Bryce Stanaway with Crafty Cruiser. Picture: Colleen Petch.
You’d think you would have to be fairly famous, a little bit well known at least, dare I use the modern word “influencer” to have a parody social media account. Wouldn’t you?
Like world leaders, Donald Trump, Sco-Mo or Boris Johnston. The Queen, Prince Charles even, Kim Kardashian has a few, but you get the idea.
Well, there are two Twitter accounts for disqualified horse trainer Bryce Stanaway and neither is him, obviously @NotBryceStanaway is a giveaway but the @sandwhichisameal handle has a solid following and is quite witty.
No Bryce hasn’t trained a Melbourne Cup winner, yes, he’s had a Cup runner (Bold Bard as Makybe Diva started to become a legend), but in a lifetime of racing in Australia he’s come up with about 200 winners and mostly feeding off the lower grade races at that. And wouldn’t have it any other way.
This is the same Bryce who happily calls himself racing’s Steptoe and trained from a place in New Zealand labelled Dogsville, where the horses were treated the luxury guests, the workers, well worked.
You haven’t heard his name called amongst the buyers at the yearling sales so no Bryce bling there. In fact, he’s more an online chaser of that once magnificent yearling that carried - “it will get every chance there” or “you bought well there, sir” banter at the hammer - that had made six figures and failed to meet expectations.
His highest rated horse is a BM60 (that’s his last winner Special Privilege, bought for just $8,000 after being at $80,000 yearling, his grandmother producing his stable banner Crafty Cruiser, now retired in his native New Zealand.
But Bryce has a following. Whether it was heightened by the 2015 “Sandwichgate” affair at Pakenham races when after a – well - robust dispute with Club CEO Michael Hodge, he scratched his three runners on the spot and was fined $2000 for his behaviour over the availability of sandwiches for his owners. Hodge escaped deeper scrutiny. Talk about a meal out of an entrée!
But first led me clear this up before we get started on Bryce, the battling but dedicated horseman who proudly and unabashedly states: “I have made a living out of slow horses”.
“I don’t even like sandwiches, I’m allergic to bread, if I eat too much I get as crook as a dog. It’s the gluten.”
Move on.
Bryce Stanaway is battling for his life on two fronts, health and his horses.
He has melanoma cancer and says the prognosis is not good, he’s living on turmeric as an alternative form of treatment, the lymph nodes under his right arm are gone. A delayed diagnosis didn’t help, nor did a letter of apology from the hospital.
“They still haven’t found the source, I’ve kept working through all the operations, I’ve had to look after the horses. I signed myself out of hospital one day, went out and drenched some sheep with a thing hooked up to my arm.”
Bryce Stanaway's beloved horses enjoying retirement. Moorabool is the grey.
Even days though when he struggled to move, let alone get out of bed, wouldn’t stop him care for his horses, he still has about 30 at his rented property at Torquay on the Surf Coast.
The only problem now is that he has no licence to train them, recently disqualified for three years in a bitter dispute with officials that stems from his behaviour and conduct after an incident involving his horse Moorabool at the Bendigo races back in October 2020.
The findings were not pretty reading including that Stanaway “yelled and screamed” at those attempting to treat the mare, “threatened to shoot the vet (denied), “interfered with the treatment “of the mare, generally behaving “in an appalling aggressive manner” and on it goes, the outcome saying that the Victorian Racing Tribunal took into account “, Mr Stanaway’s lack of sophistication in the way in which he conducts himself.”
Stanaway’s response is typically tierce. “I’m not as bad as they say. I just treat people how they treat me”.
He grew up in Dargaville in New Zealand and says he was “born and bred with horses”.
“My parents used to have horses and we used to buy them off the Maoris when I was kid for ponies, I don’t reckon they’d ever seen a white man at the time. I learned to ride in a swamp so they couldn’t buck you off."
“I left school when I was 14 and one of the early piece of advice I got from a bloke (jumps jockey) called Graeme Walters who said if a horse bolted on you – ‘grab a hunk of mane hard, hang on and pray. One got away from me one day and jumped into the hen house but I held on.”
“I was half brought up in shearing sheds, my dad a saying you treat people how they treat you, if you run into a smart arse you treat them as a smart arse, that’s how I’ve lived and survived. Hard but tough.”
Even Stanaway’s father, Ian, was quoted as saying before he died. “He was always a bit mad (Bryce), he’s been on horses since he could walk and when he was 10 he was riding horses over wire fences.
