Racing: Herlihy looking forward to the finish line

At 45, Tony Herlihy has been driving horses for 27 years, and working with them even longer. Picture / Martin Sykes

Tony Herlihy, just so you know, it was in 1985 that you were world harness-racing champion. Also, you've won the New Zealand harness-racing championship seven times.

I'm telling Herlihy these things because he couldn't tell me.

Almost apologetically, he said: "Oh, I should know, but I don't. It'll be in the records somewhere."

Hold on. The man's job is to win, to drive horses to victory, and he does it so well that he's acknowledged to be Australasia's best driver, with races worth at least $27 million in stake money to his credit so far. This season, at age 45, he's almost certain to win the New Zealand reinsman's premiership again. Yet it means so little to him that he forgets the details?

"I'm always focused on the next winner. Not the last one," he replies. He's so calm, cool and collected that one of his racing nicknames is "The Iceman". But that doesn't quite fit - he's too affable. Can we take up an hour of his time for an interview in one of the busiest weeks on his calendar? Sure. Can we move those sulkies around to take his picture with them? "Good as gold." That's his catchphrase.

Another nickname is "Forrest" as in "Forrest Gump". "Maybe it's because they think I'm a bit thick," offers Herlihy. Oh no, his rivals aren't going to be taken in by that schtick. It's Forrest because he achieves so much with so little fuss.

He keeps his nerves of steel hidden under well-deserved laughlines. Why is the cart behind the horse called a sulky? "Named after a woman," comes the prompt reply. The old joke is as much for the benefit of the cackling Australian trainers grooming their horses in Herlihy's blue stable as it is for mine.

The Aussies are over here for the Interdominions - the Bledisloe Cup of harness racing. One of them goads Herlihy about getting his photograph taken; he reckons he wants to be in the picture too. "No, you can't take your shirt off," Herlihy admonishes him with one of his frequent smiles.

But the banter gets put aside on the race track. Herlihy's travelled a lot with other leading New Zealand drivers like Maurice McKendry but "when you go into a race it's every man for himself. [They're] all fair but at the same time all hard too ... It's always you against them. All the adrenalin, it's still there today."

It's still there even though he started racing 27 years ago, at 18. By then he was already an old hand around the stables. (I'd heard rumours of a Herlihy racing in the 1960s and asked if Tony knew anything about this. "Well it wasn't me," he deadpanned.)

Arguably Te Awamutu's third favourite son, he used to travel up by railcar to spend his holidays at his uncle's at Pukekohe, from age 10. His uncle happened to work at the stables of the legendary Roy Purdon, New Zealand's all-time most successful trainer, and Herlihy helped out with the horses. On race days, he'd ride one of the horses over to the Pukekohe trotting track, leading a couple of others behind him.

At 22, the former child stablehand married his former boss' daughter. "We knew each other when we were about 10 or 11 and later on in life ... Suzanne used to go to the trots and she used to chase me round," he grins. Herlihy credits the Purdons for teaching him a lot. He worked in the stables with one brother-in-law, trainer Mark Purdon, for several years. He was regular driver for another brother-in-law trainer, Barry, until Herlihy started training horses himself when Mark moved to Christchurch about four years ago.

Remarkably for a driver, Herlihy is now one of New Zealand's top trainers as well.

Father-in-law Roy, now the 78-year-old patron of the Auckland Trotting Club, still gets up at 6am and mucks out boxes for Herlihy.

His own brother, Paul, has twice been New Zealand marathon champion. But Tony reckons he used to beat Paul in harriers. "Sometimes," he adds after a mischievous pause. Paul dedicated his 1995 Auckland international marathon win to his brother, because Herlihy had been injured on the track 10 days before.

The horse he was driving hit his knee against the hub rail, fell down, and Herlihy got hurled out of the cart and thrown onto a drain. He broke several ribs and cracked his sternum. "I was back driving within three weeks. I p'raps shouldn't have been but I was. Had a couple of good drives I didn't want to let go.

"That was the only time I haven't been able to walk away, touch wood."

He raps his workworn knuckles on the plastic wood veneer of the table of his office, beside the bridle room. Photographs of winning race days and various members of the Purdon family with Robert Muldoon adorn the walls. The biggest picture is a handsome black and white shot of a younger Herlihy in racing gear with legendary champion horse Chokin.

Day-to-day life is less glamorous. Herlihy met us just off the tractor, carrying a couple of buckets, in old sneakers, shorts and a tatty faded pink shirt covered in paint splatters. Horseflies are everywhere.

"It's not hard, heavy work but it's time-consuming," he says. Up to feed the horses at 5am, give them a morning workout, put them back in the stables in the afternoon, finish just after 4pm, with an hour off for lunch. On a race day, especially if it means travelling back from Cambridge, he's lucky to be in bed by 1am. In the winter, there's the luxury of sleeping in before feeding time - until 6am. "Yeah, we wait for the frost to thaw!" jokes Herlihy.

He left school at 15 for this life and has never considered doing anything else. He eats and breathes harness-racing, although he doesn't admit to dreaming about it. Of his four children, a 21-year-old son is working for a top trainer in the United States, a 19-year-old daughter works for Herlihy at the stables, another son, 17, works at the Top of the Park restaurant at Alexandra Park and there's a 12-year-old still at school. The third generation of the Purdon/Herlihy dynasty looks in good form to receive the harness-racing crown.

In latter years, Herlihy has owned shares in racehorses as well as driving and training them. He enjoys that, "especially if they go all right". It's the only way to make the big bikkies in this racket. "The rest is sort of paying the bills really, like a lot of jobs." Drivers get a 5 per cent cut of the stakes money that the horse wins; trainers get 10 per cent.

Herlihy had a "good dilemma" to solve during these past two weeks - he drove two favoured horses in the Interdominion trotting heats, but then had to decide which one he should drive in next Friday's final. In the end, he's chosen Delft over Allegro Agitato, because he thinks Delft will have more strength left by then. Herlihy is respected so much in the industry that his announcement made Delft the favourite.

But Herlihy's not counting his foals. "I don't know how many times I've picked the wrong horse, even in ordinary races."