‘He’s not perfect any more’: The beginning of a racing fairytale
The Harry Coffey story takes on a different meaning when you hear it from his mother.
It is no longer just a tale about a determined young boy who defies a cruel disease to grow up and become a winner; it is a story about a family.
Jockey Harry Coffey with brother Sam, mum Maree and dad Austy.Credit: Erin Jonasson
Maree Renney first crossed paths with Austy Coffey at the Birchip drive-in. That’s how young couples met in the small, scattered towns of the ever-expansive Mallee.
She grew up on her parents’ wheat farm at Berriwillock and worked in administration. Austy was into horses.
They married and had their first child at the age of 29. That’s when life became a greater challenge.
“Our local GP rang and said, ‘Maree I need to see you’, and I went in, and he told me that Harry had cystic fibrosis,” she recalls. “Two hours later we had a call from the children’s hospital, and they just said, ‘this is what he’s got. There’s no point doing any more testing. We are arranging for you to come to the hospital in Melbourne’.”
Next, she had to tell Austy. When she did, they both burst into tears.
“You just can’t believe it,” she says. “Because Harry wasn’t sick. He was putting weight on. Then all of a sudden, you’ve had what you think is this perfect baby, and he’s not perfect any more.”
A family celebration
It is two weeks since Harry stood high in the irons to celebrate a glorious Caulfield Cup victory – an unforgettable moment that reaffirmed his status as a poster boy for living with cystic fibrosis.
It was also a crowning moment for his family. His mother watched the race while nervously stacking the dishwasher in Swan Hill. His horse trainer father sat and watched intently on the couch.
Harry rides Duke De Sessa to victory and celebrates after passing the post.Credit: Getty Images
Harry’s younger brother, Sam, was in Bali with a group of friends. Video emerged of them cheering Harry to the finish line and erupting when they realised he had won. The first thing Sam said was, “I have to call Mum.”
“We are very, very close,” Maree says. “He did ring me, but the reception wasn’t very good.”
The Coffey family did not get to celebrate the moment together until the Tuesday night after the Caulfield Cup, sitting around Swan Hill’s Thai restaurant Java Spice – Harry, his wife Tayla, their 18-month-old son Thomas, Sam and his partner Megan, Austy and Maree.
The table was overloaded with food and alight with conversation – the four members of the Coffey family in full flight.
“Megan and Tayla always laugh about us because we have got our own sort of lingo, talking about racing and things,” Maree says with a laugh.
A tale of two sons
Maree often felt torn between her sons.
Every three months she would take Harry to the Royal Children’s in Melbourne for a two-week tune-up. She would have to leave Sam with Austy and her parents, Elizabeth and Tom.
The Coffey family – (from left) Sam, Harry, Maree and Austy – catch up at the Swan Hill races.Credit: Erin Jonasson
“You’d get to the hospital, and you would sort of get wrapped up in this environment of, you’ve got everyone helping you for two weeks,” she says.
“Then you come home, and you think ‘I have got to care for Harry on my own’. Austy would go: ‘I can do it’, and I would go: ‘No, no it’s OK, just let me do it’. I am probably a bit of a control freak. So, it was hard.”
Maree was not the only one who took time to readjust. While she was away, Sam would miss his mum.
“We would come home and you could tell, like Sam would sort of play up a bit, like kids do,” she says. “So you’d think: ‘He’s certainly letting me know that I’ve been away’.”
The only way to deal with the confronting situation was to make it normal. Despite the constant worry, Maree and Austy set out to ensure their family would not be defined by Harry’s illness.
“If Harry wanted to do something, I’d go: ‘Yep, that’s fine, you do it’ – sleepovers, footy, playing cricket, he went on school trips. We never really held him back,” she says.
Sam cut his own path. He was a good sportsman, winning junior football grand finals with Swan Hill Football Club, and was a “pretty good pony rider”.
He would work for his father, mucking out the stables, and was interested in the breeding, but he never felt the pull to ride the track. Instead, he went to uni and became an accountant.
Waiting for a cure
One of the debilitating effects of cystic fibrosis is scarring on the lungs. The organs slowly degenerate each year from infections and colds, until they finally give out.
“Then you need a lung transplant,” Maree says. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. So it’s scary.”
Harry pictured with Maree when he was 12 years old.Credit: John Woudstra
The family had good reason to hold out hope that such a moment would never arrive.
They were told when Harry was first diagnosed in 1995 that researchers were on the verge of a cure. But it took them another 25 years to develop the drug.
“They had to work out how to get the medication into the body,” Maree says.
That medication has been groundbreaking. For the past three years, it has tricked Harry’s body into thinking he has a missing gene. It has cleared his lungs of mucus and allowed him to breathe. He doesn’t have to go to hospital for tune-ups any more.
“Before he was on the drug, he’d be getting up in the morning, doing all this physio, and then driving to the races,” Maree says.
“Or I would drive him, and he would do the physio on the way to the races – all this continuous work to keep him going and doing what he wanted to do. The new drug has stabilised him.”
Until Harry was born, his parents did not know that they were at risk of having a cystic fibrosis baby. It had not shown up in either family – Austy was the youngest of 10, while Maree was the youngest of two.
“In saying that, I had an aunt who had a baby die at eight months (back in the 1930s) that had malnutrition and dehydration, which would be two symptoms of CF,” Maree says.
“Back then, they would not have had any idea. Looking back, that’s probably what he would have had.”
Following the dream
Maree spends two afternoons per week looking after Thomas. It has been documented that Harry and Tayla underwent IVF, as 98 per cent of male cystic fibrosis sufferers are infertile.
Maree thinks Thomas will be too big to be a jockey, but she doesn’t mind if that’s his calling. Whatever happens, happens, she says.
Harry Coffey poses with connections after riding Duke De Sessa.Credit: Getty Images
“When Harry first decided he was going to ride, I thought, ‘Argh’ – I wasn’t that happy about it because we’d been trying to put weight on him for five years,” she says.
“We were sitting at the doctors, and he just says, ‘I wouldn’t mind being a jockey’, and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, righto’.
“At this stage, he had a peg in his stomach, which was for night feeds. We were about eight months in, and he’d probably put on about 10kg, so it was really, really good.
“But his doctors said to me, ‘Don’t be too stressed about it because if someone is passionate about something, you are going to have to keep healthy to be able to do it’.
“The doctor said: ‘As long as he’s not eating like a ballerina, that’s fine’. So we went from there.”
Another big race day
Harry will be riding on Derby Day, but it won’t be in Melbourne. Instead he’ll be in Sydney riding Veight in the $10 million Golden Eagle and Nonconformist in the Rosehill Gold Cup.
He is also unlikely to have a ride in the Melbourne Cup. Coffey rides at 54 kilograms and this year the field is full of lightweights.
It further highlights how the stars aligned to deliver the racing world one of its unforgettable moments.
Despite his popularity, Coffey is not a guaranteed group 1 rider. He is a talented jockey who competes in a deep pool of talented riders. Six years ago, he was riding horses for his father at Wycheproof. No one dreamed he would win a Caulfield Cup.
Come Saturday, Austy will watch from the couch, and Maree will pack the dishwasher. She has come a long way. To start off with, she could not watch him ride. She just prayed the other jockeys were competent enough to keep him safe.
“Now, he knows what he is doing, so you have just got to not think about it,” she says.
“It’s like anything. Kids playing footy, or anything like that. They can be hurt, so it’s just that mindset – whatever happens, happens.
“You always worry about your kids. But I feel happy that both Harry and Sam are in a good place. They are pretty well-rounded sort of people.”
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