Zac Purton is about to get out of an elevator, but is madly hitting as many buttons as he can. This floor, that floor, any floor he can. At the bottom of the apartment building neighbouring Hong Kong’s Sha Tin racecourse, Purton’s then great rival jockey Douglas Whyte is waiting for the lift – and Purton knows it too.
The complex is home to a cast of the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s star trainers and jockeys: akin to Ronaldo living in the same building as Messi, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson sharing digs, Steve Smith calling Joe Root a neighbour.
Purton not only wants to beat them on the track, but he wants to mess with their mind off it too.
A couple of days later, Hong Kong Jockey Club chief steward Kim Kelly approaches Purton at trackwork to quiz him on the laborious lift.
“Are you sure it was me? I don’t know anything about it,” Purton tells him.
The Australian jockey had been wasting hard for days to ride gun sprinter Aethero at Hong Kong’s international race meeting. He’d had a few champagnes at the gala dinner earlier that night, which took greater effect than they should. When returning home, he beat Whyte to the lift and made sure the doors shut quickly behind him.
During the next Hong Kong race meeting at the carnival-like Happy Valley, of all the firsts he’s created in his remarkable career, Purton bizarrely set another: being hauled before stewards to watch CCTV footage of an elevator prank.
“I completely forgot about it,” Purton jokes before riding hot favourite and freak sprinter Ka Ying Rising in the A$20 million The Everest at Royal Randwick on Saturday. “As soon as they showed me on the big screen, I just laughed. I said, ‘I get it now’. The stewards said, ‘we’re not in high school anymore. You don’t need to be doing that stuff’.
“But that sums both our characters up. He did it to me a few times and I copped it. I thought it was funny. I rolled with the punches. As soon as I did it back, he was quick to squeal on me.”
There are many places you could start when trying to sum up the genius of one of Australia’s most underappreciated athletes, but the Sha Tin apartment building is as good as any.
It’s the most intense racing bubble in the world, where foreigners from all corners try to crack the big time in a city which, as Purton says, “eats, sleeps and breathes” horse racing. All while living in each other’s pockets.
Cricketing legend Steve Waugh liked to call it “mental disintegration”: the art of getting inside your opponent’s head. More than a few people have twisted themselves in knots debating the grey areas between out-and-out abuse, sledging and good-natured banter. In horse racing, Purton doesn’t just want to beat his rivals on the track – he likes to torment them off it too.
“I think that’s being part of a sportsman in Australia,” Purton shrugs. “There’s a lot of sledging that goes on, a lot of banter, whatever you want to call it. I grew up with that. I’ve grown up in a rough and tumble way where I’ve had to work for everything I’ve got. I haven’t had anything handed to me ever. I think that helped.
“The other jockeys try to say things back to me. But inside, I laugh. I feel like I’m beating them because they’re trying to go out of their way to try to beat me. I’ve already got them off their game.”
There’s a fine line between cockiness and confidence, and arguably Purton treads it better than anyone else. But he’s much more than just a ruthless competitor, often known for his empathy towards others in the Hong Kong racing bubble doing it tough.
In Hong Kong, jockeys are not represented by agents like they are in Australia and New Zealand, the middle men and women responsible for scouring and securing the best rides. Each rider does that for themselves in the Asian racing mecca. It’s where Purton excels.
The ruthless competitor in him is not afraid to contact Hong Kong trainers and owners to question why they are using inferior jockeys on horses he wants to ride. It’s not often they say no. But they also rely heavily on him for his no-frills assessment of their horses. One owner recently asked what he thought of a debutant Purton had ridden. He immediately thumbed off a text in response.
“Can you get your money back?”
“I think a lot of people mistake arrogance for confidence,” Purton says. “They think certain sportsmen are arrogant because of the way they act, and the way they carry themselves. They get confused with confidence.
“You always hear people speak about having to be humble, but athletes at the top, we are humble. But at the same time, we are all confident. You can’t step out there without thinking you’re the best at what you’re doing.”
Says his great rival, Brazilian ace Joao Moreira: “What I got from him is I’ve never seen anyone else capable of managing people and run the show like him. He’s just so good at that. Zac taught me more outside the track than inside the track.”
Ask any Australian sports fan who is among the country’s richest earners living overseas, and you’re likely to get a range of answers including Super Bowl winner Jordan Mailata, basketballer Josh Giddey, tennis ace Alex de Minaur, F1 driver Oscar Piastri, golfer Cameron Smith or Matildas veteran Sam Kerr.
Few would even know Purton, 43, let alone consider him.
In Hong Kong, he’s shattered so many records – including the first to ride 2000 winners in the city – en route to a staggering nine riding premierships. He’s now an unbackable favourite for a 10th this term. He’s won tens of millions in career earnings on the track, raking in far more money than Nathan Cleary or Nick Daicos would in any given year. He’s invested in a range of things from Sydney real estate to supplying Himalayan salmon, Vietnamese prawns and organic eggs to Hong Kong supermarkets. He’s also branched out into a new ZP apparel line, offering items from baseball caps to hoodies and golf shirts. His wealth has been helped by Hong Kong’s relaxed tax rate of about 15 per cent.
