Thinking back: that very first win ...

Dreaming on about that fortieth win as a race-horse owner, got me thinking back to the very first of the 34 triumphs to date. I looked in my diary and there it was. June 1999.



"It was six o’clock in the June morning, South of France time. The sun shattered in at the window and into my eyes, and I woke up knowing half-consciously that there was something I had to do. Of course, Davey Crockett. Marlborough Day Two. Check the web. He’d given us a splendidly close third (I didnt know till later just HOW close) on Day One. Could he have come somewhere again?
I slid out of bed and hurried on naked feet (OK the rest of me was just as naked, but the world was asleep and, if it wasn’t, it wasn’t at my place) over the big red terracotta tiles of the passage into the living room where the old computer with its new Internet installation sat, rather vulgarly, where once had throned a more elegantly traditional phone.
French phone service and, above all French Internet service, is not - to put it in sweet English - good. In fact, its usually either bottom-of-the-class slow or just plain stubborn-won’t-ish. But for some reason, today everything clicked through in the few moments it took me to fill and turn on the kettle...
Click. Hrnz.co.nz. Click Results. Click Marlborough HRC. Click .. the trot...
Have you ever read a book where the heroine (for reasons best not gone into) suddenly goes off like the luncheon whistle at the local factory? Yes, I’m afraid I did. It was nessun dorma at Les Arabanes that morning. They heard me three flats away. And they knew right away what must have happened.
Davey Crockett had won. We had won our first race as owners.
It took me a while, though, to find out more than the bare facts and figures. Mike Grainger posted me a copy of that best-seller (well, it ought to be) the Harness Racing Weekly in which half a page was devoted to Davey’s exploits, and in which - and I didn’t realise the hugeness of the honour at the time - he was nominated one of the three “Runs of the Week”, but it wasn’t till months later when I returned to New Zealand and bought the video of the race from the TAB that I realised how much he had deserved it. It was quite a run..
Our horse had won a race. Won a race. Won a race ...