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www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/superracing/v...b311607ef4fc60d3dd40
Who’d be a racing steward? Occupation abroad littered with stories of skulduggery, death threats and bashings
MARK Hill had heard all the stories, of jockeys being dangled from helicopters and stewards being clobbered with bottles in food courts, but he took the job anyway.
MATT STEWART
3 min read
October 26, 2015 - 12:43PM
Jockey Daniel Ganderton weighs in under the attention of Chief Steward Ray Murrihy after winning race 7 on racehorse Strat's Flyer at Rosehill Gardens in Sydney.
Jockey Daniel Ganderton weighs in under the attention of Chief Steward Ray Murrihy after winning race 7 on racehorse Strat's Flyer at Rosehill Gardens in Sydney.
MARK Hill had heard all the stories, of jockeys being dangled from helicopters and stewards being clobbered with bottles in food courts, but he took the job anyway.
Hill had worked under Terry Bailey at Racing Victoria and accepted a post as a senior steward in Malaysia.
He knew races were rigged, that jockeys pulled up horses so regularly, and with such apparent immunity, that they barely disguised it.
Hill said he refused to “go to the dark’’ side and paid for it.
It was late one Sunday morning in October 2011. He and wife Heather were preparing for a day at the Kuala Lumpur races when three hoodlums barged into their apartment.
One had a steel bar, one a sword and the third a hammer.
Hill was bashed and slashed. Heather leapt aboard one of the hoods but was pinned down and had her teeth smashed. It lasted no more than 15 seconds and was “the most horrifying experience of my life”.
Hill left town soon after and is now a harness steward in Melbourne, a short walk from the office of Bailey, who now has something in common with Hill other than a pork pie hat.
South-East Asia, where faceless punting syndicates full of gangsters control jockeys, has long been the scene of racing skulduggery and stewards have never been immune.
Sydney’s former chief steward John “Sheriff’’ Schreck spent 15 years in Asia, in places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau and Mauritius.
Schreck received death threats in Sydney during the 1980s but was once given a pretty good tip by “colourful racing identity’’ George Freeman.
“George told me it’s never the person who makes the threat that might get you. They never go through with it. It’s the one that comes out of the shadows,’’ he said.
Chief steward John Schreck received death threats in Sydney during the 1980s.
Chief steward John Schreck received death threats in Sydney during the 1980s.
When Freeman was close to death he told Schreck of the day he saved Schreck from a belting.
“I was going to get bashed one day, apparently, and George told me years later that he got wind of it and had it stopped. I was pretty grateful,’’ he said.
Schreck received many threats, some to his life, while acting as chief cop in the pretty lawless tracks of Asia. None amounted to anything, bar the odd sleepless night.
One of his colleagues, Michael Carrig, wasn’t so fortunate.
“We were in a food court. He was bashed over the head with a bottle. Another steward, Bernie McKay, took off after the assailants but pulled out when they tried to goad him into a back alley,’’ he said.
Sydney’s longstanding chief steward Ray Murrihy says he has been threatened “not 10, not 20, maybe 50 times’’ in a 40-year career.
“They’d say that when you pick up your kids from school they won’t be there, stuff like that,’’ he said.
Early in his career, in Queensland, a jockey told Murrihy “to look over my shoulder’’ during an inquiry. The jockey was disqualified for life.
Murrihy recalled the time many years ago when Perth’s chief steward John Mahoney and his wife were bound and beaten up with baseball bats.
John Schreck in his role as chief steward of the Hong Kong Jockey Club in 2002.
John Schreck in his role as chief steward of the Hong Kong Jockey Club in 2002.
That bashing came at the time of a major racing inquiry that would have had a notorious figure put out of the sport.
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“There are other incidents, all over the world. Colleagues in South Africa have told of very scary incidents, getting run off the road, stuff like that,’’ he said.
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Threats usually never amounted to actions, Murrihy said. Schreck said that even in Asia, the waving of a baseball bat was one thing, a bashing another — and rare.
Murrihy described the incident on Sunday night, when shots were fired at the front door of Terry Bailey’s house, as “a terribly low act, un-Australian”.
“Stewards make decisions that impact on people’s lives. They are well aware of that. They also cross paths of nefarious people. But something like this is utterly abhorrent,’’ he said.
Chief steward Ray Murrihy looks on at a race from his tower at Randwick.
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