Recovery And Liberation: Andrew Fortune’s Unlikely Comeback
The South African jockey is 19 years into addiction recovery and a year on from his incredible return to the saddle at age 57, he talks to Idol Horse about his journey back to race-riding and the connection he has with horses.
Recovery And Liberation: Andrew Fortune’s Unlikely Comeback
The South African jockey is 19 years into addiction recovery and a year on from his incredible return to the saddle at age 57, he talks to Idol Horse about his journey back to race-riding and the connection he has with horses.
29 January, 2026ANDREW FORTUNE was an overweight South African ex-champion jockey – mucking out stables for work – when a conversation with Mike de Kock spurred him into a chain of actions that have taken him back to the Group 1 arena his talent was made for.
“I said to Mike de Kock, ‘I’m going to go back riding.’ And he said to me, ‘You’re mad, you’ll never get your weight off. You’ll never do it, you’re fatter than me,’” Fortune tells Idol Horse.
“That’s what started it. It was like a dare: I said to him, ‘Okay, I will show you, I will do it.’ And look at that.”
Fortune weighed in at about 90kg (198lb), 30kg (66lb) above his old race-riding weight, when the hefty South African trainer queried his sanity. He had moved his family to Australia; his wife Ashley was running a stable and Fortune had started working for trainer Annabel Neasham with an idea to be a licensed track rider. The Sydney stewards had other ideas and turned him down for a trackwork licence not once but twice.
“They didn’t want me as a track rider … As a track rider!” he says. “They left me no choice, they kind of squeezed me into a corner, so I decided to come back. In their defence, I was no angel when I rode before, I had no respect for authority when I was younger, but today, I look at it completely differently; today I’m privileged to have a jockey licence.”
It took him two years to get the weight off and get back to race-riding at home in South Africa, thanks to intermittent fasting and a force of will that has been refined and strengthened through a period – close to 19 years and counting – of recovery from drug addiction.
Back, too, was the Fortune confidence, the sparks of wit and sharply honest bravado that accompanied his turbulent rise to becoming one of the finest jockey talents of his generation: a career that has seen a host of major wins, bans and fines; a cocaine positive in the midst of his addiction; recovery and a 2008 return; champion jockey by the 2008-09 season’s end; ‘retirement’ in 2017; verbal volleys and heated run-ins with the racing authorities.
Those South African authorities weren’t exactly swift to re-licence him either. But Fortune is now almost a year into his second and most unlikely great comeback, and he is confident of a first win in the G1 Cape Town Met on a horse he thinks the world of, See It Again.
He is riding winners in multiples – a four-timer for four different trainers at Kenilworth in December – and is a valuable ally for South Africa’s powerhouse trainer Justin Snaith. The Cape Town conditioner now trains See It Again – as well as Met rival and Horse of the Year Eight On Eighteen – and he provided Fortune a comeback Group 1 win on Double Grand Slam last July, eight years after the rider had left the jockeys’ room for what looked for all the world like the final time.
“Andrew is riding the best he’s ever ridden in his life,” Snaith told Idol Horse. “He has so much experience, and he’s just a wiser human, to be honest. With all the ups and downs he’s had in his career, he’s managed to turn it around and he’s riding better than he did in his twenties, in my opinion.”
Fortune is not convinced about that, not entirely. He emphasises that it’s not possible: he’s 58 years old, he’s had a knee replaced.
“Yeah, I’m not sure if I one hundred percent agree with Justin,” he says, but then finds himself laying out a pretty good case for Snaith’s belief.
“He might be right: I’m probably fitter now and I’m lighter; I’m naturally around 55(kg) but I used to ride 60kg and then take off six, seven pounds a race meeting.
“Now I’m riding 55(kg) and I’m not losing any weight, so it’s a combination of things: I’m older, I’m wiser, I understand more, I’m so dedicated now and I live around racing at the moment. I’m going to the races well-prepared.”
Fortune belongs on a Thoroughbred’s back. He felt that when he found himself in the Cape Town jockey academy at age 14, a way out of the Cape Flats with its unemployment, poverty and gang crime.
“I’d never sat on a horse before I went to the academy, so my first two weeks were quite scary,” he says. “But because I had no choice, I thought ‘you better learn’. And then I had a very good boss as an apprentice. He was a champion jockey himself, Bert Abercrombie.
“People can be great jockeys, but they can’t teach. He was a very good teacher and he kind of took me under his wing and schooled me the ropes. And those days it was different because if he had a go, then it was a privilege because he spoke to me. Now and then I got a slap across the ear, I didn’t listen.”
But Fortune did listen to and absorbed some valuable lessons that have influenced how he interacts with the horses he rides.
“He always said to me, play with horses, play on them. See what they like, see what they don’t like,” he says. “And as I’ve got older, to a degree I understand them. They communicate. You’ve just got to listen.
“So, I don’t get flustered in a race, I ride the horse off what the horse is telling me: if you are half a length or a neck behind me, it doesn’t bother me, I just ride the race for my horse. And 90 percent of the time, I’m probably going to get the better of you.”
