Finding Zac, the big fish in a small pond

It's a typical Tuesday for Zac Purton, barrier trials over, trackwork done and the 36-year-old is relaxed in the role of stay-at-home house husband for the day.

Purton's 4-year-old daughter Roxy scuttles about while wife Nicole is out, running errands with the couple's livewire 2-year-old son Cash. Roxy presses play on Finding Nemo for the 350th time and the hypnotic Disney intro emanates from the flatscreen.

It's a story familiar to Purton: precocious, rebellious kid from somewhere up on the north coast, comes, via Sydney, to find himself dropped into an unfamiliar fishbowl, lost and a long way from home. The dozen or so expat jockeys live in two nearly identical apartment buildings – Racecourse Mansions and Racecourse Gardens – 20 metres apart in a fenced-off compound adjacent to Sha Tin racecourse.

"I got off the plane, they picked me up and dropped me off at the apartments and just said, 'Ok we will see you at the races'," Purton recalls of his first day at Sha Tin, little more than 11 years ago.

"First morning I got up and wanted to go to trackwork and I couldn't even get to the track. I could see the track but I couldn't work out how to get to it. There's a fence around it and I was just walking around in circles, I couldn't get out. The security guard saw me and could tell I was lost. He took me out to the track and the trotting ring, all I could see was people I didn't know. I thought to myself 'What have I done here?'"

"Luckily (former trainer) Andreas Schutz saw me, he was laughing at me, but could see I was lost. He showed me around the trainer stand and introduced me to a few people."

"I didn't have the confidence to ask for rides, I used to just wait for my phone to ring. You are getting all of the crap that nobody else wants. It took me a long time to get going because of that."

"I didn't know anybody here in Hong Kong, they didn't have managers helping the new guys then and I didn't know any owners. I have had to work hard for everything I have got; I have never had anything handed to me. I never had any family in racing, never any friends in racing, I didn't have well connected people I knew."

Humble beginnings

Purton hails from Coffs Harbour, a seaside hamlet halfway between Sydney and the counterculture enclave of Byron Bay in more ways than one.

His parents Phil, a former cabbie, and Liz, who still runs the laundromat just outside of town, recall the imminent arrival of the first of four kids.

"We were living the hippy life," Phil says over a seafood lunch at the Coffs Harbour marina. "We were travelling around Australia on the fruit-picking trail, everywhere from Broome around through South Australia and Victoria and back up the coast again. It was a good life and you learn a lot, but when Zac was on his way it was time to find a place to settle down."

First it was the New South Wales north coast near Casino before Purton spent a section of his childhood in Nelson on the south island of New Zealand. This is where the tiny but athletic kid had his first serious contact with horses.

It is often misreported, cut-and-pasted from profile to profile, that Purton had never sat on a horse before he was an apprentice.

"He always liked horses and he had been around them," says Phil, who himself had worked with standardbreds and with stock horses on farms as a young man. "Most people are more scared up there on top of a horse, but some people are more comfortable on top of a horse than on the ground, and Zac is one of them."

"Out on the farm we'd sat him on a horse before he could walk," Liz adds. "We'd go to Casino races when he was very young and he would be trying to get into the mounting yard with the horses."

One of the reasons the Purtons returned to Australia from the standardbred heartland of the South Island, first to Mount Gambier in South Australia and then back on the mid-north coast, was to give their son a chance with thoroughbreds.

"He was still only 12 when we came back, but just to get that experience and being around racing he couldn't do it from where he was living.," Phil said. "We took him to the top trainer in Mount Gambier, Michael O'Leary, but he laughed and said, "he is too small to carry a water bucket," let alone ride."

Once back near Coffs, Liz started driving her 14-year-old into town and the stables of old-school handler Trevor Hardy.

"He turned 15 on January 3, he didn't want to go to school and he always wanted to ride," Liz says, and despite some misgivings from Phil, he gave his blessing with one caveat: "You've got to get it right, if you leave school at 15 you better make it as a jockey or you have made a mistake."

Old school

"He came in on weekends to start with," Hardy says. "We used to train our horses on the beach. Zac was 33 kilograms and had arms on him like one-inch pipes. He could ride but he wasn't strong enough to hold a racehorse so I would lead him."

Hardy has scaled things back since those days. His stables occupy a quiet leafy corner of Coffs Harbour Racecourse and lazy 7-year-old gelding Elite Dubleo (Dubleo {USA}) ambles about the place without so much as a head collar on and the jealous younger horses peer out at him from their stalls.

"We only keep in him training because he is my granddaughter's favourite horse," Hardy says as Elite Dubleo sniffs around for a pick among the weeds near the front gate. The gelding is startled by the stable cat Trevor, the stub-tailed tabbie that, now that Hardy doesn't keep an apprentice, counts as the stable troublemaker.

"The other day I was driving out of town, I stopped at the lights and I could hear some meowing," Hardy says. "I looked around and couldn't for the life of me see where it was coming from. Turns out he had been having a sleep up inside the engine block and jumped out when I stopped. Anyway, he made his way back a few days later."

Trevor, the cat, has clearly found better places to sleep now, but it wasn't that long ago that it was Purton – supremely talented but with a renegade spirit – that was causing the other Trevor sleepless nights.

It wasn't Purton's talent that was in question, Hardy recalls the wunderkind winning nine out of his first 10 barrier trials, "horses just run for him," he says, but it was the upstart’s mouth that caused problems. "People say to me, 'Gee you did a good job with him,' but I can't take credit for it, it's just natural ability," Hardy says. "Maybe I helped him as a person though."

