THE SUNSHINE COAST NEWSPAPER COLUMN: A TIP OF THE HAT TO YOU GUV. YOU DESERVE ALL OF THE BEST

By Graham Potter | Friday, July 12, 2019

Graham Potter writes a weekly column for the Sunshine Coast daily. Due to demand from those having trouble accessing the paper these columns are now also published on HRO courtesy of the Sunshine Coast daily.

In late 2016 Jeff Lloyd blazed an historic trail over the Corbould Park track creating history by riding seven winners on the twelve-race card, including the last five in succession.

Those seven victories took Lloyd to the highest level of achievement for a jockey at a single meeting on the Metropolitan stage in Queensland, surpassing the six-race haul of Mick Dittman back in 1977 at Eagle Farm.

Quite incredibly, that was not the first time Lloyd had achieved that feat having scored the same number of winners at a meeting in South Africa.

A little over a year later Lloyd smashed Chris Munce’s record for the most number of metropolitan wins in season passing Munce’s daunting target of 103 wins with as much as four months still left to run in the season. His final total for the season was 137 metropolitan victories … a record which will be hard to ever rein in.

Lloyd and Munce are the only two jockeys in history to have reached a century of Metropolitan winners in a season in Queensland. An elite club indeed … and just for good measure Lloyd did it twice!

Then there is the no small matter of the ninety plus Group 1 victories he has landed during his career.

This season’s Brisbane Metropolitan Jockey’s Premiership will be Lloyd’s eighteenth premiership success which include seasons in which he was simply the best in South Africa (where he won the apprentice title three times and then added six senior premierships to that honour roll), Mauritius (where he won five titles) as well as Australia (where he is about to officially sign off on his fourth successive Queensland Metropolitan premiership).

Lloyd also holds the record as the oldest jockey to win an Australian state premiership.

Significantly, a many of these extraordinary feats came AFTER Lloyd had suffered an ischemic stroke in March 2014.

In the short term that episode was life threatening. Once he had worked his way through that period, the continuation of his career still remained a very doubtful option … but Lloyd prevailed and his remarkable comeback was complete when he returned to riding some fourteen months later.

There had been no stopping Lloyd in his quest to get back into the saddle and there was no stopping him once he had his feet back in the irons as an already truly magnificent career forged ahead and he calmly set about rewriting the record books.

Queensland has been lucky to have a man of Lloyd’s calibre in its midst … both as an exceptional competitor and as a person of genuine quality.

On Saturday at Doomben, Lloyd will ride his last race before moving into retirement.

It will be a bitter-sweet moment and celebration all wrapped into one.

Expect a huge send-off … who knows when we will see the likes of him again.

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