JEFF CAUGHT - UNDER THE RADAR BUT READY TO STRIKE

By HRO | Tuesday, September 11, 2012

The ''Trainers in Queensland' listing offers the HRO reader the opportunity to find out more about the background, expertise and values of individual trainers in the state. Many will be familiar faces, but their detailed, personal profiles have remained relatively unknown to the larger audience ... until now.

Jeffrey Caught is the latest addition to this HRO offering

“I grew up in Townsville. My father had trotters and we started off there.

“I was around the stables all the time. We moved out to Cluden, which was near the racetrack. We were the only trotters in a street which was otherwise full of racehorses.

“I used to jog the trotters up with my father … give him a hand. Probably when I was about nine or ten years old, I started jogging them. As I got older I started riding a bit of track-work for the neighbours, around when I was thirteen or fourteen, but I also drove trotters.

“I always wanted to be a jockey, but then I got a bit heavy to be a jockey so, when I was sixteen, I was old enough to get a license to be a trotting driver … so I started driving the trotters.

“I got a winner on my first drive. You used to have to go the Charters Towers in those days. You had to have twenty drives in Charters Towers before you could come to Townsville and drive.

“My father only had about a dozen trotters. He didn’t have a big stable, but there was enough. Then my father got a few racehorses and he started concentrating on racehorses and I stuck to the trotters.

“With my work, I got transferred to Mount Isa for two years when I was nineteen. I didn’t have anything to do with horses for those two years and when I came back I started to do the trotters again and I was still riding a bit of work, but my heart wasn’t in it. It was just too hard at that stage.

“I did go to Cairns for two weeks and a bloke I used to drive for, Reg Hubbard, had forty horses in work, so I was his main driver … but then they shut the trots down.

“At that time, when I was twenty-three, my wife worked for some people who had racehorses, so they gave me one to train. It won first-up and that was it!

“I mean we were running for $300 at the trots and I then took the horse to Innisfail and won a $1700 race and I thought, how good is this compared to running for $300.

“Hadyn Flynn has always owned horses with me with a syndicate of ex-trotting people and I was lucky along the way as the stable just slowly built up in numbers. By the time I left Cairns I had fifteen in work. I had three apprentices, so things were progressing nicely enough, but then I left that behind to come to Brisbane.

“That was about ten years ago, so I was probably thirty-two when I moved down here. One of the reasons I moved down here was because of work. I was working as a Civil Design Draftsman and I had also completed a Civil Engineering Degree.

“I’ve always worked for the same company … but the main reason I moved was for the horses in the long term, because I wanted to do full time training one day and it is hard to do both.

“I started with one horse in Brisbane … Cinnamon Cove. I think he was my second starter on Doomben 10 000 day and he came second. It was 250-1 and got beat a nose.

“That would have kicked me off really good.

“I think he still holds the record for the highest price paid on the tote for a place. I think he paid $65.

“I stayed in a flat spot for about a year or two. I only had one or two horses and they weren’t real good. I didn’t have anything really so I still had to concentrate on work.

“It took me two years to train my first winner here. I trained my first winner on Murwillumbah Cup day. It’s name was Caparro. Hadyn Flynn was in that one as well.

“We went to the sales then and he bought three or four yearlings. One of them was an Easy Rocking horse called Beecadd. Then he bought a horse called Hot Cymbal. He had eight starts and won four. It was from there that a few things started building up.

“I was one of the original owners of Adnocon. I sold out and bought a horse called Pleasure Time. He won a few. Falino was a bigger winner for me. We got offered big money for him but I was lucky I kept him. He did well. I actually just retired him, because he’s just had a few wind problems and I didn’t want to break his heart.

“I’m now up to thirteen in the stable. I train three for Pat O’Shea and the Last Stride Syndicate now. I’m sweet with thirteen at the moment. I get rid of a few … there’s a few coming today and a few going. I’m squeezing thirteen here at Eagle Farm and I am always looking to improve the standard of the stable and of my training set-up so that I don’t have to juggle horses.

“That will happen. I had a look at going to the Sunshine Coast, but my wife didn’t want to move. It was harder trying to get her to move just down the road than it was to move from Cairns. I do understand that though.

“When I get a good set-up I think I can easily have twenty horses.

“So I’m looking at options that will help give me more scope. Achieving any form of success has a lot to do with persistence, but it is also very much a momentum game. You get the momentum up and things start happening around you.

“I probably get more excited watching the owners enjoy themselves. I haven’t got major owners. I haven’t got any big backers, but my owners are my support team and they keep me going … they keep everybody going in the industry actually.

“Owners pay the bills. I like to get them involved with their horses as much as possible. I don’t normally get over-excited, but it is amazing to me to see how horseracing can set quietly spoken owners off into a frenzy of excitement when one of their horses win. So to and share that with owners, particularly on a big stage … there is no greater thrill. That’s why I’d like to build more of those relationships.

“I have trained winners from Mt Garnett in North Queensland to Rosehill in Sydney. Falino gave me a Group winner when he won the Group 3 Fred Best Stakes in 2011 and was also second in the Group 3 Vo Rogue Plate the previous year, so I think the success I have had with a relatively limited supply of horses shows I have a lot to offer any potential client.

“I’m looking forward to growing my team, working hard for those winners and then watching the delight on the faces of my owners as they celebrate our success.”

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