WA Hall of Champions: Damien Oliver’s last ride came with a Gold Rush

The last 1400m came with a rush. A Gold Rush. Damien Oliver could feel the energy pulsating through a 10,000-strong crowd at Ascot Racecourse when he saddled up for the final time as a professional jockey shortly before 5.30 pm aboard Munhamek on Saturday, December 16, 2023. He’d had a good day, saluting twice aboard Devine Belief and Magnificent Andy, but there was a hat-trick on offer in the last ride of a 36-year career. Oliver’s mum Pat was there, along with his wife Trish, daughters Zahra and Niali and son Luke. His late father Ray and brother Jason, who were both killed in riding accidents, were there in the jockey’s heart and mind as he was locked into gate 14 aboard the Nick Ryan-trained gelding in The Gold Rush, a $1.5 million Group 3 weight-for-age race that marked the final big race of The Pinnacles carnival. Oliver, 51, had produced 2188 wins, including 129 Group 1 victories, from more than 20,000 track starts in a decorated career. Now he was back in his home town; the emotion and love were palpable both inside the barriers and outside where a party atmosphere had been replaced by a hush as Oliver’s true believers prayed for one last miracle. Chants of “Ollie, Ollie, Ollie” rang loud as the celebrated hoop pierced through the field and extracted maximum effort out of his mount across the final 50m to win by half a length. “Dreams do come true. That was unbelievable,” he said after the race. “There’s no place like home.” How apt Oliver would lean on a line from The Wizard of Oz. An equine alchemist, he had delivered once last gold bullion exclamation mark. “They were extraordinary scenes. There were 10,000 people there. It felt like 20,000. I’ve never signed so many autographs in my life,” Oliver told in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times. “The reception I got, the applause and acknowledgement from all my peers, was unreal. “To have my Mum and all my family at that last day at Ascot was really special. They were the support and drive for me right from the start to the end of my career. “It was very emotional. It was hard to believe that it was all coming to an end. Even though it was a long 36-year career, it still seemed to go pretty quickly. “I wasn’t going so well in the lead-up. I hadn’t ridden a winner for about a month, and I nearly fell the week before when (William Pike) Pikey nearly put me on the deck. So it was quite incredible the way it finished.” It was the perfect finish to a silken career in the silks. Oliver is one of only seven riders to achieve the grand slam – with three Melbourne Cups, two Cox Plates, four Caulfield Cups, and a Golden Slipper - along with 14 Scobie Breasley medals as Victoria’s leading metropolitan jockey and 10 Melbourne jockeys’ premierships He will add another prestigious gong to his collection on Tuesday, November 10 when he is inducted into the WA Hall of Champions at The Westin Perth. To suggest it almost didn’t happen would be a stretch given his genetic lines, but there was a point in his formative years when Oliver had his heart set on playing footy for his beloved West Coast Eagles. A former No. 1 ticket holder for West Coast in Melbourne — fittingly, he will be inducted alongside two of the Eagles’ most decorated servants, Glen Jakovich and John Worsfold on November 10 — he showed early signs of his tactical nous, skill and balance playing junior footy for the Byford Roos. “My lack of height probably got in the way. I did enjoy my junior footy, but I’m not sure I was ever going to make a footballer,” he said. “When I was 15 and about 35kg, I thought, it’s a good time to change my path.” The lure of thoroughbreds was strong from birth. His dad was a successful jockey who died in August 1975, when Oliver was three, from injuries sustained in a race fall during a Boulder Cup meeting in Kalgoorlie. His mother brought up Damien and his older brother Jason on her own before she later married Byford-based trainer Lindsey Rudland. Rudland became Damien’s first boss as an apprentice jockey, before he moved to Lee Freedman’s stables in Melbourne to complete his training. “I was involved in horses before I can remember,“ he said. “But I probably never took it seriously til I moved out to Byford and started riding horses. “My stepfather was a trainer and he had some horses and we had ponies as kids growing up. I was riding track work at a pretty young age, eight or nine. That was a thrill.” Oliver, though, says the pivotal moment was witnessing older brother Jason forge his own career in the saddle. “He started to have a bit of success; he had the nice car, the nice clothes, the nice girlfriend. I thought this is