“You’ve Got To Have Confidence, Otherwise You’ll Get Killed Out There”: Zac Lloyd Rides The Fine Line

THERE’S AN unwritten rule among jockeys, not quite an honour among thieves, but at the very least an understanding about what to say, and more importantly what not to say, when racing’s police come knocking.

It usually goes like this: Jockey A is called to front stewards about an incident on the track in which Jockey B is clearly at fault. They show them the tapes, slow them down, this angle, that angle, probe and prod for Jockey A to tip the bucket. Usually, the prosecution can’t get the witness to really sing. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

So, when a jockey actually says something incriminating, stewards usually straighten in their chairs, the ears of journalists prick and everyone wonders: that must have been bad then.

A nondescript middle of winter Saturday meeting in Sydney is hardly going to get the pulses racing of even the heartiest fans, but it was the day when the jockey code was bent, maybe ever so slightly.

Zac Lloyd was Sydney’s reigning champion apprentice, had already piloted the first two winners of the day, which achieved rarefied air for junior riders: outriding a claim in the city. If he was on the back of a broomstick, you might have rushed to the betting ring to back it.

In the next race, he eyes off the king, Sydney’s champion rider James McDonald. A jockey with itchy fingers is a dangerous one, and Lloyd had itchy fingers when he saw McDonald’s mount, United Nations, starting to yield ground. Lloyd was in his slipstream on grand old campaigner Kirkeby, trained by McDonald’s biggest supporter, Chris Waller.

As the field thunders around the corner into the Rosehill straight, Lloyd’s horse will clearly glide past McDonald’s straggler at some point. Does he ease around heels to the outside? Follow for a few more strides and then make the call? Will that be too late to mow down the leaders? Edge ever so slightly into a gap opening between horses to the inside of McDonald?   

Lloyd’s mentor, Hall of Famer Darren Beadman, one of the best jockeys ever to take a seat on a horse in Australia, watches on, glued to a television nearby. He’s wondering what Lloyd will do.

Lloyd tries to shove McDonald out of the way. The contact between horses is ugly, the one where your heart momentarily jumps somewhere to the back of the throat, and you want to close your eyes. The heads of both horses swivel like they’re on a stick, butting each other, two boxers nudging noggins as they trade blows in close. McDonald, realising the gravity of the situation having initially tried to keep Lloyd hemmed into a pocket, decides it’s in no one’s interest to keep the bumping duel going. He makes ground for Lloyd to prise through.

“That could have ended in tears,” McDonald tells stewards straight after, straying from the riders’ moral code.

Lloyd gets suspended, again. It’s his 11th ban in just over a year, the habitual offenders’ habitual offender.

“He came from inside and behind him, and all he had to do was wait another 30 metres,” Beadman says. “It was old bull against young bull. But he tried to shift him at the shoulder, while still being a neck behind. That’s arrogance or stupidity – one or the other.”

But don’t all the top riders have to have that touch of arrogance, that I’m-better-than-you mentality to be the best?

“There is a fine line between arrogance and confidence,” Beadman continues. “Sometimes, if you overstep the mark with the confidence it will blend into arrogance, and then you just think you can do anything. In a sense, you’ve got to have that touch of arrogance to make those split-second decisions and believe in yourself thinking, ‘I can do this’. You’ve got to have a small portion of arrogance to get to the top, but you’ve got to know how far you can go with it.”

It’s arguable Australian racing hasn’t seen a jockey talent like Lloyd since the days of Beadman, whose career included a Hong Kong foray in which he helped John Moore to his first training title before being ended through a shocking fall.

How many kids, like Lloyd, get handpicked to ride as the apprentice for Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s Australian arm of the global racing empire while still in their teens?

He has a presence, and is unfailingly polite. There’s swagger, and smarts (he had a high school leaving score of 85). Supremely confident, but also considered. A touch of showmanship? Maybe. But that also took “Miracle” Malcolm Johnston a long way too, the supremely gifted and occasionally maverick jockey who missed two of Kingston Town’s three Cox Plate wins through suspension in the 1980s.

It’s a regular Thursday for Lloyd when he sits down with Idol Horse between riding commitments at Kembla Grange, 90 minutes south of Sydney. He’s dressed in a plain white shirt, has blonde highlights through his hair, speaks with an accent blending his cosmopolitan upbringing, before receiving permission from stewards to leave the track for a quick lunch given his next race ride is hours away.

He sheepishly smiles when the topic of showmanship and confidence is brought up, prompted by a question about a short video he filmed for industry news website Racenet last year before The Everest. In it, Lloyd declares, slightly tongue in cheek, he thinks he can win on Stefi Magnetica because she’s the best horse in the race and he’s the best jockey in the race. The Everest is Australia’s racing phenomenon, a A$20 million sprint which includes jockeys like seasoned pros McDonald, Craig Williams, Nash Rawiller, Mark Zahra and Rachel King.

