Racing: Sheila Laxon's trophy ride

Sheila Laxon, the woman who wowed them in Melbourne, is independent, funny - and determined to the toes of her holey socks, writes MICHELE HEWITSON.

On the wall of Sheila Laxon's dining room is a print from the Newmarket series of 1891. It's titled Waiting for the Trainer. It shows a man in a bowler hat and tweed jacket casting his eye over a string of horses being led by wiry little men in dapper costumes. It's a quaint snapshot of another time and place. It is a world away from the scene down the hill at Elkayel Stables where we are waiting for the trainer.

Today's trainer is, of course, Laxon, the woman who won the Melbourne Cup and the Caulfield Cup with a horse called Ethereal and was transformed, overnight it seemed, into the darling of the racing, and media, world.

She, along with that horse, seemed heaven sent.

Laxon had a story of gritty determination to tell: she had survived a horrendous fall from a horse and subsequent brain injury. She was the first woman acknowledged to be the trainer of a cup winner. She said things like "what a man can do, a woman can do as well".

She had an easy humour. Her cellphone was held together with rubber bands after Ethereal trampled on it. She gave out the number to anyone who wanted it. In a raceday world, where big hats and flash frocks are de rigueur, she was happier being, as the Sydney Morning Herald described her, "the lady in jeans, the long-sleeved shirt and dusty old parka".

Still, because Laxon is nothing if not a sport, she agreed to being dragged off to Melbourne fashion house, Perri Cutten, and fitted out with a fetching burgundy silk costume and a hat so large she could, she says, "peer through it. And I said 'oh, that'll do me'." It did her just fine. Because that was one hell of a picture. The one that went out around the world showing Laxon's son, David, to her left looking what can be described only as gob-smacked. Sheila, face alight with utter glee, holding on to her hat as though if she let go it might fly away, taking the dream with it.

E lkayel Stables are 20 minutes south of Cambridge. A world away from Melbourne Cup day with its champagne whirl and the smell of money and French perfume.

We're in the heart of horse country. It is just after dawn. Horses are shifting from hoof to hoof in their paddocks, hot breath meets a sodden, misty morning. Two eager labradors, wagging tails and pushing cold noses, leap up out of the tractor shed. The morning smells of horse and damp horse blankets, grain and sawdust, mud and muddy dogs.

The trainer is not here. Craig Laxon, Laxon's stepson, is, clasping the clipboard which will tell him which horses will do what work this morning. He's the stable foreman who has, we are to discover, a liking for little jokes.

It is Craig who has told us that Sheila arrives at 6 am, that we should too. Which we suspect may be the sort of joke played by horsey people on towny people.

Just before 8 am the trainer arrives. Not that you'd pick any quickening in the pulse of those involved in the training machine. Sheila Laxon, trim in threadbare corduroy jodphurs and sweatshirt, heaves her tack out of the back of the ute, shakes hands, pulls a hairnet out of a pocket, shoves her hair in, jams a riding hat on and is in among the horses.

Her trainer's eye spots a horse she thinks is too skinny. "Is he?" she wants to know. "Or is he always skinny?"

Craig tells her she's riding three horses this morning. "Oh," she says, sounding disappointed. "I can do more."

There are always more. Since 6.30 am there have been 10 stablehands and a constant stream of horses splashing through the puddles left in the yard after a night of torrential rain. The stablehands at Laxon's place are mostly girls, she thinks girls "are better with horses". Craig is not so sure: "they show more fear".

Stepmother and stepson pretend they don't agree on much. He says that she says that he pays the stablehands too much. Too much, for a good one, can be $600 a week, for riding work, six days a week, from 6 am to 11 am. The ones "who don't want to think for themselves" will get between $350 and $400.

They are playing a game which has obviously been going on for years. She's the boss. He gets his own back by playing jokes. He later arrives up at the house with a dead mouse to waggle at his stepmother. Earlier on the phone to Sheila he says, with urgency: "You'd better get down here. We've got reporters and photographers for Africa." There are two of us.

It's not too difficult to wring a few Craig stories out of Sheila, to pay him back for that hideously early start. That he hurt his already buggered knee "jumping" off a balcony in the aftermath of the excitement of the Melbourne Cup. Alcohol may have been involved. That he "lost" a cellphone driving too fast a round a corner while talking on it. The phone fell out the window.

This may be slightly, but only slightly, unfair. It turns out that Sheila slept in today, she has arrived back from a month in Australia only the night before. And stables don't slack off while waiting for the trainer. One thing they do agree on: she's the trainer and she makes the decisions on how the horses will be trained.

Today, because the rain has made the sand track nearest the stables unusable, most of the horses will gallop along the nearby riverbank. They are brought from the paddocks, stalled, have their hooves picked and their expensive horseflesh checked over, weighed, saddled, and worked.