Liz is proud of her son but she is also a straight shooter, just like her son, with a tendency to tell it how it is.

"He would get off the horse and tell the owners their horse was a donkey. Well, it might be true, but it isn't what the owner wants to hear," she says.

"I nearly lost an owner over Zac, Brian Balding," Hardy adds. "Brian is a great guy but he is one of these fellas that expect the jockey to come back and say "Yes Mr Balding, no Mr Balding," not come back and tell him their horse is no good."

"Anyway, he said he didn't want cheeky kids riding his horse. I still train for Brian but he was brought up in an era when kids where meant to be more respectful."

Purton admits it wasn't so much Hardy's riding tuition and the hours spent watching videos, but the twice-daily lectures to and from the track that changed the way he went about things.

"There were a few owners that I put offside," Purton admits. "Trevor was 60 and I was 15 when I walked into the stables. There was already a big age gap between us and he was from the old school. He would leave me at the stables during the day when he knew some woodchip shavings were coming. I used to have to muck out the boxes and put the shavings back in, stay there and mow all the lawns. I worked really hard when I was first starting out. But it was those trips to the stables and back home that I dreaded. It was 15 minutes from the stables to his house. That meant 15 minutes there, 15 minutes back, plus another return trip in the afternoon. That meant one hour of lectures every day."

"I remember just staring out the window and thinking, 'here we go again,' Trevor had an apprentice called Glen Colless that was very good and all I would hear is "Glen Colless did this and Glen Colless did that", and all I used to think, "wait until I see this Glen Colless, I am going to bash him."

"I was never in any big trouble. But I needed to hear those things; work harder and keep your mouth shut. All of the things that I didn't do."

Despite regularly running his mouth, Purton matched words with deeds, winning the Brisbane premiership as an apprentice and was soon off to Sydney, but even the on-track success caused some issues for Hardy.

"We were a stable that liked to have a bet and we would put Zac on things that weren't quite ready yet and he'd run a place or win on them at massive odds, he was unstoppable, just too good," Hardy says.

Master and apprentice reunite

Hardy isn't the type that goes for long heart-to-heart phone calls so when his old mentor's name flashed up on Purton's phone during the off-season he knew 'something was wrong'

"Trevor has had a couple of heart-bypasses and he had his most recent one in December 2017," Purton said. "A few months later his heart had been playing up. The doctors have told him he is too old to have another operation because he might not wake up, so he is basically living like every day might be his last. It could be six weeks, six months or six years. He just said 'I just want to say I'm really proud of what you have done and the person you have become'."

"It was probably only a month later he called and said, 'I'm coming to Hong Kong and it might be the last time I can fly''."

That day turned into a banner one for Purton, with a brilliant ride securing the G1 Hong Kong Vase on Exultant (Ire) (Teofilo {Ire}) and a runaway victory on Beauty Generation (NZ) (Road To Rock) in the Hong Kong Mile equaling Gerald Mosse's record of nine international day wins by a jockey.

"It was good that I had a great day, we all caught up on the Monday, it was meant to be a casual lunch but we were there until dinner. It was good to talk about old times."

The new master

Riding odds-on favourites with lengths on their opposition is one thing but it might have been a five-timer, six days after the HKIR day masterclass that best showcased Purton's skills.

Hong Kong is a jurisdiction where most horses are simply oscillating in the ratings, waiting for their day, and often it is the best ride, not horse, that wins.

First Purton stood over the now-retired Po Ching Treasure (Stratum), bustling the reluctant winner of three from 63 to a surprise lead, then lifting the outsider over the line with some Mick Dittman-esque whip work. The very next race and Purton produced a polar opposite ride on Hurricane Hunter (NZ) (Darci Brahma {NZ}), a winner of zero from 11 to that point, balancing the horse up at the rear from a wide gate and unleashing a sprint, hands-and-heels, with an effort that was all balance, timing and touch.

"That's the key to Hong Kong, because the pool is so small, it is about working out how to get that extra length out of your horse,' Purton says. "Most of them aren't superstars and you might not ride that horse again for a while after he wins."

Dominance

Sometimes statistics tell only some of the story, other times they are undeniable. Here, for your perusal, are the finishing position of Purton's last 20 rides, in order: 1,1,2,2,2,1,6,1,2,1,2,1,1,6,3,1,1,1,1,2.

To save you the counting, that's 11 wins, six seconds and a third – and just two unplaced – from his last 20 starts.

Go back another few racedays, to February 10, and it's 15 wins and 12 placings from 35 starts. Oh, and that last second should have been a win if not for interference when driving for a personal best seven wins in a day last Sunday at Sha Tin.

To make a cross sport reference, they are Bradman-like numbers in what is arguably the most competitive jurisdiction in the world.

Purton is one of two jockeys with more than 900 career wins in Hong Kong, has won two championships – beating Douglas Whyte and Joao Moreira on equal terms along the way – and he is racing away to a third title.

Given the dominance, where he has come from and how hard he has worked to achieve it all, it's little wonder that, unlike Nemo, Purton isn't trying to find his way out of the fishbowl and back into Sydney just yet.

"I'm very comfortable here in Hong Kong, I enjoy the lifestyle," he says. "While I continue to get the support and do well, I don't see any reason to move home. Of course I miss being close to family, I miss a more relaxed lifestyle and you also miss that opportunity to be on better horses and ride at carnivals. A race like the Melbourne Cup is hard to win from here. But we can travel to Japan and Dubai, and there is plenty to like about living in Hong Kong. It is home now. I think those early struggles here have made me a better person and appreciate what I have."