How “the Babe” came back: The move that put champion jockey Brent Thomson back in the saddle
He was a Cox Plate king who rode the doomed Dulcify to a historic win. Now, 45 years later, he’s taking to the turf again.
Andrew Rule
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They dubbed him “the Babe” when he hit Melbourne but behind the baby face and shy smile was a natural-born killer on a racehorse.
Brent Thomson was the brilliant Kiwi kid who rode four Cox Plate winners by age 21, two as a teenager.
No-one will ever repeat that feat at that age, which makes Thomson the Cox Plate rider of all time. It’s racing folklore that the best win of his four was on the freakish but doomed Dulcify, who scored by a record seven lengths in 1979.
Dulcify was like Winx four decades later: looked like a Volvo but had a Ferrari motor under the bonnet. He was trained by the great Colin Hayes, the Chris Waller of the era.
Dulcify and “the Babe” had a mortgage on the Melbourne Cup less than two weeks after the Cox Plate. It was theirs right up until the split second when the erratic Hyperno, the eventual winner, buffeted him. Dulcify broke his pelvis and had to be put down.
Anyone there that day remembers that scene. It is seared into Thomson’s memory. For him, the 1979 Cup was both a tragedy and a bitter disappointment — his horse of a lifetime died and his best chance of winning a Cup did too.
He rode winners all over the world after that, but absence meant missing chances to ride in the Cup. Although he rode stars like Strawberry Road and Gildoran in Europe, he never stepped on one better than Dulcify.
It was Thomson’s Cox Plate purple patch that had led Hayes, then the leading Victorian and South Australian trainer, to lure him to ride in Melbourne in 1978.
Hayes was often quoted about his decision to recruit the Wanganui wizkid, who’d barely finished his apprenticeship to his father Kevin, a small trainer and former jockey.
“The future belongs to those who plan for it,” Hayes said at the time. Dulcify’s death aside, the years with Hayes made Thomson. It was a bridge to the world stage.
After three Victorian jockey premierships, he took a contract to ride in the UK just in time to compete with the greatest jockey in history, Lester Piggott, then in his last season.
Thomson rode for the Queen, among others, but mostly for the world’s most powerful racing figures — the syndicate headed by soccer pools tycoon Robert Sangster and enigmatic Irishman John Magnier.
He circled Europe in a champagne bubble of private jets and chauffeured cars, casinos and cocktail bars. His suits and shoes cost more than his father’s truck. The kid from Wanganui had come a long way and was soaking it up.
He was a self-improver, meticulous dresser and carefully spoken. A longtime friend once joked that whereas other jockeys read form guides, “Brent reads the Oxford dictionary.”
He also studied changing riding styles.
The brilliant American jockey Steve Cauthen had revolutionised European racing with his low-slung seat and “toe-in-the-iron”, sitting flat and still, quitting the vigorous style of the past for something more cool and balanced.
On visits back to Australia, Thomson’s new style attracted attention, and criticism, but it wasn’t long before other well-travelled jockeys like the astute Danny Brereton led the way for Australian jockeys to ride with shorter stirrups, a longer rein and a less violent whip action.
Brereton saw Thomson as a top-class rider when he arrived from New Zealand but one who improved again with age and overseas experience.
“He came back from Europe a smoother and better rider but Australians thought they knew better and went off him, so he headed to Hong Kong and Macau,” says Brereton.
“He was one of the best riders of his era and held his own anywhere he went. He just didn’t stay in one place long enough to set records.”
By the time Thomson decided he’d had enough, Australian jockeys had caught up: they now all rode like he did. But he was over it.
Racing is full of stories of trainers and jockeys falling on hard times. Phar Lap’s trainer Harry Telford ended up begging cigarettes outside Bacchus Marsh hospital, where he died broke in 1960; Phar Lap’s jockey Jim Pike was renting a flat in a block he’d once owned when he died.
Thomson didn’t fall on overly hard times so much as overly soft ones. Once the discipline of keeping fitness up and weight down didn’t matter any more, he went the full Roy Higgins.
It was, of course, the great “Professor” Higgins who said when he retired (after starving himself all his career) that he simply wanted to be “a little fat man.” Thomson followed Roy’s blueprint.
Anyone who has suffered the torture of wasting off weight finds it hard not to eat and drink when their sentence is up.
