Oliver wants more please

Jockey chasing another Caulfield Cup win

RACING: Damien Oliver won the Caulfield Cup at his first try.

It was 1992 and Oliver, having already ridden in three Melbourne Cups despite being only 20, steered Mannerism straight in the final 200m to just get past raging favourite Veandercross, who didn’t go straight at all.

Oliver was coming off his first Melbourne jockeys’ premiership win in 1991 and his first gig in the Caulfield mile-and-a-half classic proved the start of a stunning relationship with the race.

He won it again in 1994 on Paris Lane and again in 1995 on Doriemus.

Oliver had won three Caulfield Cups in his first four rides in the race. He collected his fourth win in 1999 on Sky Heights. Four wins in eight tries.

All told, through 20 rides in the Caulfield 2400m since that first one, Oliver has finished no worse than fourth seven times.

He won the Melbourne Cup in 2013 on Fiorente, 25 years after his first ride in the race in 1989, when as a 17-year-old he fell off a grey mare called Saliopra.

It’s coming up to 30 years since Oliver’s first race win, as a 15-year-old at Bunbury, Western Australia, in March 1988.

Four Caulfield Cup triumphs, three Melbourne Cups, two Cox Plates and 1500-plus race wins have come in that time. Nearly 10,000 race rides have netted close to $150 million in prizemoney.

But on a stunning spring Tuesday morning this week at Caulfield there was Oliver, now 45, a father of three and with a Hall of Fame career well and truly under his belt, standing in the trainer’s tower, just days out from trying to win his fifth Caulfield Cup, this time on Ventura Storm. “There are no shortcuts in this business,” Oliver said as he waited for his final ride of the morning.

“You still have to do the hard yards.”

Racing has taken Oliver all over the world and his decades of success have elevated him into one of those legendary type of figures known well beyond his own sport.

And despite conceding this week he can see an end “on the horizon somewhere”, he’s not stopping too soon.

Oliver has 107 Group 1 wins, Roy Higgins 108. Only George Moore, with 119, has more. That record doesn’t drive him.

“If you still have the talent and ability and want to do it, the winners will come,” he said.

Maybe one will come today at Caulfield.