Racing: Final fling for Jillings in Sydney

The training career of Colin Jillings - as Kiwi as the hangi - is about to end where it started, in Sydney.

It is appropriate that when Cheval De Troy runs in tonight's A$400,000 Canterbury Guineas it will be the last runner of the hugely successful Colin Jillings/Richard Yuill partnership.

Then one of the truly great training careers in New Zealand's rich thoroughbred history - if not the greatest - will end when Cheval De Troy has two more starts in Australia.

Jillings won't need any directions to find his way around Sydney this weekend - he trained his first winner anywhere, Lady Finnis in Sydney on his 20th birthday, March 11, 1950.

He has also won the Canterbury Guineas before, with McGinty in 1983.

Jillings had to kill his career as a jockey before it killed him. For one of his last winners, Super Vaals, he had to lose 17lb (7kg) in a week to make the weight.

Tall for a jockey, Jillings gave riding away aged 18, totally drained and exhausted. It's perhaps no surprise he has had zero tolerance for jockeys' excuses ever since.

Out of the blue, Auckland jeweller Alby Bronson asked him to take two horses, Lady Finnis and Gayriole, to Sydney to train on a short campaign.

Bronson was a big punter and it is no exaggeration to say that the then 19-year-old Jillings grew up very quickly during the trip.

The talent that was to heavily punctuate 54 years of preparing horses became evident when Lady Finnis won three of her five Australian starts and finished fifth in Australia's premier mile race, the Doncaster Handicap.

But it was through Gayriole that Jillings remembers that campaign.

"He was a very useful maiden when he left New Zealand and we set him up for a punt at Randwick one day.

"The owner had had some advice from someone in Queensland to put Brisbane jockey Willy Wellburn on him. His nickname was 'Pinhead' and let me tell you he was a pinhead."

Jillings has always enjoyed a bet. During the Sydney trip he had built up a bank of 400, a massive amount to have floating around your pocket in 1950. Enough to buy a respectable Auckland house.

"I put the 400 to win on him at 12 to 1."

Think about watching a bet go around that could return you at least 10 houses, particularly when your stake is all you have to your name.

"He was third on the fence and tried to barge his way through along the rails at the top of the Randwick rise 350m out," Jillings remembers, and it's not something you'd be likely to forget.

"He had no hope of getting through and got checked back to last. He flew home and was beaten two noses by a horse ridden by George Moore. They called him in first, but I knew he'd been beaten."

Jillings says he doesn't remember crying, but felt tears running down his cheeks.

"I learned something that day - I learned how to lose. These days I lose on the punt better than I win.

"When I look back it's a wonderful thing that Gayriol didn't win because I'd be dead by now. I'd have killed myself."

Things have changed. You could not possibly get enough money on Cheval De Troy in tonight's Canterbury Guineas to reap you one house, much less 10 of them. The relativity of the punt from the old days has changed dramatically.

Jillings returned to New Zealand broke and a remarkable training career was born.

Nothing would give him greater pleasure than to go out winning in Australia with Cheval De Troy, who will join Lee Freedman's Melbourne stable when his autumn campaign is completed.

Jillings has already struck a huge disappointment in being unable to win Boxing Day's $500,000 Mercedes Derby with Cheval De Troy, which would have given him a Derby for each of the six decades he trained through.

And Jillings blames himself. "The brilliant gallop he did at Breakfast With The Stars was too much for him, it sent him over the top. I cooked him, which is a shame."

There is no doubt in anyone's mind that saw Cheval De Troy's gallop at Breakfast With The Stars that the effort would have won any race in New Zealand.

It was one gallop too soon, but correction is the true art of training thoroughbreds and Jillings will not have missed a second time.

"He's done very well, although you have to be mindful that it's two months since he's raced."

You can imagine Damien Oliver getting on very well with the colt from the saddle. Oliver is Australia's coolest rider and there is zero chance of him making his run too soon.

Traditionally, Melbourne jockeys have an ordinary record competing at Sydney carnivals and Canterbury is the most difficult of Sydney's four metropolitan courses to ride.

But for all that you would be staggered if Oliver did anything but a totally professional job. It's what Jillings has expected from every jockey since the day he turned 20.