Jockey Jamie Evans saw the high life, the low life and then hit back

JAMIE Evans was an international jockey who hit rock bottom before picking himself up and putting his life back on track, writes Andrew Rule.

Ex jockey Jamie Evans. The story will highlight how low he got and how he's coming back. His life is always a constant temptation. Picture : Tony Gough

IF you want to see how far anyone can fall without quite dying of substance abuse and shame, google “Angry transvestite beats up guy” and watch a pair of candidates for early graves trying to hurt each other.

Thousands have seen it. Most probably think it’s funny, the brawl between a little man in a torn suit and a skinny transvestite, rolling on a Richmond street in late afternoon.

The little man’s suit is ripped completely down one leg and his shirt torn apart to bare the sort of gut every starved jockey dreams of until they get it. The crazed transvestite is tall and raw-boned with an adam’s apple and slaughterman’s hands: the grubby mini skirt and long boots aren’t fooling anyone.

A passer-by decides not to step in when he sees the transvestite has the height advantage and is fighting like a tom cat on amphetamines. Which, it would seem, he was.

The transvestite’s fate is uncertain. But for the guy in the torn suit, the sordid confrontation (filmed by a neighbour) shocked him into saving himself. And no wonder. That day he had washed down a heap of Stilnox tablets with a bottle of vodka and red wine. Keep that up and you die.

His name is Jamie Evans. He was a champion international jumps jockey and, before Ben Cousins started to suicide by instalments, maybe the nearest thing Australian sport has to the doomed British soccer champion George Best.

Evans lived the unlikely dream he first had when he saw, as a little boy in Braybrook, the 1978 Aintree Grand National steeplechase on television.

It inspired him to fight his way into the saddle, then over the jumps, then to Europe.

He has ridden in front of the Queen Mother at the world-famous Cheltenham jumps festival. He has won hundreds of jumping races in seven countries and two hemispheres. He was a gun flat jockey in Melbourne, where he rode 285 winners including the 1989 Geelong Cup. But with success came temptation: like Oscar Wilde, he could resist anything but that.

He bought his first car with a parcel of cash “big as a telephone book” tossed his way by a sinister punter — first of several drug dealers, bent lawyers and other predators who cultivate jockeys to help launder “black” money through betting.

In a tough game, Evans was crazy brave. The battler who’d learned to ride on a scrubby pony around the backstreets was soon seduced by the “easy” money that came from putting his life on the line.

“I thought it would never end,” he admits.

The recklessness that made him fearless about jumping fences at racing pace also made him careless of financial and physical danger off the track. Where prudent sportsmen steered clear of high times with low lifes, Evans couldn’t get enough. He played hard with hard people.

Jamie Evans on The Chilean at Sandown racecourse in 1994.

The stories are many and can’t all be told here. He graduated from tipping horses to “Boris the Black Diamond” and “Johnny Wong” to roaming strip clubs with drug baron Tony Mokbel, partying with Carl Williams and the edgy end of an
A-list that included gangsters, actors, footballers and cricketers.

In Chinatown he didn’t pay for anything — from Chinese banquets to diamond bracelets, champagne to beautiful escorts — as long as he tipped winners to the crooked cash kings. Sydney’s original “colourful racing identity” George Freeman “looked after” visiting jockeys with drugs and women. Evans didn’t realise how dangerous the notorious race fixer was until he accidentally beat a “one goer” the Freeman crew had backed in Melbourne. When Evans was to ride the same horse in Sydney at its next start, Freeman called him to a meeting and told him if he didn’t lose this time he wouldn’t be going home. Evans understood.

He “fell” at the first jump, discharged himself from hospital hours later and fled Sydney before the stewards could catch up with him.

He showed the flip side of that fearless horsemanship at the Cheltenham festival where he stole an audacious win on Big Strand in the 1997 Coral Cup — so audacious it was ranked in the best 100 rides in British racing history. It was the highlight of a career he’d dreamed of for 20 years. Even better than riding in the Grand National the next year.

But disaster is only a fall away in racing and Evans had plenty of them. Legs, arms, collar bones, skull and, finally, a broken vertebra. He rode his last race — and won it — in Adelaide in 2005, only to find out later that his “sore back” could never be repaired enough to keep him riding.

He ended up full of titanium plates and screws. But his worst fall didn’t break bones. It was psychological and came after his brother Stephen hanged himself in late 1999. It was a doubly cruel tragedy. Stephen had a fatal kidney disease but would not accept the kidney Jamie offered to donate because it would end his riding career. Stephen killed himself instead. Soon after, Jamie had his first hit of heroin a “friend” offered to “kill the pain”. Drugs threw a switch in the excitable jockey who’d never smoked and hardly drank. He started on alcohol and every drug he could get.

The obsessive edge that made him such a fierce competitor was destroying him bottle by bottle, deal by deal, blackout after blackout.

Jamie Evans with his late brother Stephen in the late 1990s.

After he stopped riding, it got worse. He should have died. He once woke up in a bus stop on a Monday morning and asked a passer-by where he was. It was Guildford, a suburb near Perth airport. He could remember nothing since a drinking session at Flemington the previous Saturday. He had no memory of boarding a plane. Still doesn’t.

Worse was the night he broke into a Dandenong supermarket in 2008 and staggered past wine and beer trying to find a bottle of “metho”. He mistakenly drank turpentine. Staff members found him comatose in the cool room. He “flatlined” in hospital but somehow recovered. Another time he woke up in a St Kilda doss house for vagrants. He’s been to jail four times — for doing “runners” after eating and drinking at top-end restaurants where he had once been greeted like royalty. In jail he saw a prisoner stabbed 30 times over a carton of milk.

He’s had spells drying out in “rehab” places, sometimes with other big names he used to party with in the past. Most of them relapse, he says. His last “fall” was in 2014.

Now, he won’t even take a codeine tablet for back pain because it can trigger a binge. “Addiction,” he quotes, “is a chronic relapsing disease of the brain.” He’s an addict and acknowledges it every day.

After the infamous brawl with the transvestite, another former jockey called him and said, “Mate, you’ve destroyed your reputation.” Evans retorted: “What reputation? You mean for being a rum-soaked degenerate? That reputation?”

He doesn’t kid himself. But he’s been “clean” nearly two years. In the past, he has talked to young jockeys — and sports people of all sorts — about dodging the bad choices that have nearly killed him. Now he’s all set do it again, firstly as a volunteer with the National Jockeys Trust, then on the speakers’ circuit. Why?

“Staying busy keeps me sober,” he says. Besides, it’s quite a story he’s got. Especially the bits that can’t go in a family newspaper.

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