First double at 78

When harness racing’s John Olds hooked the float onto his car on Monday little did he think he would be harnessing up two winners . . . his first double at the tender age of 78!

John, who lives at Kadina, only trains two horses, Rosiano, and the oddly named Kickapoo Creek,(Kickapoo Creek is a tributary of the Illinois River in the U.S. state of Illinois.) and they both duly saluted for the veteran trainer at the Globe Derby meeting.

John last had some success with another little horse called Chasing a Win, that he leased from Jill Neilson, and who won “6 or 7 races” for him, and most of them were at Mildura, when John, and his partner Kathie Grossman traveled to Mildura, and had an extended stay due to his sister’s illness up there. John’s brother-in-law is Pat Attard, father of Kate Attard, a very successful trainer, horse dentist, and horse therapist in Mildura.

John has had a long association with harness racing, he hails from Broken Hill, and used to drive himself in races at the “Hill”, and trained the odd one, in conjunction with Pat Attard.

He had the 1982 Horse of the Year, with a horse called Easy Flow, and he and brother-in-law Pat trained and drove, and always had a few horses in the stables during the Broken Hill season.

However life took a strange turn, and about 28 years ago, he and his long-time partner, Kathie, adopted his grandson, Dylan, as a baby, and decided to make the move to Yorke Peninsula, and settled at Port Hughes.

Fast forward a good few years, and he joined up with Steve Papps, at Kadina, and started helping Steve with his small team, and was in the ownership of Tirano Bliss who won the Horse of the Year at Pt Pirie in 2012, exactly 30 years after he won the same award at Broken Hill.

They raced a lot of horses together, with Big Henry being another of the prolific winning horses they had there, John had a real soft spot for the giant horse, even after he tipped John out on the training track one day, breaking his collarbone!

When Steve Papps stopped working horses at his property, due to ill-health, John ended up at “Leahville Lodge”, where he and Steve fast worked their horses anyway. After Chasing A Win retired, John was about to retire himself, when Jill Neilson stepped in with “something that just needs to be quiet and sensible for Jono to potter around with”, and suggested Rosiano, and the next partnership was formed.

With Rosiano’s latest win, that brings up win number 10 for the diminutive daughter of Alto Christiano, and hasn’t John had some fun with her.

Which is why he, and Kathie, grandson Dylan, his wife Shauna, and their daughter Amity, decided to purchase Kickapoo Creek, as Kathie saw her advertised, quite cheaply, and as she was also by the ill fated Alto Christiano, they snapped her up, even with her ordinary form.