Bryce became a farrier and to this day still shoes horses, he started out with Dave O’Sullivan in days when Mike Moroney was starting his racing journey, but has ridden in rodeos, buckjumpers and some would not be surprised he was a rodeo clown – “it’s the most important job on the ground I can tell you.”
But even back then Stanaway was having trouble with officialdom, struggling to get a licence. He eventually did and started off a life of hand-me-downs and unwanted rejects and trying to turn them into something no-one thought they could be.
Like Charlie Karl (named after his two sons) who took on the might of Kiwi jumping legend Ken Brown in the famous Great Northern. On the eve of the race Brown was quoted as saying: “I take my hat off to him. He has come a long way since he was a buck jump rider at the rodeos.
“He was always a bit of a tearaway in trouble but if you needed someone to give you a hand, he was always first to help."
“He had a hell of a job getting his licence, they said we don’t want this wild little guy involved, but jumping needs people like him, someone with guts prepared to have a go.”
Stanaway was then, as now, always regarded as a horseman, like the time he had an open chequebook to source horses for Asia, primarily Singapore and Malaysia, and he’d have 110 lined up on the tarmac ready for new homes abroad, but just as he found his own horses at home.
Stanaway can tell you of horses like Laud Peregrine – “he was on his way to pet food” – Stanaway, who has just won the rookie buckjump rider of the year title in New Zealand, got the “hopeless case” going and he’d win a New Zealand Cup (for Ralph Manning).
Or Hard Man (“they named the horse after me”) –
“I won on him with a broken arm, cut the cast off the night before, rode him 3kg overweight.”
Or Change of Heart, bought for just $400 also destined for unkinder futures until Stanaway stepped in and changed both their lives.
“I was fucked by the tax, they came to repossess the trucks. I said to them I’ve got this horse going to Hastings on Saturday which will win and I’ll pay you Monday. If it didn’t, I told them they could take everything. It won and the tax billed got paid.”
Stanaway’s line of horses since he came to Australia all have similar stories. He came here with $1500 in his pocket, bought a horse called Shubier for $400 after two bowed tendons won a race at Ballarat with Wayne Treloar up.
Since then it’s been a long line discards, rejects but have all found a loving caring home on the hills at Torquay which was his new version of Dogsville until he cleaned it up and remains there today on a gentleman’s agreement with the owner.
He’s never craved the spotlight, but has had it sone upon him by those who perhaps misunderstand his manner, if not demeanour beneath the exterior. For Stanaway, it is all about his horses, and it doesn’t matter how slow or competitive they are.
“This place and the horses are all that has saved my life, the salt air, it’s my little piece of heaven, I’ve been driven to the bottom and what they’ve done to me mentally, the damage, but here with my horses, that’s what it is about.
“But I’ve never had a day off, no when my grandmother died, I was gone for two days, but these horses, they still get fed twice a day and looked after, they come first, horses come first – I go without a lot of things,” Stanaway said.
“I make a living out of slow racehorse. Everyone loves a fast horse but you don’t have to spend a million- you can and end up with nothing. I think the most I’ve spent was $16,000” (that was Prince Vitality off Graeme Rogerson, who he’d win seven races with and was Geelong Horse of The Year.
Hanaki Warrior was a $900 buy who has won nearly $200,000, Venture Highway a $100,000 yearling, for clients of Darren Weir, going nowhere, given to Stanaway and a long career and over $140,000.
The year Bold Bard won the Bagot at Flemington, Stanaway won the $50,000 VRC Stayer’s Award. And of course there was his $1m man Crafty Cruiser, living a life of retirement back home in ew Zealand.
He is unapologetic at the “quality” of his horses and the multiple runners in slow grade staying races in Victoria.
“I reckon I’ve propped them up. I’m not running them for the sake of it. I give these horses a special home, you don’t have to back them, would you rather have me down at Centrelink.”
But right now, that is about where Stanaway is headed and his beloved horses most likely going on line to be sold – unless a GoFundMe page set up by daughter to raise funds for a legal fight in the Supreme Court – can get him there.
“Financially I’m fucked, I’ve got no income, I’m shoeing a few horses, they haven’t broken me – but I reckon I’m finished.
“I’ve had offers for some of the horses, but I’ve turned them down. I’ve given my whole life to horse racing, and to my horses, it’s all that I know."
“I just can’t stand any cruelty towards horses, can’t tolerate it. That’s how I got into this mess, standing up for horses and laying a complaint."
“I am going to miss the horses, they are what has saved me.”
“I may as well go home and find a Maori sheila.”
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