There was a time when the man who could lay claim to being the world’s best jockey, and if not, at least on the podium, was sacked three rides into his career.
Three!
It’s at this point, it usually goes one of two ways: the teenage apprentice kicks stones, rails against the world and is sucked into a vortex of friends, fast cars and even faster women, rather than starting out on slow horses. That’s the easy option.
The harder one is to stick at it and make it work.
When it comes to Hong Kong’s history-maker Zac Purton, Michael Zarb is not a name which readily springs to mind.
But as a former steward in Purton’s native Australia, few have had such a profound impact in altering the course of the Asian racing annals.
It was he who sat down with Purton when his master had punted him just as quickly as his career had started, frustrated and fed up with a cocky little kid with the world cupped in the middle of his God-given delicate hands.
“To be honest, he left that meeting and I wasn’t sure we were going to see him again,” Zarb tells Idol Horse. “I initially got Darren Beadman to give him a call and Darren was really good apparently. He spoke to him about a few different things.
“A lot of people and I recognised (Purton’s) talent and everyone was doing their best to try to keep him in the industry. Like a lot of young kids, they just thought they were a bit too good for everyone else.”
If nothing else, Purton is brutally honest. Perhaps too much for the liking of some.
His old boss who sacked him after three rides, Trevor Hardy, likes to tell a story of the day Purton came back to scale and told the owners of a horse he had just ridden it was “just no bloody good”.
Purton never subscribed to the theory you can bag a man to his face, but don’t bag his horse.
Hardy’s owners were taken aback. One told the trainer the kid would never ride a horse he owned again. Others were just as perturbed.
“I said, ‘you can tell them the truth, but please don’t do it the rough way saying this thing is no good’,” Hardy laughs.
The truth was Purton was always going to make it as a superstar of world racing, whether owners liked him or not.
On the eve of his first race ride in the Australian state of Queensland for more than a decade (he started his career riding on regional tracks in nearby northern NSW), Idol Horse has charted the story of Purton’s roots more than two decades before his career-defining union with Ka Ying Rising.
And most of it can be traced back to the day he was lying on the lounge in his parents’ home wondering if he would ever ride again.
“I was like a 17 or 18-year-old kid running around at night on the drink with my mates in Grafton carrying on, and my boss (Hardy) just didn’t like it so he sacked me,” Purton shrugs.
“(Zarb) obviously saw something in me. Well, listen, obviously I had a lot of natural ability – I think I won seven out of the 10 barrier trials that I had to do, so my horses could run for me. And then I’d only had three rides in a race when Trevor sacked me.
“So, then I went to sit in the lounge for however many months that was, until I got convinced to go back and give it another go.”
In an era when apprentice jockeys are starting later and later, Purton was always on an expedited path to greatness, long before he was even allowed to hold a learner’s driving licence in Australia at 16.
Zarb’s intervention to help save Purton’s career was not the first time they’d crossed paths. The former jockey and stipe had helped refine Purton’s riding style before granting him a trackwork licence before he was 15.
The pair would comb through old videos of Zarb’s winning rides, where he would try to teach Purton the nuances of steering 500kg thoroughbreds with decisions needing to be made instantly.
“It was an interesting thing showing him how good I was,” Zarb jokes.
“But he’s watching the race and saying, ‘look at the bloke on the second horse, he should have done this and he would have beaten you’. Or in the next race, ‘this bloke running fourth, he should be doing this’.
“This is before he’s turned 15. He was pointing out the little things. I went back through the films again a couple of years later and thought, ‘geez, he might have been right’.”
Like Theo Green and Ron Quinton down in Sydney, Purton’s first boss Hardy was known as a genius for putting the finishing touches on apprentice jockeys. Hardy took five Hong Kong apprentices under his wing in Australia – including Marco Chui, Way Leung and Jacky Tong – before they went back home to ride on the Jockey Club’s roster.
Purton might have been his easiest and hardest protégé all rolled into one.
Easy because the kid could seriously ride. That much was evident from the moment he moved in with Hardy and his last wife Trish, who lived in the beachside NSW town of Coffs Harbour, known for its banana growing and its tourist attraction ‘the Big Banana’, a roadside monument named after the region’s favourite fruit. Purton was just 14.
