Lisa Allpress.
This is not how a great career is supposed to end.
Star jockey Lisa Allpress was only just resuming her record-breaking career after a long period of injury rehabilitation when it was halted again by a freak accident at Trentham on Saturday that left her with three breaks in a leg.
It wasn’t even a racing accident but a pre-racing accident, with Allpress’s mount Hickory Jack rearing up and falling backwards before race four, landing on her leg.
The horse was okay, the race delayed, but Allpress was left on the Trentham turf wondering what she’d done to deserve another gut punch in a magnificent career punctuated by injury.
“That is what she said last night: ‘What have I done to deserve this again?’” says her husband Karl. “She is pretty down, as you would expect, so now we are waiting for an operation to insert a rod [in] her leg.”
“She has broken her tibia just below the knee with two breaks further down, and originally we thought the operation would be today [Sunday].
“But you wouldn’t believe it, they don’t have the right rod at the hospital, so they [have] to get one flown down from Auckland.
“So that is the next step – get the operation done then get her home.”
Then and only then, or perhaps in the months ahead, can Allpress answer for herself the question Karl was already being asked yesterday.
“So many people are calling to ask how Lisa is. I finish one call and the have another one straight away.
“And yes, people are asking if this it is, whether she will retire now.”
There is, of course, nothing left to prove if Allpress chooses that path. She turns 50 in May, has won the national jockey’s premiership a remarkable four times and has 119 black-type winners in New Zealand.
However, there is another number which looms on her horizon, or maybe now beyond it. Allpress has ridden 1956 winners in New Zealand and would love to be the first female rider to ride 2000 here.
“There is that, but she has actually ridden over 2000 winners if you count her overseas winners,” says Karl.
“We have spoken about the 2000 target in the past, but I have told her she is already a 2000-race winner.
“But those conversations, about what happens next, are probably a fair while away yet, and obviously it is Lisa’s decision.
“If she says ‘this is enough’ and chooses to retire, then we will all be so proud of what she has achieved and the things she has had to overcome.
“But part of me – and I am sure, Lisa – would love to see her ride again, even if it was just one more race and she finished last.
“I don’t really want her career to end with her lying on the turf injured before a race she never rode in.
“If she wants to come back, we will all support her and even if she only rode at one more meeting at Whanganui, didn’t win a race, then went back into the jockey’s room and said ‘That’s it, I’m finished and leaving on my own terms’, that would feel better than this.”
Of course, Karl was only speaking for Lisa yesterday because she couldn’t. About the only good part of breaking your leg is people understanding you not answering your phone.
Lisa will ultimately decide, or maybe just instinctively know, whether she wants to ride again.
Whether that be a hack around the farm, a farewell meeting in the Whanganui rain – or perhaps the desire for 44 more New Zealand wins to enter a club all of her own is a fire that can not be doused.
Regardless, the defining images of Lisa Allpress’ career won’t be that of the little warrior lying on the Trentham track.
Those are not the pictures proud owners hang on the wall or which we see in video highlight packages.
If the career of our most successful female jockey is over, it will be remembered and celebrated for all those wins and the joy they brought so many people.
People like you, who may never have met Lisa Allpress, yet once or twice cheered her home on a winner that put money in your TAB account and a celebratory drink in your hand.
Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.