O’Leary’s patient game pays off with Te Kahu

Marton dairy farmer-come-trainer Dan O’Leary knows the value of patience when handling horses, as illustrated again with his comeback steeplechaser Te Kahu.
O’Leary, who races the Zacinto gelding with his wife Jane, prepared him to win the 2021 Great Northern Steeplechase in what was just the 14th start in a career that had begun as a rising five-year-old in July 2018. After suffering a tendon injury in the second start of a brief Australian campaign in 2022, Te Kahu didn’t race again until a month ago, and when he lined up in last Saturday’s Animal Health Direct Hawke’s Bay Steeplechase it was his first start over country since breaking down in Victoria nearly two years before.
While there is no comparing Te Kahu with the best horse O’Leary has been involved with, there are still parallels that bear recounting. That other horse is the remarkable stayer Who Shot Thebarman, who O’Leary had the pleasure of racing in partnership with his brothers Humphrey, Michael and Shaun.
Bought sight unseen as a weanling for $8,000 from his Otago breeders White Robe Lodge, Who Shot Thebarman became a fan favourite during a career that began as a four-year-old in the autumn of 2013 and ended in November 2018, just weeks after his 10th birthday, with a record of 57 starts, 11 wins and stakes of more than $5 million.
His tally included the Auckland, Sydney, Moonee Valley and Avondale Cups, The Bart Cummings and Zipping Classic, along the way contesting four Melbourne Cups for third in 2014 and fifth in 2016. He was as tough as tungsten steel, as those who oversaw his early education could attest, and he retired sound at the end of a career that included no less than eight 3200-metre races.
Dan O’Leary was involved with Who Shot Thebarman’s early development, but with a mixture of resignation and common-sense, he deferred to Awapuni trainer Mark Oulaghan.
“The bloke who broke him in warned us he was pretty tough and I got him after my brother Humphrey had given up on him,” O’Leary recalled earlier this week. “For ages he took two people to catch him, it was a battle to get a bridle on him, and before we rode him we would lunge him in the round yard to take some of the sting out of him. Whenever we took him into the (Wanganui) track to work he was a bugger to kick in the float.
“He wasn’t what you would call nasty, it was just him, he just wanted to get on with it, but after I galloped him one day with a horse that went alright, I told the boys he was worth sticking with.”
Ultimately the decision was made to send Who Shot Thebarman to Oulaghan, mainly because he had clicked with other progeny of Yamanin Vital, but when the big bay showed flat ability from the start, flat rather than jumps racing was his destiny. A brace of trial wins were followed by wins at his first two raceday starts and within a year he had won six of ninecapped by the 2014 Auckland Cup.
Who Shot Thebarman had just one more start for Oulaghan when unplaced in the Sydney Cup, and his quartet of owners then threw the dice and transferred him to Chris Waller.
“What he achieved was amazing, he was such a good, tough horse who gave our whole family so many thrills,” says O’Leary of the horse named in memory of the O’Leary brothers’ Aunt Julie. “But he was also one of those horses that if you had made the wrong move with him, it all might have come to nothing.”
While Te Kahu has nowhere near the same profile, he is likewise a credit to O’Leary’s judicious handling, capped by his defeat last weekend of the country’s champion jumper West Coast.
“His tendon injury wasn’t as bad as some – it was more of a stretch rather than a hole – and I was always hopeful he would make it back. I just had to be patient, so to start with we kept him confined to a small paddock and a lot of his early work was on the walker.
“I was happy with his first two hurdle runs and the plan was to step him up to steeplechasing at Te Aroha last week and then back him up at Hastings, but when Te Aroha was called off I decided to go straight to Hastings.
“There’s an undulating sand track on the farm and we can get a fair bit of work into them, so heading into the weekend I was pretty confident. West Coast is a wonderful horse, but on a heavy track I thought with six kilos less my horse could give him a race.”
So it transpired when Nick Downs kept Te Kahu in sight of the hot favourite, sent him forward on the final round to dispute the pace and then lead over the final jump. At the line Te Kahu had two lengths on West Coast, who simply wasn’t able to match his lighter-weighted rival.
For both the trainer and jockey it was the 25th win of their respective careers, and for rising 50-year-old Downs the most important since he emigrated from England a dozen years ago. Adding to a memorable day, the Cambridge horseman’s partner Caitlin McKee scored her first win as an amateur rider with a daring rails ride in the Duke of Gloucester Cup, no less, on the Ken Harrison-trained Meandeel.
O’Leary will be looking for further honours with his small team at next week’s Wellington Steeplechase meeting, but Te Kahu won’t be amongst them. Others in the wings include Captains Run, who pushed West Coast to a short neck in last year’s Great Northern Steeplechase and went down narrowly in a maiden hurdle at Hastings on Saturday, and last-start Parliamentary Handicap winner Blackwood Star.
“Te Kahu’s next target is the Grand National, so the likely plan is to give him his first look at Riccarton in the Koral Steeplechase on the first day of the carnival and hopefully get him to the big one feeling as good as he was on Saturday.”