“I used to lead him on a horse down on the beach when he was that age and a horse would jump sideways and he wouldn’t move,” Hardy, 85, says. “He was always going to make the grade.”
But he was always going to test the patience of an old school trainer, too.
“He’s pretty outspoken,” Hardy says. “With us, he was as good as gold though.
“He would come home from working in the morning and go to bed for a while and have a sleep. Someone would ring up and want to have a talk to him about his career, but he’d say, ‘tell him to ring me later’. Trish said, ‘this is your career you’re looking at. Get out of bed and get on the phone’.
“He didn’t object.”
As is customary for all jockeys in Australia, Purton had to get his ‘ticket’ to start riding in races as an apprentice by competing in sets of barrier trials against older and more experienced jockeys.
His last assessment was a day Zarb won’t forget quickly.
Perched high up in the grandstand at Grafton with his binoculars focused on the field, and primarily Purton, Zarb watched the young rider go to the wire in one trial. He immediately admonished himself for what he thought was a silly error.
“As they’ve gone past the post, I thought, ‘s—, I’ve got the wrong jockey here’,” Zarb recalls. “I thought I was looking at a senior rider, not an apprentice who hadn’t ridden in races.
“He was so strong with the whip and I sent the message down to the start and said, ‘make sure next trial I don’t want to see Zac using the whip, I want to see him push one out hands and heels’.
“From his first ride he was nearly the best rider in that area.”
It might sound trifling given the lesser calibre of horse and rival jockeys, but competing on those northern NSW tracks was pivotal to Purton’s career success.
They all come in different shapes and sizes, but many were tight and continually turning. It taught Purton the importance of firing a horse out of the barriers and taking up a position early in the race, traits which have held him in such good stead for so long in the ultra-competitive Hong Kong environment, featuring some of the world’s best and most aggressive riders.
“I think (those tracks) sort of correlate a little bit to Hong Kong,” Purton says. “So it certainly, in my opinion, helped mould me into the rider that I’ve become.”
Once Purton returned to Hardy’s stable after they smoothed things over, the trainer knew he had an apprentice capable of reaching the very top of his craft – even if he did rub a few people the wrong way.
But isn’t that usually the nature of most champion jockeys, never lacking in a healthy dose of arrogance and self belief?
Hardy likes to tell the story of a day a fellow participant said they’d left him a present in the tie-up stalls at Grafton. Curious, Hardy went over to check out what it was. It was a thick piece of timber.
Puzzled, Hardy went back and asked the other person: “What’s that for?”
“To fix up that kid with,” came the reply.
“But he settled down,” Hardy says. “He was good value for me as well when he was riding all those winners.
“He came home one day and we put a back room on our house, which was like a sun room. He said, ‘what’s this?’ I said, ‘that’s my new room. You helped me pay for it’.
“It didn’t take long for him to jump on things at long prices and run a place on them. They would just run for him. He just had that timing and balance from day one.”
As is the rite of passage for any rider showing promise in northern NSW, Purton quickly graduated to riding in Queensland, where he won the senior title as an apprentice in 2003. It didn’t take long for him to make an impression on the trainers north of the Tweed.
“He was a bit of a wild lad I think, but he was a very gifted apprentice,” says trainer Kelly Schweida, who has booked Purton to ride his three-year-old Grafterburners in the G1 Doomben 10,000 for his return to Brisbane.
“He was very, very neat and polished and he was very determined to win races. He liked winning them. But he was just a typical teenager.”
These days, Purton still remembers his roots.
Hardy keeps in touch occasionally and after preparing his last runner at 84 in 2025, mostly keeps tabs on Purton’s Hong Kong heroics through his neighbours, who watch every one of the jockey’s races religiously.
“Zac’s been amazing,” Hardy says.
Each year, Zarb will text or call him to congratulate him on another inevitable season crowned Hong Kong’s best jockey. Purton knows the impact the ex-jockey turned steward had on his career, which was about to be over before it had really begun.
What would have happened if there hadn’t been that intervention?
“Absolutely no idea,” Purton says.
Adds Zarb: “Every year he says, ‘my body has had enough. I’m exhausted mentally and physically’. I think that’s been on repeat for the last five or six years. But he’s always trying to learn something.
“There is no one that communicates better. I feel touched that he mentioned me even a little bit. He had a lot of people help him, but no one has helped him more than he has helped himself.” ∎
