Myers caps riding comeback with Te Rapa win

Kelly Myers rode Liquid Fire to victory in the last at Te Rapa. Photo / Trish Dunell

It didn’t take long for comeback jockey Kelly Myers’ competitive nature to kick back in at Te Rapa on Saturday.

And it may be one factor in determining how much punters see of her at racetracks around the north the next few years.

The 41-year-old was back riding last weekend after being only intermittently involved in racing for much of the past six or seven years as she and her husband started a family.

Now the mother of a 1 and 2-year-old, Myers has been riding trackwork at Pukekohe and decided the time was right to return to the jockeys’ room, albeit a changed one.

“A few of the female jockeys from my era aren’t riding here any more, like Danielle [Johnson] and Sam [Collett], and Sam Spratt was away riding down in Whanganui, so there were a few new faces,” says Myers.

“It’s good to get to know them and I loved being back out there, but after getting beaten a few times during the day, the competitive juices were starting to kick in.”

The Group 1-winning jockey didn’t have to wait too long for that familiar winning feeling, though, as she produced a beauty on the Ralph Manning-trained Liquid Fire to win the last race.

“It felt good. I’ve been loving being back riding trackwork, so it was great to be out there again,” says Myers.

“I love being a mum and my family is my first priority but I also realised a while ago I was ready for some adulting,” she smiled.

“So how much raceday riding I do, I don’t really know. I don’t want to be going to all sorts of meetings for the sake of it but I’m very competitive, so I won’t be turning a good ride down either.”

Myers is a welcome returnee to the senior jockeys’ ranks, with 638 career victories here including 27 black type wins.

Myers will be one of the first jockeys to test out Ellerslie’s new StrathAyr surface when she competes in one of five jumpouts there this morning.

The jumpouts will be the first horses to gallop under more or less race conditions on the new surface as the next step in Ellerslie’s return to racing protocols.

That will go to another level next Monday when official trials will be held at Ellerslie, after which the track’s return to racing on January 14 is likely to be confirmed.

Today’s jumpouts are open to the public and start at 10.30am.

Lucrative targets

Trainer Lance O’Sullivan says

Waitak deserves his shot at a serious race, even if he might not be able to win it.

Waitak bolted in on his resumption at Te Rapa on Saturday, showing the benefits of a lengthy spell after a luckless Queensland campaign.

The victory was no surprise, as it took top-class horses in Prowess (Auckland Guineas) and Desert Lightning (Avondale Guineas) to deny Waitak a major win here last season, and he finished fifth in the New Zealand Derby.

O’Sullivan and training partner Andrew Scott will keep him to shorter distances for now, with the $110,000 Stella Artois Final (1500m) at Ellerslie on Boxing Day a logical step towards the $1 million Elsdon Park Aotearoa Classic on TAB Karaka Millions night on January 27.

“Maybe he can’t beat Legarto in the new race, because if she turns up, she might be too good for all of them, but it’s great money, so it’s the obvious target,” says O’Sullivan.

The stable’s 1000 Guineas winner Molly Bloom will also be heading to Pukekohe on Boxing Day for the Hallmark Stud Eight Carat Classic, in which she will clash with stablemate Grail Seeker, runner-up in the Eagle Memorial on Saturday.

The stable’s star sprinter Dragon Leap will go into the $450,000 Sistema Railway on New Year’s Day fresh up.

Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.