LARRY’S VIEW - I’M STILL HUNGRY FOR SUCCESS

By Larry Cassidy | Friday, April 1, 2011

Larry Cassidy currently has forty-two Group 1 successes behind his name. He is a multiple Premiership winning jockey having taken out three titles in Sydney and one in Brisbane. Larry’s View, the personal blog of this top class rider will appear on horseracingonly.com.au every Friday, workload permitting.


Looking back over the fifteen months since I relocated to Brisbane, I’m pretty happy with what I have achieved.

Making the decision to leave Sydney was difficult. When the rides started drying up there … it was tough.

After going so well in Sydney before … to be looking somewhere else … it was a hard choice to make.

It was not just as if I pack up and go somewhere else. You’ve got to take your whole family. You’ve got to think about schools and all those other things like that. Also, where we lived in Sydney … we lived in a cul-de-sac … we had a very good group of friends and neighbours and it was tough leaving there too.

It was something I spoke to my wife and kids about. I could have just hung around and hoped things got better, but I just couldn’t see how the situation was going to change. I could have started riding at the provincials, but I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to go to Kembla on a Saturday. I do see myself as a Metropolitan jockey.

Brisbane looked like a good opportunity to me. My wife’s parents live up here, so at the end of the day it was a reasonably easy decision to make after going through everything.

I did have contact with some trainers in Brisbane before I relocated. Rob Heathcote had e-mailed me and said, if you come ride work and work hard you will get rides off me. I rode quite a bit for Barry Baldwin when I first came up and I guess it just all took off from there.

In one respect, if you went back on what I’d done over the years, I had the form on the board so I was given opportunities. My reputation served me well up to a point, but you’ve still got to show that you want it.

That was my plan … to come up here and show that I want to be the leading jockey here in Brisbane. The only way to do that was to work hard and to throw myself into a busy riding schedule.

I only arrived in Brisbane basically for the second half of the 2008/09 season and, by the end of July, I’d almost had as many rides as some of the other leading jockeys had for the full twelve months. It was hard work all around.

I’m fortunate with my work ethic. I wouldn’t say I work one hundred percent all the time … it’s very hard to do sometimes when you are wasting hard … but the majority of the time I’m a good worker.

I never had a strict master as an apprentice. I was apprenticed to Brent Beattie who only ever had four or five horses in work so, I suppose, I had it pretty easy as an apprentice, but I have always willing to work.

If you ever want to get somewhere in life you’ve got to work for it and that was my mind-set when I arrived in Brisbane. That was the only way to get where I wanted to be.

You’ve got to maintain that focus and motivation and that comes with having the will to win.

Some people thought my coming up here was like a semi-retirement. It was actually the complete reverse. Because I still had the will to win and the will to succeed I had to work even harder.

It almost translated into the fact somehow that I had to prove myself all over again. If I had come up here and didn’t do so well … I’d look back and say, that was a waste.

So I had to come up here and prove that I am not just an average jockey going around, or, I’m not up here just to semi-retire and earn wages. I wanted to win a premiership and still show that I am competitive at the top level and I was rewarded for my commitment when I got to share the premiership with Stathi last season.

A lot of the hard work is obviously also related to keeping your weight at its optimum level.

I walk around at about 56kg. I’m not that tall but I’m quite stocky and I tend to put on weight easily. If I look at a plate of food and it weighs a kilo I put on a kilo-and-a-half.

Whenever I go on holiday I balloon to about 59kg … 60kg, and that’s without really letting loose.

For example, I find it incredibly difficult to ride at 53kg on both a Wednesday and a Saturday, so, of late, I’ll only ride 54kg on a Wednesday and concentrate on getting my weight right for the Saturday.

There are different things I do in terms of trying to maintain my weight.

I sit in a hot bath and sauna a lot. I’ve got a one man sauna that I’ve put in at home and I use that as a last resort on race-day.

I’ll probably jump in a hot bath four or five times a week for about forty-five minutes a time. I lie there and read a book … take off a kilo. I have the bath water very hot.

That’s just to maintain my weight, but I also do other things. Some of the jockeys … Shane Scriven, Ric McMahon and a couple of other boys … we play squash, which I think is a great way to lose weight.

I prefer to lose weight by exercising.

When I walk, when I mow my lawns … I do it with my sauna-suit on. Anything I do around the house I throw a sauna-suit on and rug-up. In the middle of the day, especially a thirty degree day, you can drop one-and-a-half to two kilos.

All the better if it is something that had to be done and you can lose weight while you are doing it … and it beats sitting in a sauna.

Wet weather can also complicate your life. When meetings are abandoned it changes things. The less you ride the harder it does become to maintain your weight, although sometimes it is good to give your body a break from getting your weight down all the time to ride at 53kg.

Most jockeys in the natural course of events get time away from riding through suspension or injury. If you don’t pick up a suspension or injury for an extended period, you’ve got to listen to what your body is telling you and make decisions on things like taking a short break yourself and perhaps getting away on holiday.

I really suffer in the hot weather up here. Someone said, you’ll get used to it. I’ll never get used to it.

I’ve ridden in Macau, Singapore, Hong Kong … and they are all similar climates to here. They are all hot and humid and I’ve never ever got used to it.

“I’m a really free sweater and people say, hot weather … well, it’s better for your weight. That’s nonsense.

You’ve still got to spend an hour … an hour-and-a-half … in the sauna before the races. On a hot day when you are getting out of a sauna … my sauna goes at forty-eight degrees … and you are coming out to a thirty-five degree, one hundred percent humidity day … it just knocks you. It knocks your socks off and you feel weak.

Realistically, you come to the races weak. As you have a couple of rides you get weaker and it completely drains you.

The change of climate has certainly been one of the things I’ve had to cope with since I’ve been here.

So now you know a little more about what I’ve gone through to get where I am now … and right now I’m looking forward to the Brisbane Carnival.

When I get to thinking about these big races I must admit do miss Sydney. I did have a some offers to go back now to ride at the Sydney Carnival this time, but I thought it was going to clash with a couple of the rides I’ve got here in Brisbane coming into the carnival.

I think I’ve got to concentrate on our carnival instead of going down there and riding a 20-1 shot in the Sydney Carnival when there is a chance, or a possibility, I might lose out on the ride on a promising horse here.

I do miss riding down there in the big races, but we’re building up to our carnival. I’ve got a couple of nice rides. If they are heading in the right direction and I win a big race during our carnival that will make up for not going to Sydney.

Brisbane has been kind to me so far. I’ll be working hard to make things even better.

Till next week.

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