West Coast the poster boy jumps racing needs

In jumps racing’s hour of need, West Coast confirmed his status as one of the best ever with yet another champion performance in Sunday’s Ben & Ryan Foote Racing Great Northern Steeplechase.
There’s no getting away from the intense scrutiny that jumps racing in this country is under right now. That was brought into focus by the NZTR release in early August of a consultation document requesting stakeholder submissions and last week’s appointment of a subcommittee to rule on those more than 200 submissions as the crucial step in deciding the discipline’s future.
So to have a horse like West Coast again stamp his greatness in our premier jumps race was a perfectly-timed gold nugget. Three Grand Nationals and now two Great Northerns, along with two Korals and single editions of the Wellington, Hawke’s Bay and Manawatu Steeplechases, are just part of an incredible legacy that, all things being equal, is still not complete.
West Coast has already claimed the Champion Jumper trophy for his achievements in the 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons, and after completing a Grand National hat-trick and a Great Northern double in the past five weeks, it’s nigh implausible to imagine that he won’t make it three titles at the end of the current season.
In assessing where West Coast belongs on the list of this country’s best jumpers, it’s perhaps unfair on each and every member of that cohort of warriors in even attempting comparisons. There have been suggestions that West Coast has been favoured by the 73-kilogram maximum topweight for the Prestige Jumps Races that he has monopolised over the past two or three years, and that has been off a minimum of 66 kilograms.
In Great Northern Steeplechase terms, the most obvious recent era comparison to be made is with Hunterville, who made the race his own with a hat-trick in the 1980s, and Hypnotize, won three times in the four editions spanning 2007 and 2010. The highest weight Hunterville carried was 66.5kg off a 57kg minimum, while Hypnotize – nowhere near as hulking an individual as Hunterville or West Coast – carried 70.5kg in his third win when the race was 6400m and three times over the Ellerslie hill.
That’s as far as I’m prepared to go in drawing comparisons between these and other jumping greats, suffice to say that what was witnessed by the large crowd in attendance at Te Rapa last Sunday and those many others who tuned in was extraordinary.
As the 11-horse field lined up for Sunday’s Great Northern Steeplechase, there was to some degree an air of foreboding stemming three races earlier from West Coast’s stablemate Berry The Cash being eliminated as the hot favourite from the Great Northern Hurdle after a rival fell in front of him.
The big question on the mind of everyone when any horse with further records beckoning faces yet another challenge, is whether this might be the end of the golden run, that it’s someone else’s turn. That’s unavoidably omnipresent in the minds of those closest to these high-profile performers and believe me as someone on the fringe, it was never more stark than at Te Rapa on Sunday afternoon.
So to see West Coast answer every question as he went about his business and win with something up his sleeve, will be the lasting memory of a jumps season when its stars and their support cast fronted up and answered those querying the discipline’s place in racing’s wider landscape.
Superlatives are almost redundant in describing West Coast’s dominance in the race that defined him forever, but this was the performance that brought an admission from the two men who have been integral to his greatness – trainer Mark Oulaghan and rider Shaun Fannin – that this was without question their absolute best.
When I congratulated Oulaghan I suggested there might be a tear or two in his eye, to which his reply was so typical – “Yeah, probably close to it. Nah, he’s a great horse, my best ever,” the master conditioner said.
Fannin, whose jumps jockey career has been extended by this horse of a lifetime while he simultaneously forges his place as a trainer, couldn’t find words sufficiently adequate to describe what he had just experienced.
“Everything went to plan, I was happy to lead early and then take a trail; even when he hit that flat spot across the top I knew I still had the horse under me,” Fannin said after taking his Great Northern Steeplechase tally to a record six.
“But when we turned for home with that other horse (last year’s runner-up Captains Run) was still there, I thought just maybe this was it. Then as the last came up, he just lifted under me, he so wants to win, he launched himself and that was it.
“He’s an incredible horse, for me there’ll never be another like him.”
This was Fannin’s greatest moment, in a year that one of his proudest fans, his father Rhys, passed away. Content most times to watch his son from his Hawke’s Bay home while his wife Jill took every opportunity to soak up their son’s raceday action, Rhys collected every clipping possible to compile one of those good old-fashioned scrapbooks chronicling a wonderful career.
Early next year Fannin and his fiancée, training partner Hazel Schofer, will marry and he will contemplate further horizons for the great one, with connections flagging a possible start in Australia’s iconic jumps race, the Warrnambool Grand Annual in May. The thought alone is exciting –33 fences over 5500m – meat and veges for this champion, albeit another stiff challenge.
On hand at Te Rapa were the junior members of West Coast’s ownership group, South Canterbury farmer Henry Williamson and his Mexican-born wife Gabby. Back home in Twizel were their seniors, South Island racing stalwarts Ron and Jennifer Williamson, unable to travel but still enjoying the occasion from afar with family and friends.
“Dad has had his health challenges over the past little while,” his son recounted. “He was in hospital when we won last year’s Grand National, but tough old bugger that he is, he was back at Riccarton last month for the Grand National.
“This horse deserves the credit for Dad still being with us, he’s way better than any medicine in a bottle or doctor’s advice. I honestly don’t believe Ronnie would still be alive if he didn’t have West Coast to look forward to.”
The central districts added to its dominance of feature jumps racing when Wanganui gelding Lord Spencer put up an amazing sprint over the final stages of the Peter Kelly – Bayleys Great Northern Hurdle.
The JJ Rayner-trained seven-year-old tipped his hat to his just-deceased sire Zed with an upset win in a race that had been turned on its head when Berry The Cash was taken out of play with more than around to go.
Rayner is a daughter of highly respected horseman and former training partner Evan Rayner, whose wins included the 1990 edition of the Great Northern Hurdle with Star Count.
For winning jockey Lemmy Douglas, it was clearly a highlight in a New Zealand career that began for the 30-year-old Englishman when he arrived in the country as an aspiring jumps jockey in 2018.
His successes in that role were limited, but to his credit he stuck to the task and evolved to include flat riding in his brief, and now has career tally of 52 wins, 50 of those since the 2021-22 season.