The morning flashes by in a blur of oiled hooves, small people who are made smaller by the proximity of large horses and the occasional horse tantrum at having to get on the scales. There is little talk.

What passes for chat is arcane, clipped discussion about such conditions as "floating gristle", on a horse who is being "a bloody bag", and about how today is "bucking day". (Floating gristle is a condition that seems to have been made up on the spot - "I've never heard of that," says one of the stablehands. It is bucking day because the horses will be ridden through long grass which can tickle sensitive bellies.)

T his is what Sheila Laxon really likes about the job: getting on a horse. You can tell that by watching her gallop to the brow of a hill, followed by a curious bunch of horses. From here she can look down on the 120ha, see the 40-odd horses, Craig's 70 Herefords and what Craig calls her "60 pesky designer sheep".

"Beautiful here, isn't it?" she says over her shoulder as she hacks through the paddock.

Life is beautiful all right for Sheila Laxon. So much so that interviewing her is a bit like attempting to talk to somebody on a happy trip.

Back at the house she shares with one of her stablehands, she talks on the phone non-stop. She laughs almost incessantly - and often enigmatically. At one point she gets up and, there is no other way to describe this, gallops across the room snickering. She sees the raised eyebrows and says, simply: "I won the Melbourne Cup." So you can take some good guesses at what's making her delirious with joy.

There's the money, of course. Although she says of Ethereal's $4.92 million purse thus far (her share must be around $490,000) "most of it will go to the tax man, won't it?" It might mean that she will splash out on a pair of socks. Or else she'll buy the 40ha of leased farmland which includes her much loved hill ride.

Laxon is stretched on a lone couch adrift on an expanse of pink carpet in a living room decorated with photographs of her in her days as a jockey and oil paintings of the dogs. In the loo there are portraits of horses. There is a hoofpick on the hall mat and a horse blanket in the office.

There are large holes in Sheila's socks. She couldn't care less. Craig says she "likes to hang on to it". She just laughs harder, looks up to a patch of crumbling ceiling and says "we ought to do something about that one day." On the phone, taking yet another congratulatory call, she says "I told you I'd win the Melbourne Cup one day."

She rested Ethereal after the Caulfield Cup, making the decision not to run her in the Mackinnon Stakes, the traditional run-up to the big one. She thinks about that now. Thinks about how, right up until the horse won, people were telling her "she's done it all wrong". Those people included her husband Laurie Laxon. "I did it my way. It worked. So many people said 'oh, you've got to do this, you've got to do that, and no, this is what she needs'. They knocked me. They said I was doing it wrong. And at the end of the day what I did was right for her."

"That," she says, lying back and laughing hard, "gives me more pleasure than anything."

You can see that it might.

When she fell from a horse called Triple Crossing in 1991, she was in a coma for eight days. When she woke she couldn't talk, or write, or do anything much. She was placed in a psychiatric ward in Waikato Hospital where she feared she would be raped and where she watched One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest. After which, she says, she made a rapid recovery and was sent home to the farm where, still unable to communicate, "I suppose I just existed".

She got back on a horse four months later. "Only because I felt so alone. This place was geared to horses and I felt that if I had no input into the horse scene I was no longer of any use to anybody."

This place belonged to Laurie, Laxon's husband who now trains out of Singapore. The official story, says Craig, is that Laurie has gone to Singapore to make enough money to pay off the farm. What really happened between Sheila and Laurie, and how she came to take over the stables is, she says a long story. And, frankly, she's too busy laughing to help make much sense of it.

What she will tell you is that when she came back from a trip to Zimbabwe with her ill mother, who subsequently died of cancer four years ago, "Laurie said, 'You're not part of my scene any more.' So I thought 'you bastard,' and got two paddocks up here [outside the house] and said I'll train on my own."

Laurie left for good in 1999. Sheila had to earn some money. She took over the stables. Some owners removed their horses. The Velas, Peter and Philip, owners of Ethereal, did not. The double win, Sheila says, "vindicated their faith in me. The fact that they stood by me meant a lot of other people stood by me".

Laxon likes to be rude about men in general, although it's hard to tell how much is just for show. She and Laurie still seem to get on; she plainly adores Craig.

"Sheila, you can't be a manhater," sighs Craig after an hour of her getting in barb after barb about how useless men are.

"I'm not being a manhater," she snorts. "I'm just saying what they do. There are some men who can work."

She tells me that there is some interest in a film. And, says this woman who has driven double-decker buses, worked on hovercraft, survived that awful accident and won the Melbourne Cup, with a distinct twinkle in her eye: "I've always wanted to be an actress."