Horseracing legends honoured
Four heroes inducted into the South African Hall Of Fame
This week saw four legends from the sport of horseracing inducted into the South African Hall Of Fame.
All were giants of the turf, whose accomplishments contributed immensely to the magic of the sport of horseracing.
The true heroes of the sport are unquestionably the horses, whose power and beauty has elevated racing to the Sport of Kings, and from their ranks it was Sea Cottage who was voted to be the first equine inductee into the SA Hall Of Fame.
No horse has captured the imagination like Sea Cottage - partly due to the bullet fired into his rump before the Durban
July of 1966, but mostly because of his sensational record.
Winner of 20 of 24 races, including the 1967 Durban July, he possessed a potent burst of acceleration and ranks among the fastest finishers in the history of the sport.
After his relatively short but illustrious racing career, Sea Cottage retired at five to stud, eventually dying at the age of 25.
Among the many legendary racehorse trainers South Africa has produced in more than a century of racing, Syd Laird is the first to make it into the SA Hall Of Fame.
He won virtually every major race on the SA horseracing calendar, including the Durban July seven times – a record that stands to this day. Laird also won the Met three times.
Laird was born on 12 December 1923 in Durban and had his trainer’s licence granted in 1959. He was the nephew of Syd Garrett, another legendary South African trainer, to whom Laird was assistant.
Laird was also known as a committed gambler, joking that it was necessitated due to his uncle underpaying him as an assistant trainer.
Michael “Muis” Roberts, the most accomplished South African jockey of all time, is the third inductee.
He won the SA Jockeys’ Championship a record 11 times and is the only South African rider to have won the British Jockeys’ Championship (1992).
Fearless and smart, with wonderful balance, he won his first race in 1968 at the age of 14.
In his career he won a string of Group 1 races not only in South Africa, but in England, France, Italy and Japan.
Roberts had amassed 3 968 career winners when a bad fall in the UK in 2001 forced him to retire from the saddle.
He moved back to SA and is now a successful trainer in KwaZulu-Natal.
The fourth racing inductees into the SA Hall Of Fame is Harry & Bridget Oppenheimer, arguably the country’s most successful racehorse breeders and owners. Their black-and-yellow silks dominated the South African horseracing landscape for decades.
The Oppenheimers’ racing involvement began in 1946 when Harry bought the farm Mauritzfontein, near Kimberley. A former remount station dating to the Anglo-Boer War, Mauritzfontein had become South Africa’s leading thoroughbred stud farm by the 1960s.
After Harry’s death in 2000, Bridget’s equine enthusiasm was undimmed and she was known as the “Queen Mum of Racing”. Her aptly named filly Cherry On The Top carried off the Triple Tiara in 2013, shortly before she passed away.
Harry and Bridget’s daughter Mary inherited their devotion to racehorses, as did Mary’s daughter Jessica Slack – who now races the famous black and yellow silks.