“I’ve learnt in Australia you can keep money, but it’s very hard to grow your money,” Purton says. “The Australian government continues to bleed everyone for every last dollar they can. The taxes there and cost of living, it blows my mind. When you look at how successful people in Hong Kong are, the money you earn here you actually get to keep. Then, you can invest it and grow it and enjoy your life. It’s a completely different way of managing things.”
Golf is a major passion away from the track, and his connections helped him obtain the office as president of the Macau PGA (he will miss this weekend’s Macau Open to ride Ka Ying Rising). He is also an ambassador for a new course soon to open in Hong Kong. “A golfer that is very, very good, but wants to be better than he is – and will never get there,” Ka Ying Rising’s trainer David Hayes laughs.
It all comes with unrelenting fame in Hong Kong, and mostly anonymity in his homeland given he left Australia in 2007.
“When things are going well, there’s no better place in the world to be than Hong Kong,” Purton says. “You get special treatment at restaurants and people are jumping out of their cars to open doors for you. At the golf course, they’re running to collect your golf bag. It’s a great place to be. You get to love this rock star lifestyle.
“When things are not going well, there’s nowhere to hide.”
And at one stage, all Purton wanted to do was hide.
He’s right when he says he’s had to work for everything he’s got: he left school at just 14 to start an apprenticeship, was sacked after just three race rides by his old school boss Trevor Hardy at Coffs Harbour due to a poor attitude, belatedly returned to the saddle and then was such a rising star in Australia, Hong Kong’s all-powerful Jockey Club headhunted him to join its riding roster at just 24.
Purton planned to stay for six months, and it felt like he wouldn’t even make it that far. No owners are more superstitious than those in Hong Kong, who want to see foreign trainers or jockeys have success early, or risk being dubbed as unlucky.
Initially, Purton’s winners were scarce, and on a short holiday to Phuket, he lounged by the pool telling wife Nicole, the daughter of Hall of Fame jockey Jim Cassidy, they should return to Australia. Nicole had adapted to life in Hong Kong quicker than Zac.
“Give it a bit longer and see how you go,” Nicole told him.
Shortly after, Makybe Diva’s three-time Melbourne Cup-winning jockey Glen Boss, who was riding in Hong Kong, had a feud with trainer Ricky Yiu. Yiu asked the struggling young Australian in Purton to ride his horses. With the western trainers dominating the Hong Kong market, Purton needed opportunities and he cultivated relationships with the less credentialled Chinese conditioners. He went on a hot streak with Yiu and the rest is history. Now, he has most Hong Kong trainers – western or Chinese – on speed dial.
One of those is expat Australian Hayes, who trains Hong Kong’s legendary sprinter, Ka Ying Rising, now in Winx and Black Caviar’s rarefied air shooting for a 22nd straight win when he lines up in The Everest.
“Zac Purton is a great friend and, without a doubt, is the hungriest jockey I’ve ever worked with,” Hayes says. “He’s just ruthless on wanting to be successful and wanting to be the best he can be. There’s no one else in the world I would want to absorb the pressure he does on my horse.”
The pressure is immense. Bookmakers reason Ka Ying Rising so dominant, they’ve got him $1.40 to win back-to-back Everest crowns. Since winning last year’s race at Royal Randwick – a performance Hayes and Purton bemoaned as his “worst of the season” – Ka Ying Rising has won seven straight races in Hong Kong. He broke the Sha Tin track record in five of those.
The only thing which might stop him is Sydney’s fickle weather given Ka Ying Rising has never raced on a track as wet as he’ll face on Saturday.
A few years ago, Purton was struggling so badly with a chronic hip problem he could barely get out of bed some mornings. No treatment or painkillers were working. He was about to retire when his other great riding rival, “Magic Man” Moreira, another subjected to Purton’s famous mind games, decided to leave Hong Kong after suffering through his own hip injuries.
Then Ka Ying Rising also arrived on the scene.
“’Hayesy’ put me up (in a barrier trial) and said, ‘I think this horse goes OK. Let me know what you think. I think he can win a couple of races’,” Purton recalls. “He was never anything outstanding early in his career.”
Now, Purton has a seat on greatness, horse and human working almost perfectly in unison to bully their rivals with his front-running style. No horse can touch Ka Ying Rising in Hong Kong. Even in Australia where sprinters are renowned as the world’s best, few have been running towards the Ka Ying Rising challenge, and never has there been a year where the 11 other Everest slots have taken so long to fill.
So, what makes the world’s highest-rated horse so good?
“He just moves across the ground with effortless ease,” Purton says. “It’s like he’s gliding across the ground. When you watch a horse gallop, you can see their legs come down. You can imagine them hitting the ground. He doesn’t feel like he’s hitting the ground. It feels like he’s just gliding across it.”
Ka Ying Rising’s gliding has kept Purton and his angry hip in the saddle. It’s a common refrain for 40-something jockeys; Winx’s rider and Purton’s Hong Kong rival Hugh Bowman needs major hip surgery, Moreira has already gone after battling the same ailment.
So how long does Purton have left? He says he’ll keep riding until his hip gives way again.
But it would be fitting if he can see out the rest of Ka Ying Rising’s career. In the twilight of his own riding days, Purton has found the horse of a lifetime, one who skipped the stairs and took the express route to the top. He’s still laughing at how good he’s got it.
You can’t blame him for trying to make sure the lift descends as slowly as possible. ∎