probably the path I want to take,” he recalled. “I’d ridden horses from a pretty young age. I could see having a background in racing it was probably going to be an advantage for me.” His first race winner was Mr Gudbud at Bunbury in 1988 when he was 15. The following year, with 66 wins to his name, he moved to Freedman’s burgeoning stable following a recommendation from Jason. He had an immediate impact, riding rapidly through the ranks and Freedman sensing he had a special talent made Oliver his primary rider. Oliver landed a first Group at 17 in 1989 when he led throughout aboard Groucho to win the G2 Warwick Stakes at Warwick Farm and in November took the reins of $250 roughie Salisopra for his first Melbourne Cup ride, but fell off mid-race. He delivered a first Group 1 win in 1990 when he teamed up with master trainer Bart Cummings to claim the Show Day Cup on Submariner at Caulfield. When Oliver reels off his favourite horses - Mannerism, Schillaci, Doriemus, Northerly, Testa Rossa, Alinghi, Forente, Apache Cat - it’s clear he is talking about old friends. His three-quarter length win on the Fred Kersley-trained Northerly, Western Australia’s ‘Fighting Tiger’, over Sunline in the 2001 Cox Plate, which came after a protest, was considered one of his master rides. It denied Sunline a third successive Cox Plate and marked Oliver’s second, after a win aboard Dane Ripper in 1997. “He just had great stamina. But he was strange. Most good horses give you a good feel. He didn’t really do that. He wasn’t the prettiest of horses, and he’d come under pressure before a lot of horses, but he was always the last one standing,” Oliver said. “Acceleration is usually the weapon of Australian horses. His stamina was his weapon, which is unlike an Australian horse. The Europeans are a bit more that way.” Of Oliver’s three Melbourne Cup wins aboard Doriemus (1995, trained by Freedman), Media Puzzle (2002, Dermot Weld) and Fiorente (2013, Gai Waterhouse) — the second has legend status and became a movie, The Cup, starring Stephen Curry as Oliver. It was scripted in heaven following the death six days earlier of Jason, at age 33, after a fall during a trial at Belmont. He made the decision to ride in the cup as a tribute to both his brother and father, wearing Jason’s breeches in the race. Oliver positioned Media Puzzle smoothly behind the speed and moved up to share the lead with Vinnie Roe on the home turn before he kicked clear near the 350m mark to win by two lengths. Oliver blew a kiss to the sky and shouted “My boy, my boy”. Later he said: “I’d give it away right now to have my brother back. But I know it was the right thing to ride. Jason would have wanted that. This has made me think of how dangerous this game is, but I knew my brother would have wanted me to be here.” Oliver told The Sunday Times: “It’s the one I’m probably most remembered for. It wasn’t the most enjoyable because of the circumstances, but as it turned out it was a wonderful tribute to my brother who was a big influence on my career. We were always very competitive my brother and I, pushing one another to get the best out of one another.” Oliver had his own riding trauma in March 2005 when he fractured the T3 and T4 vertebrae in a race fall at Moonee Valley. Major surgery fused six vertebrae and had titanium rods inserted in his spine. “I was pretty close to becoming paralysed. That had me out of the saddle for about 15 months,” he said. “I didn’t know if I was going to be physically able to come back and ride. “I probably never really lost the passion for it, but it was probably more about my family and their concerns, not so much my own. “The biggest thing was just getting myself in the best shape I could for life in general and then I could just see how I was progressing and I was able to come back and ride.” Oliver says his Hall of Champions induction will be a “pinch myself moment”. “It’s an incredible honour for me and something I never dreamt of happening when I started out in a career with racing,” he said. Oliver says he misses the adrenaline rush of racing “a little bit”. “It’s the friendships, the associations you make with people. Finding a good horse and watching it develop,” he said. “And I miss the big days, but that’s probably only a small part of it. “There’s a lot of work that goes into it as well behind the scenes to get to that stage, and I’m enjoying my sleep-ins and eating and drinking what I like and not missing long trips to the races and starving myself. “The positives are outweighing the negatives and I had a pretty good run at it so I can’t complain.”

WA Hall of Champions: Damien Oliver’s last ride came with a Gold Rush

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