holds him in good stead on the racetrack.

Such issues, are not easily dealt with. Combine that and, shall we say, the exuberance of youth and ...

In Melbourne last year, his stellar career, and his life, came off the rails. He had broken up with his girlfriend, the controls that come with being apprenticed to a trainer had gone, he was 20 and doing booze and cocaine - but not, he hastens to add, when racing or riding trackwork.

That crisis may have cost him what would have been his only ride in the Melbourne Cup, the biggest race in this part of the globe. He was pulled off Catch Me If You Can 90 minutes before the A$5 million ($5.4 million) event after committing the professional jockey's sin of presenting overweight.

"I didn't care about anything in my life," he says. "I was living day by day. It was no good." He is referring to that time but also to more recent events.

On June 24, at 4am, Walker, intoxicated, crashed his Mercedes-Benz near New Plymouth.

That cost him his driver's licence and the disqualification may well be lengthened next month when he appears in court on another driving charge.

He refers to the crash as "a wake up call" from which his sessions with a counsellor arose. (His lawyer told the court that Walker would seek professional help for his alcohol problems.)

Over lunch - which Walker washes down with a beer - he tells me the alcohol issue is in the past. And besides, it's a symptom rather than the cause.

He lives in Matamata, is back with his girlfriend, and is stable jockey for Mark Walker (no relation), one of the top trainers.

Race meetings, travel and daily trackwork make for a busy life.

It seems to suit. Three months into the season, Walker is top of the jockey's premiership and extended his lead by riding three winners at Hawera the day after our interview.

I asked what it takes to be really good.

"A thoroughbred racehorse is one of God's most impressive engines," Laura Hillenbrand wrote in her landmark novel Seabiscuit. "Tipping the scales at up to 1450lbs, he can sustain speeds of 40 miles per hour. Equipped with reflexes much faster than those of the most quick-wired man, he swoops over as much as 28ft of earth in a single stride, and corners on a dime. His body is a paradox of mass and lightness, crafted to slip through air with the ease of an arrow. His mind is impressed with a single command: run."

The jockey is the pilot of this rocket of nature. In Walker's book, the best jockeys love horses, as he does. He speaks about soft hands and long-rein riding.

"Horses can feel the way you are feeling," he says. "A horse's feeling goes from their mouth through the reins to your hands and through to you.

"If you are tense your horse is going to be tense. If you're relaxed, it will relax."

"If you gather a horse up, they're going to want to pull. If you give a horse their head they are going to come off the bit and relax for you."

And a top jockey must hate to lose.

"The will to win makes you do things, like take a gap that's only this big," says Walker holding up finger and thumb, "that after the race you think, 'Did I just do that'?"

Walker is the most competitive person he knows.

His girlfriend, Candace Smith, advises people to avoid board or card games with him.

Walker says: "I'm hopeless. I have to win everything. And if I don't win I pack a shit."

Larrikins often do well in racing but tend not to last.

Of all jockeys, the one Walker most wants to battle head-to-head at the finish of a race is Chris Johnson, a South Islander whose brilliance on horseback was undermined by erratic behaviour out of the saddle.

That may happen. Johnson is back riding after several years' absence. If it does, Walker wants the photograph for his wall.

Two men with ordinary life problems. Two men with rare gifts for horses. Holding it together. Fighting for the prize.