Swan Hill jockey Harry Coffey has just come off his first season with 100 wins and he is pretty sure he knows what that means for the new season, which began on Monday.
Just about nothing.
You are, Coffey knows, only as good as your next race, and if you want that to be a good one, you had better keep your win ratio on 10 per cent – or higher. His career average sits on 10 per cent, but in his last 50 rides of the season, he lifted that to 14 per cent.
Finishing 2021-22 with 103 winners – 98 in Victoria, three in South Australia and one in Tasmania – he almost certainly would have done 100 Victorian winners but when he was suspended at Caulfield on July 23 for 10 meetings, his shot at 100 Victorian winners was over.
Something the self-deprecating hoop says never entered his mind.
“I pushed into a run more in anticipation of a gap opening than one actually being there and bumped into another horse,” Coffey recalls.
Yet when he looks back on his season – which included his first Caulfield and Melbourne Cup rides, his first start in the Newmarket Handicap and his usual slew of country cups – the first race that springs to mind isn’t even a win, it was his second in the Adelaide Cup on Tigertiger.
“Obviously wining the Bendigo Cup and the Launceston Cup were big ones, but I felt my ride in Adelaide was about as good as it could be even though we only finished second,” he says.
But Coffey is concerned more about his rides in the months ahead as the Spring Carnival looms. He wants to be back in the big cups, and he wants his first ride in the Victoria Derby, hopefully on boom three-year-old Skyphios. His win on the gelding in the Byerley Handicap gave it a guaranteed start in the Derby and Coffey says the ride is his to lose.
“I am also very excited about the Daniel Bowman filly Bubble Palace. She had two starts for two wins for me as a two-year-old and I am really looking forward to see what she can do in her next few starts.”
Considering his car did more than 100,000km last year, getting him from track to track, occasionally to an airport and often home late in the day so he can snatch a short sleep before trackwork starts in the very early AM the next day, Coffey says as “rapt” as he was with 2021-22, it is 2022-23 that now has his undivided attention.
