Warren Kennedy rides another winner for his chief supporters, the famous Cambridge Stud of Brendan and Joe Lindsay’s (Picture: raceformbl.nz).
Most South Africans have an image of NZ as being a small country but twice South African champion jockey Warren Kennedy said chasing the championship had required more travel and been just as taxing on him as it had been in South Africa.
Kennedy has the championship in the bag as his nearest rival, reigning champion Michael McNab, has been laid off for the rest of the season with what has been found to be a fractured vertebra.
“He (Kennedy) has been equal parts magnificent in the saddle, professional out of it and robotic in his determination to add the New Zealand jockey’s title to the two premierships he won in his native South Africa,” wrote journalist Michael Guerin in the New Zealand Herald.
“To move to New Zealand as a total unknown here and win the premiership inside two years defies belief and McNab can take comfort he has conceded his title to a horseman of rare talent and drive.”
Warren said in an interview with Turf Talk, “Mission accomplished! It was unfortunate for Michael that he got injured, but that’s the way racing is and I am relieved that it’s all said and done now, to be honest.”
Warren can look back on a magnificent season in more ways than one.
He could well be the first foreigner to win the New Zealand premiership.
He has ridden 135 winners at a rate of one win every 6.11 rides and is the leading rider in both stakes earning and in number of stakes race victories.
His earnings are NZ$5,910,340 (R64,245,395) and he has won 17 Graded and Listed races combined.
He became the first jockey to ever surpass NZ$5 million in stakes earnings in one New Zealand season and he will set a new record earnings mark.
On New Year’s day he became the first jockey in NZ history to ride seven winners on a day and the seven wins from nine rides included one Gr 1 and three Gr 2s.
He said there is a strong press presence in New Zealand racing and the seven winners were given a huge amount of coverage in the written press and through interviews.
However, Warren in typically humble style took something different out of it and said, “When I had six winners in SA once Garth Puller said well done to me but added ‘Just remember I have ridden seven in a day!’, Well now I can tell Garth I’ve also ridden seven!”
He said he had been expecting about two or three winners on the morning of that immense day.
Yet, despite having had a busy big race schedule, Warren said possibly the biggest pressure he had felt all season was riding a first winner for his wife Barbara.
He said, “She knows the game and she knows how it goes and all that, but you want to get that monkey off the back, that first winner just to prove to everyone that she’s capable of training horses and winning races. We thought that horse could win and there was a lot of pressure on us, but once the filly passed the line it was, ‘Oh, thank goodness, I can focus on the championship again!’”
Barabara grabbed the opportunity to take over Peter and Dawn Williams’ successful barn at Byerley Park from the beginning of June and Warren emphasised how hard she had been working. This is particularly in light of there being quite a lot of differences between training in New Zealand and South Africa. The work has paid dividends as her barn is now just about full with 26 horses.
Warren said chasing a championship in South Africa had been comparitively easy from a travel point of view.
He said, “In SA you just fly into the major centres and you’re just about on course. But In New Zealand to get to some courses requires a two hour flight and a three hour drive. There are some pretty remote race courses and it’s quite a mission to get there, so it’s been very, very busy, really a lot of travelling.
Warren and Barbara live in Auckland and are close to the country’s main racecourse , Ellerslie. That has some advantages, but it sticks Warren a long way from most of the other courses. For example Taupo racecourse is about an hour-and-a-half away for a lot of North Island trainers. but for him it is a three hour drive. He said also that the traffic in Auckland is “horrendous”, “Worse than J’Burg!”
He has generally had less rides per week than he had in SA, because although there are opportunities to ride most days some of them are not enticing.
He said, “They’ll have a meeting at some country race course that you don’t really want to be riding at, there are a quite a lot of inexperienced riders around and you don’t want to really be riding there. There’s North Island and South Island racing and and come wintertime it’s bitterly cold down in the south, so you don’t really travel that much around there in winter.”
The racing in New Zealand tails off a lot in winter.
Warren said, “A lot of the horses go out for spells in the winter. The winter is very wet, so they don’t really run the good horses on all the real wet and heavy tracks. They save them for the spring and summer, when it’s all the big races. So all those good horses you’re associated with at the start of the season, they fall away come April. Then you are scrounging to get rides on the rest of them.”
However, during the Summer he was averaging about four to five meetings a week.
