IF Shanae O’Meara harboured any doubts she’d made the right career choice, if the fight to recover from a horrific fall, and the hundreds of unseen hours of pre-dawn trackwork and trials and jump outs were really worth it, you should have seen the smile on her face at Stawell.
Because at the Stawell races she had just ridden her first winner and, most fittingly, it was on Austy Coffey’s Deer Scent; making it a triumph for this inseparable duo to share.
And in classic O’Meara style, there was nothing routine about victory – she had brought Deer Scent from nowhere to a massive dive on the line, and neither she nor Linda Meech on the favourite Morning Has Broken knew who had got there.
“Then I heard them call out my name, and saying it was my first win and I just couldn’t believe it, I was so buzzed,” O’Meara said.
And relieved, because while it was her first win, it was also an almost impossible thank you to the legions of people who have supported the 22-year-old since that 2019 day when her life was actually on the line.
It was also a world away from August 26, two years ago, when she was doing trackwork on the sand with Harry Coffey when she fell and was critically injured – an accident Austy Coffey described at the time as one of the worst he had seen in a lifetime of racing.
Shanae told The Guardian she still felt “very blessed that I just don’t remember that accident”.
“Harry and I were just doing a slow lap on the sand and I came off and the horse clipped me in the head,” O’Meara said.
“When I was still in the coma; they didn’t really tell my family much ’cause they still weren’t sure how I would come out of it.
“There’s about three weeks I don’t remember; and it took about a month until I could start processing and realise what was going on and start asking questions about how it happened and why am I here?”
After the first of the day at Stawell, clinching the $25,000 Ecycle Solutions Plate over 1600m, O’Meara knew exactly why she was there.
In fact she was loving it so much, she nearly did it again in the very next race on Swan Hill trainer Noel Watson’s Tony’s Kick (17/1).
“Only this time, as we were pulling up, Jason (Benbow, on 30/1 rank outsider She’s Poetic) said he was sorry, but he got me,” she laughed.
Although how he worked that out was a mystery, because her win by a lip in race one was a bigger margin than her loss in race two.
In the first she tipped out Meech on the favourite, in the second she and Benbow tipped out Meech, who was again on the favourite.
“The whole day from there on was a bit of a blur, and when I turned my phone on after the racing finished it, just kept going off with messages and texts,” she said.
“And I have just about got back to everyone; but they are also still coming in.”