That kind of connection is obvious in the way Fortune speaks about See It Again.
“He’s just a proper horse,” he says. “Amazing, amazing action. When you work him, his tank is endless. You know when you’re sitting in a Mercedes CLK and when you’re sitting in a Mercedes C-class. That’s the difference. He feels like Eight On Eighteen. That’s the quality that I feel, just endless, endless, endless. He’s the most amazing thing to sit on.”
Fortune rides See It Again almost every day – the exceptions being if Snaith himself takes the mount along the beach – and this has deepened the connection: “I’ve got to know him,” he says. “I know his body language and he’s just very solid at the moment, he’s very, very proud of himself.
“For me, we all can ride horses, but we all can’t understand horses,” he continues. “There’s a huge difference between those two things. And that’s me. From a young age, I’ve been able to do that. Be a bit kind, a bit nice, communicate with them to a degree, speak to them all the time. So that’s me as a person as well, and that’s why they go like that.”
For any jockey there’s the connection through hands touching rein, touching bit, touching mouth, the feet in irons and legs squeezing flanks, but Fortune’s connection has an intangible element that is in keeping with his spiritual view of life. The harrowing addiction experiences, the 12-step recovery programme meetings he attends, have all shaped and refined that spiritual awareness.
“We’re not human beings having a spiritual experience, we’re spiritual beings having a human experience and that makes sense to me,” Fortune says.
He adds that if ever he thinks he has a problem, he walks into a recovery meeting, he listens, and he feels blessed. He still writes down the things he’s grateful for, still does the basics within the 12 steps.
“It’s worked for a million people, why would it not work for me? And it is working for me,” he says. “It’s a sign of putting the thing down, it’s changing. The easy part is putting the drink down or putting the drug down, that’s the easy part, that’s not the hard part. The hard part is I’m still stuck with me and my attitude and behaviours and things I do and thoughts I have, you know, and (bad) emotions: I’ve still got to manage those. And people have done it, so it’s worked for them and they’ve had successful lives
“I ended up living in a squatter camp when I was using and that’s where it can take you,” he continues. “You can ask any addict using: you’ve hit rock bottom? No, no, no, there’s plenty more: rock bottom has got basements, it depends how deep you want to go into them.
“You’re gonna feel every emotion in this earth. I don’t care who you are, you’re gonna feel sadness, you’re gonna feel disappointment, you’re gonna feel hurt, you’re gonna feel let down, you’re gonna feel joy if you create it yourself. Because that’s what happiness is, you’ve got to make happiness in experiences.”
Riding horses has given Fortune a particular kind of happiness: a release from human cares and life’s difficult emotions.
“It’s a kind of freedom because when you’re on that horse, you think of nothing else,” he says. “There’s nothing else matters, it’s only you and the horse, there’s never a worry in your head when you’re going a half pace down the track. You’re never thinking ‘oh, I need to pay that bill’. It’s you and the horse, it’s like liberation for me.
“Not that I worry about too many things in life anymore because I came with nothing, you’re gonna leave with nothing.”
But when the 2026 Cape Town Met comes around, he believes he will leave with the spoils. If he does, he will have beaten one of his own sons, Aldo Domeyer, who rides another of Snaith’s six in the race, Legal Counsel. Domeyer has one up on his old man, in that he has a Met already in the bag.
“They’ve got no chance, they’re just filling the field,” Fortune laughs. “No, all these billboards, they’re all for me. No doubt, I think See It Again is the horse they all have to beat.”
Fortune says there’s mentorship but also a “bit of a buzz” of father-son rivalry between the two.
“I remember I’d been back about nine months and Aldo saying, ‘Oh, dad, you’re old now, you can’t beat me anymore,’” he recalls. “Well, about two or three months ago, his stable fancied a horse and I beat him. I just reminded him that, ‘Hey, listen to me, I’ve schooled you whatever you know, but I never schooled you everything I know.’ So since then, he’s been a bit quiet.”
Banter aside, Fortune is happy having family so close. Ashley – his second wife – has recently moved back to South Africa from Australia with his younger son and daughter, and he is enjoying his second return to the big-race spotlight. How long he will continue, he doesn’t know but says he’s already had some job offers for when he does call time.
“If it’s another couple of months or a year … as long as I can ride,” he says. “I don’t worry about that part so much. When you’re clean this long, you don’t overthink things anymore. God doesn’t close doors, he hears the conversations when you aren’t present: you think this door is closing, what am I going to do? and it ends up better because there’s a greater plan.
“That’s how it is and I’m a full, great believer in it. It becomes pain free, your life; it becomes pain free.”
Fortune knows pain and he knows joy: he knows them deeply. And where he is at now in life’s journey, with family close and Group 1 horses to ride, he is accepting of the hard paths he has taken and the long, liberating recovery road he is travelling.
“I had to go left in life instead of right,” he adds. “That’s what happened and it made me a better character, made me a better human.” ∎