“I did say that,” Lloyd grins. “That was a bit obnoxious, a bit out there.”

But does that necessarily mean it’s wrong?

“You’ve got to have confidence … otherwise you’ll get killed out there,” he says, nodding at the track. “There’s going to be someone out there more confident than you. You can’t let that happen.

“If you’re second guessing yourself, you may as well not go out there. Look at Zac Purton and James McDonald, I’m sure they think they’re the best riders in the world. If they don’t, I don’t think they would be. It’s something I’ve tried to take on board.”

It’s hard not to be fascinated in Lloyd’s shooting star since he sat on $1.30 favourite Satine in his first race at Dalby in Queensland nearly five years. Most trainers like to help kick start the career of an apprentice, and Lloyd’s then bosses, father-and-son training team Toby and Trent Edmonds, had found an easy “kill” for the teenager. Lloyd’s brother, Jaden, rode the second favourite in the race. For nearly the entire event, Jaden sat outside and pestered his brother until Satine was certain to kick clear.

“When my horse got to the 400 I just said, ‘see ya, mate’,” Zac laughs.

Imagine having the belief to sledge a fellow jockey during your very first race ride, travelling at nearly 70km/h, no matter if it’s your brother.

“And my horse took off,” he says. “It was quite cool.”

Says the brothers’ dad Jeff: “I’m glad he won because I had to drive the two of them home. He would have blamed Jaden if they got beat.”

Zac ended the day falling on his last mount, a $2.30 favourite, as it came out of the barriers. It was the microcosm of racing’s giddying highs and gutting lows in one raceday, his first as an apprentice jockey.

But it didn’t take long for heads to be turned around the country about the kid riding winners for fun in Queensland. He quickly made the move to Sydney to link with Godolphin’s then private trainer, James Cummings, who was being assisted by Beadman.

The winners came – fast – particularly with the backing of Godolphin and an apprentice claim which almost seemed like a cheat code. He won the Sydney apprentice title in successive years, only the third to do it this century after Sam Clipperton (2012-13 and 2013-14) and Robbie Dolan (2018-19 and 2019-20). Lloyd piloted 76 winners in the 2022-23 season, the most by an apprentice in Sydney over a 12-month period since Wayne Harris more than 40 years ago.

It netted Lloyd the prestigious Bart Cummings Medal as the standout performer at Sydney meetings throughout the season, doing the unthinkable: loosening Waller’s grip on the honour. Waller has won it every other year since 2010-11. Lloyd didn’t only rip up the record books and snare major gongs, he also ruffled the feathers of the older brigade in the weighing room.

“I’m a lot younger than all the other boys in the room and I bring that new generation feel,” Lloyd says. “It has its perks and it can rub some people the wrong way, the older guys who aren’t used to it. Obviously, the way I’ve been brought up, it’s different to other guys. I am a bit more out there than them. I like to interact with fans. I really enjoy that aspect of when people come up to me when I’m out. I find it cool.”

It’s hard not to write about Lloyd and mention the string of run-ins he had with stewards when he first arrived in Sydney. Told it seemed like he was being hauled in front of stipes every second week, Lloyd fires back: “It felt like every day”.

“You look back at it now, I thought I was so hard done by,” Lloyd says. “Obviously when you get a reputation for yourself, you get watched a lot closer. At the same time, I was aggressive.

“But I wouldn’t change it for the world. It helped me reach a high level because I was so competitive and wanted to prove myself in Sydney. Some of those horses wouldn’t have won if I didn’t ride as aggressively as I did.

“I have worked really hard on it. I have done quite well this season staying out of the stewards room. It’s a fine line.”

Beadman has been his north star.

There was a time when Lloyd was just starting to show little signs of being a distracted jockey. Nothing major, but leaving trackwork a little early, not being as dedicated to his preparation, worrying about the suspensions. One of Beadman’s favourite one-liners is “attitude determines altitude”. But he had another for Lloyd this particular day, pulling him aside.

“Listen son, iron sharpens iron.”

Jokes Lloyd: “I said, ‘what the hell does that mean?’ ‘If you work hard your results will follow’. He was right, I’ve found the more I’ve ridden the sharper I am on raceday.”

Being born into a racing family is generally a sentence to spend your life around horses, but Lloyd’s gift was a passport which never sat idle. His father, Jeff, was a legendary globe-trotting jockey who predominantly rode with success in his native South Africa, Hong Kong, Mauritius and Australia.

By the age of six, Zac would pretend to ride the family’s lounge, watching replays of his dad steering Hong Kong hero Able One to victory. As Jeff pulled the whip through in his hand, so would Zac, mimicking every move. He spent a lot of his early childhood with the sons of Hong Kong racing identities at Sha Tin: Luke Ferraris, Tom Prebble and Ronan Fownes.

