Risking my life for one more Melbourne Cup
Michelle Payne
As Michelle Payne strapped a saddle onto her gelding Woody last month, a wry smile came over her face. She’d wondered if she’d ever again experience this feeling of the crisp dawn trackwork air on her face and the warmth of a mount ready to mould to her every command.
A hint of nervousness came over her as she hoisted her weakened legs over Woody’s enormous frame and tucked her feet into the stirrups, but with a gentle pat, they were off.
It was slow going at first, but Michelle savoured every moment of that precious canter because on that frosty winter’s morning in a paddock outside Ballarat, she was back.
Just weeks before, surgeons had advised the Melbourne Cup-winning jockey that she should consider giving away the sport she loves after a freak race fall in Mildura.
Michelle suffered life-threatening injuries akin to a serious car accident, including three fractured vertebrae, a
lacerated liver and her pancreas split in two, and the pain was so intense she thought she’d be lucky to survive, let alone ever ride again.
“She’s a very lucky girl,” says Alfred Hospital trauma surgeon Dr Joseph Mathew. “If the pancreas leaked, the worst-case scenario was death.”
With the Spring racing carnival just around the corner, will she ride again has been the question on many lips and some people, including family and close friends, have been suggesting it’s time to hang up her saddle.
Yet Michelle Payne has made a habit of proving the doubters wrong; in fact, she quite enjoys it. And if that precious moment with Woody proved one thing, she knew she was desperate to ride again, despite the risks.
“I’m not scared of what might happen,” she says. “I’ve never hopped on a horse thinking, ‘What if?’. I couldn’t wait to get back on Woody and as soon as I was on him, I knew everything would be okay. I still have a massive fire in the belly to saddle
up for one more Spring racing carnival, I love competing and feel I’ve got more to give. A lot of people have asked, ‘Why keep going, you’ve won a Melbourne Cup?’, but why wouldn’t I? Like any other sportsperson, it’s about the competition and the challenge. If a tennis player wins a Grand Slam, they don’t just retire.”
Dragged along the track
Michelle was just 30 seconds into a race at Mildura in May, when the accident happened. As she rounded the first bend, her horse Dutch Courage, trained by her brother, Patrick, clipped the hooves of another, throwing her off. Michelle held on and was dragged along, but knowing she was in trouble, she made a splitsecond decision that perhaps saved her life. She let go of the reins and luckily fell to the right-hand side of the track where there were no other horses, rather than into the middle of a thundering pack, where she would’ve been trampled.
She was rushed to Mildura Base Hospital and although winded and bruised, on the face of it she looked okay, but she told the doctors something didn’t feel quite right in her stomach. Her instinct was correct; she was suffering internal bleeding and was airlifted to Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, where surgeons discovered three fractured vertebrae, serious lacerations to her liver and her pancreas was split in two, which can be fatal.
During a three-hour emergency operation, the trauma team stitched her pancreas, which was hanging by a thread from her spine, to her stomach to stop pancreatic enzymes leaking into her body and poisoning her.
Dr Mathew says Michelle is very lucky to be alive. “The pancreas was our biggest worry, it was a very serious injury and there was a real risk of death. It is quite difficult to operate on the pancreas because it’s tucked away near the back, so this was major surgery and we were crossing our fingers the graft would take because there was a risk of leakage, and if that had happened, she would have been in a lot of trouble.”
Michelle was heavily sedated and oblivious to the fuss going on around her, but as the days wore on, she began to feel the full impact of the injuries.
“The first three or four days, I had the worst pain of my life. I didn’t think I could keep going at one stage,” she says. “I asked the doctors, ‘Will it get better tomorrow?’, and they said, ‘Days five to seven are the worst, then you’ll get better’. I was hoping they would lie because I didn’t know how I could get through another day, let alone two or three.”
Patients with injuries of this nature should normally avoid physical activity for at least three months. Michelle was back riding trackwork just six weeks later.
“It wouldn’t be what we’d normally advise,” Dr Mathew says, smiling, “but Michelle is fit and she is lucky to have healed as well as she has. But she is aware of the risks of further injury.”
A precious moment
Michelle doesn’t recall hitting the ground – she was unconscious and woke some time later in an ambulance on the way to hospital. For a few brief moments, her memory had gone completely blank, but she had a vague feeling that something big had happened in her life.
“Did I win the Melbourne Cup?” she asked the paramedic when she came to. Although the answer, “Yes”, was a relief, she says that moment of blacking out and weeks of enforced hospital rest that followed allowed her a precious moment to catch her breath and regroup away from the tsunami of attention that has engulfed her life since she won the Cup.
In the first 24 hours after the accident, Michelle received dozens of calls and messages from friends and well-wishers, which she wanted to respond to, but realising the seriousness of her injuries, Therese and Maree Payne placed their little sister into lockdown. They confiscated her phone, banned all visitors to the hospital and gave her strict instructions she was to rest.
