Michelle Payne limps out of spotlight a hero
ON A horse Michelle Payne is probably the world’s most successful female jockey. Out of the saddle she’s what one racing reporter calls “a nice farm girl”, writes Andrew Rule.
VIC News
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ON a horse, Michelle Payne is probably the most successful female jockey in the world, one who can beat racing’s elite riders on her day.
Out of the saddle, Payne is what one racing reporter calls “a nice farm girl”, in this case clutching a bunch of native flowers and wondering what the fuss is about.
That’s how it looked when she stepped outside The Alfred hospital yesterday for another of the scores of media conferences she has faced since the first Tuesday of last November.
The cold wind nipping down Commercial Rd wouldn’t worry a Ballarat kid who has faced several thousand freezing dawns.
Neither, lately, would cameras and microphones.
What worries her is the internal injury that has kept her in hospital since she fell in a race at Mildura two weeks and three days ago. Not that she actually said so.
She spoke very little and said even less, answering none of the questions that hopeful reporters bowled up.
Part of the brief appearance was devoted to warnings that the most quoted jockey of our time — courtesy of her off-the-cuff comments after stealing the Cup on Prince of Penzance — wouldn’t be making any off-the-cuff comments.
Now there’s a book in the stores and a film in the offing, the “tell-it-as-it-is” country girl that stopped a nation is working to a script.
She walked a touch stiffly to and from the hospital door — nothing unusual for anyone who has spent most of their life in the saddle. But it is recovering from surgery to her pancreas that matters most.
Doctors said their patient needed complete rest for at least a month. If there was a real reason for yesterday’s blink-and-you-missed-it show, it was to underline that fact.
And to say she has nothing to say about her future.
As Jack Dyer might have said, she didn’t want to say anything in case she said something. Instead, she ran through a short checklist.
She said she was grateful to doctors at Mildura Base Hospital and The Alfred. Tick.
She said she felt better than she did after the horse booted her in the stomach. Tick.
She said she didn’t want to feel pressured into making any comment about what would happen next. Tick.
Just in case anyone missed those points, Jockeys’ Association chief Des O’Keefe ran through them again. He added a little mayonnaise: the Payne family “have a very strong view” about whether their daughter and sister should return to race riding — “but, as usual, Michelle will make up her own mind”.
By then Payne had retreated, still holding her bunch of flowers. It turns out a friend had given them to her and she insisted on carrying them so the friend would see them on TV. As O’Keefe said later of Ballarat’s best jockey, “she’s a bloody nice person”.
But nice is not necessarily enough in this business.
Slow horses rarely cause arguments among owners, who shrug off the bad luck and lose interest. It is winners — and the chance of prizemoney — that lead to trouble.
The 2015 Melbourne Cup was lucrative — $3.6 million to the winner, spread between many owners. Trouble is, the 2016 Cup is equally lucrative, offering potentially life-changing money. In a tick over three minutes last spring, a hobby horse became a superannuation scheme.
But if Prince of Penzance is fit to run this year, he will have more weight.
And Payne can’t get back on a horse for many more weeks and will then be racing against time to get fit enough for the Cup’s lead-up races.
Some owners will tell each other they owe it to themselves not to water down their chances by using an unfit jockey. Others might want to stick with last year’s fairytale rider no matter what.
But don’t bet on it.
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