Group 1 victory caps young jockey’s inspiring rise to beat affliction

A couple of decades ago, daily access to a horse in Auckland was becoming close to impossible.

I figured donating time to Riding For The Disabled was a hugely rewarding activity and fixed the horse problem.

I was assigned a softly natured 13-year-old girl with the most magnificent long natural blonde curls imaginable. Except for what you couldn't see — a chronic case of cystic fibrosis, a horrible, incurable lung affliction which until the late 1940s killed practically every child born with it before their first birthday.

Those afflicted would literally drown in their own mucus. More recently special powerful antibiotics have been developed to loosen mucus. Between 1980 and 1990, the average life expectancy went from 18 to 27 and is now over 40. Even with the aid of antibiotics, cystic fibrosis damages lungs, heart and in severe cases the liver.

Because early teenagers have rubber band elasticity, I daily laid the girl backwards across the saddle and walked her around the arena for one hour. As the finest woman jockey the world has known, Californian Julie Krone, so eloquently and accurately once said: “The best thing for the inside of a human is the outside of a horse.”

On dismounting the girl would bend and for up to eight minutes cough up the most hideous amount of mucus. To watch a young human transform from distress to delight in 60 minutes, well, it doesn't get better.

But it's a non-stop battle. Exercise is important, but of course there are limiting factors.

Wind that forward to someone with cystic fibrosis becoming a jockey and, well frankly, most would tell you that's an impossibility. You have only to see healthy jockeys heaving for breath after a tough race ride to know the lung capacity required by jockeys is almost beyond human.

At Morphettville on Saturday, one of Australia's most underrated young riders, the cystic fibrosis-afflicted Harry Coffey, rode his first Group 1 winner aboard the Darren Weirtrained Sopressa in the Schweppes Oaks. Coffey's brave determination to race ride has risen above regular hospitalisation and time away for treatment and has been strongly supported by Darren Weir.

You can't make up a story like this. Weir, going about breaking nearly every training record on the books, is not a man given to tears, but he was $1.05 and shortening to produce one after being interviewed post-race. “I guess it's a dream come true for Harry and also myself,” Weir said.

“The Coffey family has been unbelievable to me through my career. I got into horses through Harry's old man [Austy Coffey].’’

“I've known Harry ever since he was born and I've followed his career and his illness. It's an amazing story.” We all need inspirational heros. If the unassuming Harry Coffey doesn't do it for you, you're hard to please.