“This accident was a blessing in disguise because I had a break away from everything,” Michelle says. “Obviously, you can’t prepare for what comes your way after winning a Melbourne Cup – it’s amazing, but also overwhelming.
“With the win comes a sense of responsibility and a lot of media requests and interest. At times, I’ve felt like I needed to keep everyone happy, but in the end, you’ve got to look after yourself first and the chance to rest has been really good.”
When Michelle crossed the finish line on Prince of Penzance last November, she captured the hearts of a nation. Winning the Melbourne Cup was a dream she’d held close to her heart since she first started riding around her dad’s stables in Ballarat at the age of four. Being the first woman to win the Cup and her passionate and daring post-race speech telling all of her doubters they could “get stuffed” added a layer of magic to the fairytale. Since then, there’s been a book, a Hollywood movie in the making, thousands of invitations, letters, requests for appearances and even a formal invitation from
Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen at Royal Ascot in June, which was postponed due to her injury.
Then there are the strangers turning up at her door – at least one or two every day – requesting her autograph on photos or memorabilia and, of course, endless requests for selfies, even frustratingly at the racetrack when she’s trying to concentrate on riding.
In hindsight, thundering Prince of Penzance across the finish line was probably the easy part – becoming a household name overnight and adjusting to life in the limelight has been more of a challenge.
“It’s an amazing thing to achieve your dream and it’s awesome that they find inspiration from my story, but that focus on celebrity isn’t where
I’m most comfortable,” she says.
“I love when people come up and say, ‘G’day, Michelle’, but I’m not a movie star. I’m just the same as I was before. I’m not a celebrity, I am myself and I have a job to do. My heart is at the racetrack, that’s my first love – not being in front of a camera.’
Her win added an extraordinary chapter into the endearing tale of the Payne family, whose story is littered with triumph over tragedy. Michelle’s mother, Rosa Mary, was killed in a car accident when she was just six months old, leaving her father, legendary horse trainer Paddy Payne, to raise their 10 children alone.
Eight of the 10 have successfully followed in their father’s racing footsteps, including elder brother Stevie, who was integral to Michelle’s Cup win as Prince of Penzance’s strapper. They are a close-knit family with good reason to be anxious about Michelle saddling up again. Not only is this her third serious fall, she has previously suffered nine fractured vertebrae, a fractured skull and bleeding on the brain. Yet looming large in all of their minds is the death of their sister, Brigid, in 2007, after a hauntingly similar fall to Michelle.
Michelle is keen to one day start a family of her own, but for Therese Payne and Michelle’s other sisters this this latest brush was a bit too close to home. There’s no doubt they were worried about history repeating itself.
“Deep down, we’d probably all love Michelle to retire,” says Therese. “There’s more to life than racing, but obviously, we’ll support whatever she does.”
The family had the surgeons on their side. Dr Mathew recalls politely advising Michelle that “it might not be prudent to resume riding”. Michelle had other ideas, so they reached a compromise which may become a life-saving legacy for jockeys around the world.
“We advised Michelle that if she fell again, there was a real risk of serious damage to her pancreas,” he explains. “But she is mentally very strong and determined, so we are working with Monash University to see if we can engineer a special protection mechanism to go into her riding vest. We have great hope that we will be able to devise something that protects Michelle and other jockeys, too.”
There’s no doubt that retirement has crossed Michelle’s mind in recent weeks and she has a scar the length of her stomach to remind her of her lucky escape. She’s been planning for life after riding for some time, purchasing a property adjacent to the family farm, where she hopes to follow in her father’s footsteps and train horses. She has applied for a trainer’s licence, but there’s unfinished business on track first.
“During the first week, when I was in the worst pain, I’d ask myself, ‘Could I ever go through this again? Did I really want to ride again?’ Every day, it was a different answer. But my whole life is racing. I’m going by instinct. I’m riding trackwork well, it’s very comfortable and I feel good in myself, my stomach is healing and not giving me any pain. There may come a time when I think, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’, and I’ll make a decision then, but I don’t feel scared at all, so there’s no reason I won’t race again.’
Dad Paddy, has other ideas. “I wouldn’t be worried if she never got on another horse again!” he says.
“She has nothing left to prove to anyone, but it’s her call and if she wants to ride on, then we’ll be happy with that. Michelle has courage that I can’t explain. She has had a nasty fall and she has no worries about getting straight back on. If she’s up to it, which she is, she’ll be fine.”
One thing’s for sure – the decision about Michelle’s future will be hers alone when the time is right.
“I want to make sure that when I retire, I’m ready – I don’t want to be thinking about a comeback because I’ve retired too soon. I get frustrated with people telling me I shouldn’t ride anymore, so now I just ignore it.”
Michelle laughs when I put it to her that perhaps she tends to do the opposite of what people tell her.
“Well, some people may suggest that about me!” Then, more seriously, she adds, “I know people have my best interests at heart, but if I’d listened to the doubting voices, I wouldn’t have won a Melbourne Cup, so I’ll do what my heart tells me because that is always the right decision.”