Khoury warms to Currie

ONE of Ben Currie’s biggest owners says he will be sticking loyal with the Toowoomba trainer and expects he will beat the charges levelled against him by QRIC.

Melbourne businessman Tony Khoury races horses including Weetwood winner Amanaat and last month’s Magic Millions Country Cup winner Mr Markou with Currie.

“My attitude is that these horses will stay with Ben Currie until he is completely told he cannot train a horse. That’s my loyalty to him. And it was always going to be that way,” Khoury said.

Currie earned a reprieve at QCAT last week when he was granted a stay of proceedings against a suspension imposed upon him by stewards last week with regards to seven new charges, including the use of jiggers.

“The word animal cruelty is used in the wrong way. They are saying he’s used a jigger. There’s no jigger. They can search everything. They are false allegations,” he said.

“I know Ben pretty well. There’s definitely no jigger in his racing stable.”

Khoury said he has raced horses with many of the top stables in Australia but Currie’s record with the cheap horses he has sent him, like Snitch ($10,000) and Amanaat ($7000) is “unbelievable.”

“The kid is a gun trainer. I think he’s a rising star. But he’s headstrong. He’s young, he’s cocky and he wants to stick up for himself,” he said.

“He has some immaturity issues to get over, but I think he’s just sticking up for himself. When they throw punches at him he wants to throw punches back and poke the bear and that’s why he’s in the hot water that he is, because he keeps poking the integrity department.”

“The problem is with Ben he is completely under the microscope because I believe there’s tall poppy syndrome around him.”

Currie is facing three separate investigations, those being 28 charges issued in May last year, four positive swab results and another seven charges this month.