REMEMBER WHEN

GOLD COAST BULLETIN, SUNDAY MARCH 20, 1983

A GOLD Coast promoter was looking for someone to train his horse — to do a parachute drop.

James King, of Mudgeeraba, wanted a skydiver to put his 14year-old roan gelding, Coloured, through his aerial paces to publicise the International Polocrosse Test series.

The jump was to be out of a helicopter with one or two parachutes strapped across the horse’s back.

“The skydiver will jump with him to make sure everything goes all right,” Mr King said.

“The thing the horse has to learn is how to jump. Next week we’ll probably have him doing parachute jumps off a 10m platform.

Mr King, the publicity officer with the Gold Coast Polocrosse Club, believed the gimmick was a certain way of attracting attention to the event.

“We’ve only just started getting the jump together,” he said.

“At the moment we are sorting out whether we need two parachutes or not — one on the back and one on the front.

“Our biggest problem though is the helicopter. I think we’ll need a fairly large one. The ideal thing would be a chinook.”

Teams from Zimbabwe, New Guinea and New Zealand arrived in Australia for the Test series, with the second match to be played on the Gold Coast.

Mr King said he chose Coloured, a former polocrosse squad mount, for the jump because of his sterling performance at the Albert Australia Day Celebrations and Stockman’s Iron Man day.

Mr King was confident Coloured would perform.

“He’s a quiet horse and very easygoing — we reckon he’ll go for it,” he said.