After falling out of love with riding, Thomson returned to his adopted hometown, Melbourne. As far as he can recall, the last time he put his leg over a horse (before late last year) was in the promotional Legends race at Flemington in 2001, when he rode against Piggott, Tony Cruz and other retired greats.
He didn’t do a lot except something was good at: spending big on quality items and making friends. For years, he lived in a Collins St apartment and ate out in good restaurants.
Thomson’s day job was (and still is) as Melbourne representative of New Zealand Bloodstock, the business headed by fishing and racing tycoon Sir Peter Vela. If he wasn’t inspecting horses for his employers, he was golfing or going to the track with one set of racing mates or lunching or dining with another.
Despite his international success and eminent connections, Thomson has always been polite and self-effacing. His many friends inside and outside racing joke with him, and about him, but no one ever says a word against him.
He is universally liked. His competitive streak comes out only on the golf course, where he is known to sneak a satisfied look at fellow players after nailing another deceptively big swing.
Longtime Hong Kong bloodstock guru David Price reckons Thomson’s only fault is that when asked to describe riding one of his Cox Plates, instead of the race running two minutes, “it stretches to about 12, like three Jericho Cups.”
“And I tell him if he had all the money he’s spent on ties, he’d be travelling pretty well,” Price says.
It didn’t take long for the perfectly tailored clothes to get tight, the fine Italian belts to strain at their last notch. Mainly, as he readily admits, because he drank much fine wine.
Golfing mates like bookmaking identities John Dow and Rick Cummins would rib him about sipping from slim cans carried in his bag of expensive Japanese clubs.
“What’s that you’re drinking, Thommo?”
“Pinot noir,” he’d say, deadpan. “They’re bringing it out in cans now.”
He was always happy to send himself up, telling stories from his James Bond days with Robert Sangster and the billionaire set in Europe.
He dressed as well as the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo but “trained off”, hitting maybe twice the weight he’d been as a tiny 15-year-old apprentice in 1973. He can’t say exactly how much weight, because after enduring the tyranny of the scales for so long, he refused to use any.
And that’s the way it went for 23 years, give or take a couple of marriages and changes of address. The houses got smaller and the trousers got bigger. Something had to give.
The turning point for Brent Thomson came more than a year before he delighted sports fans in two countries by riding a fast gallop at Breakfast With The Best at Moonee Valley last Tuesday morning.
Thomson, who for a quarter century had perfected the running double — long lunch into liquid dinner — was talking intently with someone he refers to only as “a dear friend.”
At some point, he recalls in his quiet voice, the friend persuaded him to make a decision to change while he could. To give up the easy life of the retired gentleman jockey, to put down the wine glass that had been glued to his hand for years … and to get back on a horse.
The simple wisdom of it hit him. He stopped drinking, enrolled in Kieser strength training and called a friend in the Ciaron Maher stable. He said he wanted to get on a galloper again.
He stepped on a Maher horse at the beach last October. And realised he missed doing something he was very good at.
Inside the 65-year-old city dweller was the apple-cheeked kid who’d ridden fearlessly and stylishly on ponies from when he could walk, and went jumping and hunting for years before he could leave school to start his apprenticeship.
Young Brent’s favourite pony, Pinto, was given to him by one of his father’s best owners, who also let him ride his speedy mare An Illusion to win his first race. It was the right call. Kevin Thomson’s boy swiftly became New Zealand’s leading apprentice.
Talent is forever but luck’s a fortune. Under the rules of the annual inter-island Invitational race, jockeys drew lots to see who’d ride which horse. Thomson fluked Fury’s Order in 1974, and won. To his surprise, the owners asked him back when they sent Fury’s Order to Australia for the 1975 Cox Plate.
The kid did. And won in a tight finish. The rise and rise of Brent Thomson had begun.
Now, the kid is a grandfather and on a second journey. The long-planned “surprise” appearance riding a gallop at Breakfast With The Best last week was the good news story of the day.
He had been building up to it for months. When news leaked in April that he was off the booze and riding work for Ciaron Maher at Fingal and Cranbourne, his mates thought it was an April Fool’s gag. But the joke was on them. At 66, the Babe was back, preparing to ride in front of a crowd again.
The flab is coming off, the muscle’s coming back, his eyes are bright and he’s hitting golf balls further than ever. As for staying out late, he doesn’t do much of that because three mornings a week he’s out of bed before dawn to ride into another sunrise.
As another sporting great once said: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
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