VICTORIA’S leading trainer Darren Weir has come a long way since riding a palomino pony on the family farm at Berriwillock 30 years ago.
Tomorrow at Moonee Valley, the 43-year-old will saddle up the strong fancy Puissance De Lune in Australia’s richest weight-for-age race, the $3m WS Cox Plate.
The Irish bred, French import was purchased by Gerry Ryan of Jayco Caravans for $100,000 after having four runs back in his homeland for a win and two placings.
Since coming to Australia nearly two years ago, he’s become one of the star attractions of the Australian turf.
He rose to prominence this time last year when thrashing his rivals in the Bendigo Cup before a most emphatic victory in the Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Flemington during the Melbourne Cup Carnival.
Following this win, he was installed as favourite for this year’s Melbourne Cup, to be run in 11 days.
Weir’s career with horses goes back about 27 years when he left school as a 16-year-old working for Birchip trainer Jack Coffey and later John Castleman of Mildura.
After moving to South Australia, he was employed as a stable-hand for one of Australia’s great trainers, the late Colin Hayes.
To further his experience, he journeyed to Ireland.
But after a short stint there, he became homesick and returned to Hayes at Lindsay Park.
In 1990, Weir’s career started to take shape.
He moved to Stawell where he worked as a farrier, shoeing horses for trainers in the Wimmera and the Western Districts of Victoria.
To further supplement his income, he started to break in horses.
Five years down the track, Weir decide to try his hand at training and was granted an owner-trainer’s licence before upgrading to a full licence two years later.
His first success as a trainer came at Avoca in October 1995 when Epaulay saluted in a maiden over 1100m.
The winners steadily mounted up and by 2001, Weir started to outgrow the Stawell stable, taking the biggest punt of his life, making the move to Ballarat.
He purchased the stables that were built by Lloyd Williams for the late Noel Kelly, a legend in the Ballarat training ranks.
After less than a year of being at Ballarat, Weir struck gold bringing up his first Group 1 success with She’s Archie who came from last to take out the SA Oaks at Morphettville.
Later, she suffered a life threatening illness, however, was gradually nursed back to health and amazingly she continued to race.
She will be long remembered for her great second in the 2003 Melbourne Cup when she rocketed home to beat all but the champion staying mare Makybe Diva.
Nowadays, She’s Archie is the dam of May’s Dream, who won this year’s Elvstroem Classic on the first day of the Swan Hill Cup carnival and is current favourite for the $1 million Victorian Oaks to be run on November 7.
Weir has become the dominant trainer on Victoria’s country tracks, being crowned the state’s leading country trainer for nine of the past 10 years.
Last season, he trained a staggering 176 winners, he was presented for the first time with the trophy for Victoria’s Leading Trainer.
With another seven winners interstate, he ended the season with the grand total of 183 and finished fourth on the Australian Trainers Premiership — an amazing effort for a country trainer.
Now, Weir not only has stables at Ballarat, but also a satellite stable at Warrnambool, where Puissance De Lune spends his time between races working through the sandhills and wading in the surf.
With four Hobart Cup victories and the majority of Country Cups on offer in Victoria, Weir commented a couple of years ago that he wanted to train four Cup winners — the Stawell Cup as that is where he started his training career, the Ballarat Cup as that is now where he is based, the Swan Hill Cup as that is his ‘hometown’ Cup and the Melbourne Cup.
He’s already got three of the four with Just The Part claiming the Stawell and Ballarat Cups while Can Do won the Swan Hill Cup in 2011.
Weir quips the last one is going to be quite a bit harder. However he does have a genuine chance this year with Puissance De Lune.
You only have to ask his mother Noelene, who lives in Swan Hill, that he’s very determined to win ‘the race that stops the nation’.
“I remember Darren was only 13 when he rode his mare Sonny at the Sea Lake Pony Club,” she recalled this week.
“She wasn’t the easiest to handle when around other horses, but Darren got on really well with her and it was a real challenge for him.
“When he shifted down to Stawell, he took her with him then gave her to a little girl for pony club.”
It was then Darren convinced Noelene he was going to be a horse trainer.
Currently the leading trainer in Melbourne, even she couldn’t have imagined how successful he has become.