He had to adapt to the racecourses too, which are generally different to South Africa.
He said, “Some of the courses are very, very tight, they have straights of about 250m. And there are no false rails in New Zealand, so it gets very tight and you’ve got to make room for your horse. So it was a bit of an adaption and the tracks they are prepared to still ride on are extremely heavy. They call it a heavy tenure, and it is proper slosh, but they are all natural-based tracks, so the horses don’t really falter. So they go in deep, but it’s safe. They go in really, really deep and the first couple of times I rode here when it was so wet I was looking around and thinking ‘Are we really going to race on this? I’m not used to riding on this and if this was in South Africa the meeting would be cancelled!’ But, it’s how they race here and in the wintertime, with the good horses put away, they’ve got the horses for these sort of tracks.”
However, from Warren’s experience the generally more testing New Zealand going does not make the tracks more suitable for a certain type of action.
He said, “They’ve got their sort of graph of heavy tracks, so once you get to an eight, it’s pretty heavy. But every track is different and some of the tracks play differently. So they will for example call it a heavy ten because that’s what the readings give them and some horses don’t run on it. Heavy trackers sometimes don’t run on those tracks and yet they’ll run on another heavy ten track and win as they like. It’s really funny. There’s a lot of different courses and it’s difficult. Horses adapt to some of them and don’t adapt to the others. It’s really hit and miss here, to be honest, and the wintertime it’s really hits and miss.”
Warren has been associated with some top horses this season.
Last season he rode the top three-year-old filly Prowess to two Gr 2 wins and a Listed win before she went over to Australia and won the Gr 1 Vinery Stud Stakes under Mark Zahra.
He said he could not say she was the best filly he had ever ridden “because I have ridden Summer Pudding!”.
He added, “I would say one thing though, she reminded me of Summer Pudding. She has a big engine and she just kept unwinding, just like Summer Pudding would do. It’s difficult to say which one is better.”
He rode the crack three-year-old Crocetti to seven wins in succession, including a Gr 1, a Gr 2 and two Gr 3s, before he lost his unbeaten record when second in his first race in open company.
He has ridden the top filly Orchestral to Gr 3 success and, like Prowess, she was also sent to Australia and she also won the Gr 1 Vinery Stud Stakes.
Comparing horses in general in New Zealand to SA he said, “I’d say up to a mile South Africa’s probably got the better ones, but SA doesn’t have stayers anymore. They’re bred to stay here, so they’re much tougher and they go the trip they are bred for.”
Former South African Jockey Donavan Mansour was Warren’s agent and was instrumental in him moving to NZ. However, he will have a new agent this season as Donovan is going into a new venture. Warren’s new “manager” (as agents are called over there) will be former jockey Leith Innes.
The chief man to thank for luring Warren to New Zealand is the owner and breeder Daniel Nakhle.
However, his chief supporters have been Brendan and Joe Lindsay of the famous Cambridge Stud, which they took over from Sir Patrick Hogan.
Hogan’s selection of the legendary stallion Sir Tristram in the mid-1970s changed the face of Australasian breeding. Sir Tristram sired 45 Gr 1 winners, which was at one stage a world record. Danehill overtook his mark and Sir Tristram’s son Zabeel, who also stood at Cambridge, also surpassed that mark.
Warren said the appreciation of Sir Tristram and Zabeel is ever present on the stud farm through a statue of the former and multiple memoribilia.
On life in general in NZ he said family life was a major improvement, because it was really safe to the extent they could sleep with their doors open. They live on a two acre plot with no gates and no burglar bars and it has paddocks on one side and the main road on the other.
He said schooling for their little ones was also great.
However, he added that the cost of living was very expensive and gave the example of a small fist-sized mango costing the equivalent of R90. Rent is also very expensive.
However, overall they are enjoying life over there.
He added, “We do miss Woolworths though! They’ve got a store called Woolworths, but it’s nothing like the Woolworths we’ve got in South Africa, it’s absolutely nothing like it!”
Warren concluded by saying his New Zealand jockeys premiership victory was important for more than just himself and his family as he believed it would pave the way for more SA jockeys to be accepted over there.
On the bright side for South African fans, he said he would unlikely be chasing another championship again and said he would like to come over to SA to ride in races like the Hollywoodbets Durban July next season.
The top ten in the NZ premiership as it stands:
