Racing: Shoe supremo out to kick tumour

Kevin Crampton at Ellerslie. He famously always wears shorts, even in winter. Photo / Dean Purcell

The most famous shorts in New Zealand racing are taking a break. But the man who wears them, Kevin Crampton, says they will be back.

He just needs to deal with this pesky tumour the doctors tell him he has first.

Crampton has loved doing one of the hardest jobs in racing for 50 years, shoeing horses.

It is a daily battle between man and beast, a difficult dance where one of the partners weighs 400kg more than the other.

And until his recent diagnosis Crampton wasn't just a farrier who visited stables but the regular racemeeting farrier at several northern tracks, including Ellerslie and Alexandra Park.

Two factors were consistent: Kevin's professionalism and his shorts. Always the shorts, even in winter. Even after he turned 80.

Now as Crampton settles in for his next big battle the shorts have been packed away, he even went as far as wearing a suit and tie as he enjoyed a supposed retirement dinner with well wishers at Alexandra Park last week.

"The doctors say they can shrink the tumour and slow it down, give me some more time," says Kevin. "So I am hoping to get back to work at some stage."

As the man who for decades was called to the rescue of so many equines who had pulled a raceday shoe, Crampton has put new "wheels" on plenty of the great ones, having his own Hall Of Fame of hooves.

"There have been hundreds, too many to name. But you treat the good ones the same as the average ones.

"They all deserve your best," he offers.

But that is not really good enough, is it? You can't lay your hands on some of the greatest horses in our history and not drop a few names.

"Oh, I suppose I have worked on most of them. But Bonecrusher was special of course. Horses like him don't come along very often."

While Crampton's efforts have helped many a trainer, he is also an astute horseman himself, never having a big team but training a genuinely top class three-year-old in Beechcraft in the early 1980s.

"He won a Guineas here and I took him to Aussie and won the Caulfield Guineas there then we left him there," says Crampton.

But Crampton really had two victories that Caulfield afternoon, October 8, 1983.

Because not long after Beechcraft had won his Guineas one of Takanini's greatest ever equine sons McGinty won the Caulfield Stakes and his trainer Colin Jillings says without Crampton the best would never have been seen of McGinty.

"McGinty had bad feet and Kevin spent weeks, probably months, working on them one way and another," the retired Hall Of Fame trainer told the Herald.

"And he got him right and that was a big part of us getting the best out of McGinty.

"Don't worry about Kevin, who has always been good with horses and he could train. But he was a very, very good farrier.

"I haven't seen one better."