MARTIN HARLEY BACK IN THE SADDLE

By Graham Potter | Thursday, March 21, 2024

Jockey Martin Harley will be back in the thick of the action at Eagle Farm on Saturday after spending a month on the sidelines.

“I had a little incident in the stalls a month ago at Ipswich,” explained Harley. ‘I just got a bit of a knock on my head and my neck when the horse pushed forward. . Then, on the way back up the horse hit me on my head and sent me back in the saddle.

“The muscles just tightened up for a week to ten days … but, I’ve had scans now and everything is one hundred percent.

“I rode work on Saturday at the Gold Coast, and I was back at trackwork with eight or nine horses at Eagle Farm on Tuesday.

“Hopefully I can get a good, clean run now and get a few winners going into the carnival.

“I did need to take the time off for things to settle but, like I said, it was just a little incident.”

You can see why Harley referred to his latest setback as ‘just a little incident.’

In January last year, Harley, who was champion apprentice in the UK in 2011 and who has five Group 1’s wins behind his name, including a King Stand victory at Royal Ascot, suffered a brutal fall at Doomben which resulted in injuries with included a broken shoulder and three broken vertebra in my neck.

That was a big deal, but Harley didn’t blink.

His well documented, quite phenomenal road to recovery … few will have worked harder to get back on track … and his subsequent highly charged victory on Abounding in the $3 million Magic Millions Guineas, just twelve months after he hit the deck with those serious injury consequences, will forever stand to his credit.

Clearly, Harley puts adversity … big or small … behind him as quickly as possible, focusses on moving forward … and comes back strong.

You wouldn’t expect anything less this time around.

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