Picture perfect beach “recovery” in WA

It all looks idyllic now, but it’s been a hard road to get to this point for West Australian harness racing couple Michael Young and Kiara Davies.

Swimming the team at the beach is a regular “recovery” session for the stable’s equine and human workforce in the summer months, from their new base at Mundijong in Perth’s outer eastern suburbs.

But last summer, Young and his stepfather were putting in the long days building 30 yards at their new property, owned by Perth jockey Willy Pike.

“It was 35 or 40 degrees most days and I wouldn’t like to think how many bottles of Powerade we got through between us,” Young said.

“But it was worth it – it’s a really nice property, perfect for us, with the horses right here where we live.  We were really lucky to be able to get it,” he said.

“It’s about 20 minutes from the horse beach, which is at the Naval Base.  A lot of trainers go down there and Kiara and our staff take them down about once a week in the summer months.  It’s good for the horses and good for everyone.  But not me.  I swim like a brick and I hate riding horses, so that’s Kiara’s thing!” he laughed.

Michael and Kiara moved to the farm about nine months ago, and it allowed them to expand their team and staff.

“We were looking for something more suitable because we were at capacity at our old place.  We could only have 15 horses there,” he said.

“Once we moved, we put on another staff member so we could increase our stable numbers.  We got up to 30 at one stage, but we found that was just a bit too many.  We’re at 25 at the moment and that’s good for us.”

But the move wasn’t all smooth sailing, with a virus setting back the team after the move.

“It was very unfortunate, but they all got sick when we moved, and the virus went through the whole stable. We basically had horses that were winning one week and then leading and dropping out to get beaten by 100 metres the next, but they weren’t showing any obvious symptoms,” he said.

“It set us back for the first eight or 10 weeks. Of course, you wonder what you are doing wrong or what’s not working at the new place, but we didn’t change much, just kept on with our program and everything ironed itself out.  But it was very stressful at the time.”

The couple were also delivered a devastating blow with the loss of their stable star, Group 1 winning mare Eighteen Carat (Mach Three) three months ago.

A winner of 15 of her 57 starts, including the Group 1 Norms Daughter, two group twos and two group threes, Eighteen Carat was among the horses affected by the virus earlier this year.

“We thought we had her back to her best after that, then one morning in trackwork, she just pulled up in the last quarter. She’d broken her leg. We did all we could and told the vets to do everything they could to save her, but the leg shattered and it just wasn’t possible,” Young said.

“It was terrible, she was such a lovely horse and so tough.  Even when the injury happened, she didn’t fall, she held herself up. An injury like that is something you never want to see,” he said.

Young said the stable would have a relatively quiet back end to the season, but has a number of very nice horses, including Watching Our Coin (Hes Watching) and Nevermindthechaos (Sportswriter).

“We’ve got a lot of handy little horses here who are going to win a lot of races.  There’s probably 20 here that we’d put in that category.  At the start of next season, we should have quite a few of the new ones ready to race, and we’ll just keep looking for that really good one,” he said.

by Terry Gange, for Harnesslink