“It was a great bunch,” Lloyd says. “I’ve got to say it was a great place for a kid to grow up because we were in the same building together and could just play all day.”

There was another horse he thought he could play with, too. But even the best-intentioned plans don’t always go well.

Mystery can’t have been a name used for many ponies, but for Zac it was his first one. Yet as the name suggests, he could never quite work him out.

“He was a shit of a pony to learn to ride on,” Jeff laughs. “He had the better of Zac and Zac hated it. I could see his determination, but this little pony was just doing whatever it wanted. Sometimes, he just jumped off it and let the thing go. It would take me half-an-hour to catch him.”

Zac was still in primary school when Jeff, at 51, had a stroke doctors told him he was lucky to survive. Being so young, Zac didn’t quite grasp the gravity of the situation. But despite having ridden more than 4500 winners at the time with six jockey titles in South Africa, Jeff decided he wanted to see if he could ride again.

By his own admission, he hated swimming. But for a while, it was the safest way for him to build fitness. He would chug up and down a pool, following a little black line, for hours on end at a time. He couldn’t even turn his head to breathe on the side.

“I couldn’t do a lot, but I could swim with a snorkel,” Jeff says. “I couldn’t swim turning my head because I would get unbalanced in the pool. It wasn’t easy for me, believe me.”

Zac saw something in his father’s perseverance and bloody sheer-mindedness which clicked with him, more so when Jeff did make a successful comeback to riding.

“I would finish school and would come home and he’d say, ‘I swam 10km in the pool’,” Zac says. “He’s never been a swimmer. It’s just ridiculous dedication and love for the sport at that age to still do it. So many people wouldn’t do it.

“He’s been the best jockey in the world in my eyes. Probably results don’t show he’s the best jockey in the world, but he did pretty well for himself. He was treated like a God (in South Africa). Now, I can understand why. But at the time, I just thought it was normal.”

It’s little known to most people in the racing fraternity, but Zac could have easily pursued careers in two other sports: soccer and cricket.

At the round ball game, he excelled as a midfielder – “never got tired, a machine”, Jeff says – and was chosen to represent Queensland on numerous occasions. By the time he was riding three mornings a week at trackwork before school, the fork in the road came when he was selected to tour Europe with an Australian-based junior team where top scouts would be watching. He never got on the plane.

“I just always wanted to be a jockey,” he shrugs.

In cricket, he was also a state level junior as an accomplished top-order batter. The only problem was by the time the fast bowlers started growing and the ball began to be hurled towards tiny Zac at greater speeds, Jeff thought it was enough.

“I said to him, ‘no, you’ve got to stop now. These boys are getting too big and the ball is going around your ears too many times’,” he recalls. “I was getting nippy watching it. He was just so small.”

So, racing won out, all the while he kept his school grades high, “more to keep mum (Nicola) happy”. But by the time he sat on his first racehorse, the path was worn. Having finally retired himself, Jeff now manages Zac’s rides. They speak every day, and after every meeting, to the point if Zac doesn’t call within 20 to 30 minutes of his last ride, Jeff starts thinking he’s in the stewards room. That hasn’t been happening nearly as often lately.

“He was very ambitious and he had to find the balance of being aggressive competitively,” Jeff says. “He was just learning. He was making quick decisions too quickly and it got him into trouble. He needed to improve and he’s progressively getting better.

“You’ve got to remember he’s been quite rushed the whole time, and he’s kept raising the bar. He’s achieved a lot in a short space of time, but he’s still got a long way to go.”

Sydney has, according to the rankings, the best jockey in the world riding in its jurisdiction nearly every week. Is it a stretch to say, while Lloyd is still only 22, his path might one day include the same honour as McDonald?

“Yeah, for sure,” he says of the ambition to be world No.1. “I’ve done quite well up until the age of 22, but I’ve still got a long way to go.”

Just maybe don’t expect him to be riding well into his 50s like dad, who will always be in his corner with Beadman.

“The world is his oyster,” Beadman says. “He’s a great young man. He’s got youth on his side, he’s got a gift and it’s a matter of harnessing that gift, but also allowing it to take you to the place you want to go to.

“One thing my old boss Theo (Green) said to me was, ‘you can’t put an old head on young shoulders’. And that’s the very place where he is at the moment. He’s got young shoulders. But in saying that, if he takes it on board how people have tried to help him or advise him, then the old head will go on.”

Maybe next time Lloyd is stuck in a pocket inside of McDonald with the race on the line, that “old head” thinking will prevail and he will win without having to go and argue his case in the stewards’ room. ∎

Adam Pengilly

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