Humble beginnings for Kevin Seymour’s harness racing hobby
A recent near-death experience reminded property veteran and Richest 250 member Kevin Seymour how much he had riding on harness racing’s Triple Crown which his boom pacer Leap to fame won on Saturday.
When it was a matter of life and death, Kevin Seymour’s mind was on his boom pacer Leap to Fame and the first leg of harness racing’s triple crown, the Inter Dominion.
Harness racing has been the property developer’s great passion for 55 years, and at the age of 83 he, with wife Kay, finally had a horse capable of winning all three legs of the sport’s biggest prize.
So, after a heart attack, his greatest concern was the possibility of not seeing his horse win December’s big race in Brisbane.
This article is from The List — Australia’s Richest 250, published March 15, where Seymour and family are ranked in the top 170.
“It’s hard to imagine. Here I was for 12 months in anticipation of having a horse in the Inter Dominion, and only four weeks beforehand I was lying in a hospital bed wondering whether I would ever see a racetrack again,” Seymour reveals.
“I can’t tell you the sheer relief I had when I got to the track and he won that race. You can’t imagine what an outpouring it was right at that time to appreciate
“I was there seeing it happen in front of my own home crowd.”
As well as the Inter Dominion, six weeks later Leap to Fame won the second leg of the triple crown – the $500,000 AG Hunter Cup – and on March 9, the pacing sensation won the third leg, the $1 million Miracle Mile.
And to cap it off leap to Fame became the first horse to win the prestigous race from such a wide draw and the second pacer since Preux Chavalier 39 years ago to win the Triple Crown.
Leap to Fame now has 35 wins from 45 starts, and won $2.76 million in prize money.
Trained and driven by Grant Dixon, the five-year-old standardbred has been touted as the greatest Queensland pacer since the retired champion Blacks A Fake. Many think he will become Australia’s greatest.
Having raced more than 1000 pacers – many of them bred at his famous Egmont Park Stud near Toowoomba – Seymour says Leap to Fame is his best horse, overtaking Mr Feelgood, which won the Inter Dominion in 2009 and finished with $3.4 million in career earnings.
“They’re predicting Leap to Fame could win between $6 to $8 million.”
The gallops or thoroughbred racing may be the so-called “sport of kings” – Seymour has raced them but never really tasted success – but harness racing is his passion and haven.
“It’s something a bit different. It’s completely separate from business. No one asks me about business and I don’t talk about business. I enjoy the hard-working, decent people in harness racing. I enjoy their company. There’s no sense of entitlement. It’s a blue-collar worker’s sport and in my mind they’re the salt of the earth.”
With a fortune made through property development, a long marriage, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Seymour considers himself lucky in life and in business. And it was a large dollop of luck that steered him towards being a first-time horse owner.
Back in 1967, before his development career took off, he was looking for some extra cash and found a second job at Brisbane’s Albion Park Harness Racing Club. Seymour was a ticket seller, and one day he mentioned to the chairman of stewards that he’d like to be an owner. There was a horse called Crazy Chief on offer for $2000.
“My problem was that I didn’t have $2000. I had $200 as a deposit on a lounge suite, and I said, ‘I can give you the $200 as a deposit.’ And he said, ‘OK, but leave it until Monday and you can give it to me then,’” Seymour recalls.
“I went down to the betting ring – and in those days Albion Park had 70-odd bookmakers – and being a calculating guy, I thought, ‘Hang on a sec, I have $200. If I get 10 to one, I can pay for the horse.’
“Suffice to say, I put $200 on the nose and the horse won. I paid for the horse, and that’s how I got into harness racing.”
At Albion Park, Seymour eventually graduated to being the club’s accountant then three-time chairman. Nothing much goes on in harness racing in Queensland or throughout Australia without Seymour knowing about it or being a part of it. He has been a vocal critic of the state government’s plans to relocate harness racing from Albion Park to Norwell on the northern Gold Coast to create a sporting precinct in inner Brisbane for the 2032 Olympics.
“I have a policy of ‘not what racing can do for me but what I can do for racing’, and I try and make sure I contribute something back,” Seymour says. “I used to run a training program for young people to enhance their knowledge in the sport. I used to take them to New Zealand and all over Australia, and I found that it was one of the most exhilarating parts of my involvement in the sport.”
Away from the track, he still goes into the Seymour Group office in Brisbane daily, despite announcing more than a few times that he was taking a step back from the business. “It’s not practical. You get under the feet of your wife and become a nuisance, or alternatively you become a vegetable by not doing much. I jump out of bed every morning at six o’clock and I look forward to coming to work. I look forward to conversing with people. I look forward to solving problems. Every day there is something different.”
With three of his grandchildren, Seymour last year completed The Oxlade, an upmarket residential development at New Farm, on the river in Brisbane. Also in the pipeline is a $1.5 billion, eight-tower urban renewal project at Newstead in the inner city, as well as large industrial developments in Yatala, between Brisbane and the Gold Coast. But another luxury residential project, on Oxlade Drive, had to go on the backburner because of the problems in the building industry.
“It’s tough,” he says. “In all the time I have been in this industry I have never seen the construction side in such a bad way. Builders incurred huge losses during Covid, with massive rises in material costs and difficulty with getting labour. I can’t see how construction companies can pick up what they have lost over the last few years. The industry is so bad, I think there will be a real issue with the government wanting all the infrastructure built – new prisons, hospitals and roads, and they have to build all the Olympics stuff. The problem they have is that the resources aren’t there.”
