Source :- THE AGE NEWS
In many ways, Thursday is the day young trainer Taige Weir gets to welcome back her father.
As the racing industry eagerly anticipates the looming spring carnival, which warms up with a group 1 at Flemington on Saturday, the 28-year-old Weir is more excited about showing her father around her workplace.
“I can’t wait for him to actually come here,” she says of her training base at Ballarat. “Just to show him what we’re doing, and the horses that we have, it will be pretty special. I just want to show him what we’ve built.”
Darren Weir served the last day of his seven-and-a-half years in exile on Wednesday.
It brings to an end consecutive disqualifications for possessing and using jiggers on three of his racehorses while running on a treadmill on the eve of the 2018 Melbourne Cup carnival.
It means he can now visit his daughter’s workplace, offer her advice and gain entry to a racetrack. He is not licensed to handle her horses.
“The biggest thing I’m looking forward to is just to have him on track at a race meeting where I get a winner,” his daughter says.
“He’s always first on the phone when we get a winner, and it’s pretty special because he’s obviously been so successful.”
It is mid-morning on a crisp, clear day at Ballarat Racecourse.
Weir is sitting in a modest portable office at her stables, a facility she has leased off the Ballarat Turf Club for the past 12 months.
She has ridden three horses in work, sometimes she rides seven, her partner, jockey Will Gordon, is washing down a feisty chestnut Hanseatic colt in a nearby wash bay, and another staff member is sweeping dirt from a concrete slab.
Weir has trained 12 winners since being granted her licence in February. Her first winner, No Greater Vue, was ridden by Gordon at Colac on March 1. It was her second runner on her first day at the track.
“I think he’s ridden all of my winners,” she says of Gordon, an Englishman who moved to Australia five years ago and was recently crowned Country Victorian Jockey of the Year with 109 winners.
“I think that shows he knows these horses very well. He gallops them, gives me good feedback, and that allows me to place them right.”
As excited as Weir is about the challenges ahead, setting herself a goal of 30 winners in the coming season, it is inevitable she is asked about her father. Especially on this day.
She says she is unsure about his future. She has not asked him if he wants to train again.
For that to happen, the 2015 Melbourne Cup winner would have to re-apply for a licence and prove he was a fit-and-proper person before being allowed to return to the fold.
The decision would rest with the Racing Victoria board.
He is unlikely to apply in the immediate future. Instead, he is expected to return to his pre-training business at Maldon, near Bendigo.
“I think he’d be pretty happy if he could just sit back and watch (my sister) Bonnie and I do it. I think he’s pretty happy that we’ve followed in his footsteps,” Weir says.
Weir says her father’s ban took a “massive toll” on their family, and he remains remorseful for his action.
“We went from going to the races all the time and following dad around, and then to nothing. It was just all gone one day. So it was pretty hard,” she says.
“But I look at it both ways. It brought my sister, my cousin Dayne, Dad, and myself closer. Dad was never able to watch a game of netball before, but he didn’t miss a game when he was banned. I thought that was pretty cool.”
Weir says she has 38 horses in work, and about 60 on her books. She says she works her horses hard and has a set training system in place – six weeks of trotting and cantering before introducing gallops, and then sending them to a trial. But, she explains, “you have to know your horses because every one is different”.
She also springs a surprise: she did not become a trainer because of her father. Instead, she credits Chris Waller.
The lightbulb moment happened, she says, while working a Saturday afternoon shift at Waller’s Flemington stables in 2022. Two of Waller’s star sprinters, Home Affairs and Nature Strip, fought out the group 1 Lightning Stakes down the nearby racecourse’s famous straight. She watched the race with stable staff on her phone.
“I had only been there three days, and I was like, ‘this is amazing’,” Weir explains. “I had cleaned out their boxes earlier that morning. I just thought it was pretty cool, being a small part of those horses’ preparation.
“It was also cool because Dad trained Nature Strip. I had a lot to do with him early days, and then Dad got into trouble, and he went to Chris.
“Then I met Chris and after seeing his system and how good he is at everything, I sort of thought, ‘yeah, this is what I want to do’.”
Weir has served a lengthy apprenticeship. She grew up around horses, rode in pony club, played polocrosse, spent six months with Waller, 14 months with trainer Andrew Bobbin in the Grampians, did a year pre-training with her father and worked a couple of yearling preparations with breeding giant Yulong.
Every day is full. Her alarm goes off at 4.15am, she works at the stables until 11am, takes a short break and then returns for the afternoon to sort through emails, swim horses and do odd jobs before going to the races.
“When dad was training, we had group one winners all the time, and we went to the races, and I didn’t actually work, and I was like, ‘this is great’,” she says.
“But now I realise, it’s actually not all sunshine and butterflies. It’s hard work.”
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