Racing: Lyell sun setting but what a ride he's given us all

For 12 of the chosen few, Friday night's $250,000 Interdominion Trotting Final will be the race of their lives.

Then there is Lyell.

Not Lyell Creek, although that is how his name will officially appear in form guides and on TAB sheets.

Just Lyell. Because Lyell has no need for the second half of his official name.

To anybody even remotely linked to harness racing Lyell Creek is just Lyell, in the same way rugby fans talk about Jonah. Giants whose deeds erased the need for surnames.

Victory in Friday night's final at Alexandra Park would cap New Zealand harness racing's most amazing career, at the same time giving a one-fingered salute to Father Time.

Yet it would still only be an exclamation mark in the fading chapters of trotting's greatest story.

An exclamation mark at the end of a career punctuated with question marks.

Consider what Lyell has achieved and you start to question how he is still, well, Lyell?

You question how a horse who nearly died from scouring before he raced, just another nameless equine life that would have ended in obscurity in Kaikoura, become the benchmark for an industry?

How did he repeatedly save the fortunes, maybe even the life, of one of New Zealand's worst gamblers, owner Graham Bruton?

How did he break every trotting record in New Zealand and Australia and still have enough left to perform on the world stage?

How did Lyell not give up when racing against the incomparable Italian champion Varenne, or running fourth to Victory Tilly in trotting's fastest mile, or when plying his trade in the Canadian snow so cold the air hurt his lungs?

How, when he returned home for a peaceful retirement, did he recalibrate his body to rid it of the Lasix and other chemicals injected into horses in North America?

And how, at the age of 11, can Lyell still be the horse to beat in this Interdominion final?

But to ask how Lyell has done it, and continues to do it, is to limit him to our own expectations, what we consider normal or possible.

When you look at Lyell don't think how, think why?

And that is when the true wonder of Lyell becomes evident.

Since he ignited the open-class trotting scene on the eve of the new millennium, Lyell has been the poster boy for determination.

He was never as fast as Mountain Gold or his own stablemate Take A Moment. And he sure wasn't the smoothest trotter to ever lean into a corner.

But to watch Lyell at his best, in a two-year period from 1999 to mid 2001, was to watch pure hatred. Hatred of losing.

While he would often wobble around the bends, once Lyell got to the home straight, with history in front of him and his equine enemies behind, he would hurt the earth, pounding it with fracture-proof legs.

With Lyell something had to give, and as it turned out it was his opponents' hearts.

He didn't beat horses, he broke them.

For the first two years Lyell was the best trotter in New Zealand a fine animal called Sundons Way was second best.

But Lyell beat him up so badly Sundons Way eventually couldn't win even when Lyell wasn't in the race. Lyell broke his heart.

If Lyell were human, a shrink somewhere would undoubtedly come up with some psycho-analytical garbage about how he was fuelled by his early life crisis (nearly dying), his unfavourable parentage (failed sire Roydon Glen) or the power of his desire to succeed being nurtured by great mentors, Tim and Anthony Butt.

He would be a B-grade movie of the week waiting to happen.

But forget all that rubbish.

The only insight you will ever get into why Lyell is Lyell is to enter his world. To experience Lyell at work.

I got that chance in October 2003, when Lyell was home, on a comeback trail seemingly headed for nowhere.

The Butt brothers, thinking Lyell was finished, gave a hack a drive behind their pride and joy, maybe payment for the 50,000km I had travelled to watch him race.

Around and around their Canterbury track we circled, the champ and the chump, and every lap was the same.

Lyell would loaf, kid and hang on the bends but every time he got to a straight, every time he saw a corridor of dirt, he would take off.

For just a few seconds he would grab the bit and start another charge toward whatever Lyell has been charging toward all his life.

I never intended to write about that morning and wouldn't now unless it wasn't the best way to explain why Lyell is Lyell.

After our 40 minutes together Lyell steered us back to the Premier Stables and I asked Anthony Butt if he was always like that or whether Lyell had been playing with his novice driver.

"No, it's not you. It's him," assured Butt.

"He has always been like that. Every day, every workout, he always takes off at the top of every straight.

"It is the strangest thing. I've never seen it in another horse," said Butt, shaking his head.

On Friday night around 9.10pm, Lyell will enter another straight, a 220m stretch of dirt showered in light and resonating with sound.

The home straight at Alexandra Park.

Surrounded by his new equine enemies, once again he will grab the bit and take off.

Maybe the younger legs and less-scarred lungs of his opponents will mean that Lyell's charge does not carry him to the winner's circle.

For the tens of thousands watching Lyell - and only Lyell - the fairytale ending may not be delivered.

But to Lyell it won't matter.

Because there will be a straight line and a chance to attack it.

Maybe, for all these years, he has only been racing himself.