The legendary skills of Wanganui horseman Kevin "Dummy" Myers have drawn high praise from the connections of horses that won both feature jumping races at Te Rapa on Saturday.
The Turakina-based trainer produced Sea King to win the Dunstan Feeds Waikato Hurdles and then two races later Rioch to win the Porritt Sand Waikato Steeplechase. Both horses had previously proved too difficult to handle for other trainers.
Otaki-based trainer Rachel Frost had conceded Sea King was too tough for her to handle and passed him on to Myers, while Rioch was labelled "too slow" to win even a jumping race by John Wheeler's Melbourne-based jumping foreman and former top jumps jockey Brett Scott.
Both Sea King and Rioch were ridden beautifully by Myers' regular jumps jockey and Santoft satellite stable foreman Jo Rathbone on Saturday.
"I'd given up on him a few years ago - he [Sea King] was a bit too tough for me, but Dummy has done an outstanding job with him," Frost said after the race.
Meanwhile, Rioch's owners, the O'Leary brothers Dan, Michael and Sean, who all farm near Wanganui, refused to give up on their now 10-year-old despite a raft of injuries and problems stemming from a spectacular crash at the second to last fence when looking a clear winner of the 2009 Grand National Hurdle at Riccarton.
That day Rioch, in the hands of English rider George Strickland, was a clear leader before ducking sharply to the right at the second last before being pile-driven by the chasing horses into the deck.
Rioch sustained serious bruising and ultimately a haematoma in the chest area. He was sent to spell in the hills at Michael and Sean O'Leary's dairy farm in Whangaehu.
"We put him up in the hills to recover and when he came back one of his breast muscles had atrophied and shrunk. We gave him plenty of road work and sent him back to the hills.
"His tendon then flared up, so he sent back to spell again," Michael O'Leary said.
"When he came back he did plenty of road work again in the Whangaehu Valley before being sent to Jo [Rathbone] in Santoft. Kevin told Jo to just keep doing road work. What Kevin did was outstanding - phenomenal. When we rode him we could all feel the sheer power beneath us and just knew he was worth persevering with - we knew there were wins in him," O'Leary said.
And the O'Leary brothers were well aware of what Myers could do with horses, especially jumpers.
The brothers raced former Waikato Hurdles winner Fontera, along with fourth sibling Humphrey O'Leary who opted out of Rioch because he had "too many" in work himself.
Fontera went on to run second in the world's richest jumping race, the 2004 Nakayama Grand Jump in Japan.
"Kevin calls all our horses junk, but he keeps winning with them."
O'Leary said both Rioch and Sea King had both come through their weekend assignments in good order and had both been working on the water treadmill and grazing the paddocks since.
"We'll wait until Kevin comes back from Australia before the next plans are hatched," O'Leary said.