How a Man and a Mare became Balnarring’s pin-up pair
IT’S a storyline scriptwriters might even suggest was farfetched.
Balnarring Racing Club’s oldest serving committee member with his one homebred horse winning their local Cup.
Well, on Australia Day in front of a 5000 strong crowd trainer Mick Binney and his lone soldier Diamanda will be playing starring roles in trying to deliver that fairytale ending.
But for a mare who has won eight races and $152,000 in prizemoney, her 79-year-old trainer who still jumps on her back every morning, admitted he would only be lying if he said he always kept the faith.
“She raced at Healesville one day and I thought she’d win,” Binney explains of his mare, who took 25 starts to break her maiden.
“She ended up running third and I was really disappointed and when Ray Douglas (jockey) came back on her I said ‘I think I’ll sell her… you can have her for $500’.
“Thankfully ‘Rayzor’ said ‘don’t worry she goes better than that.’”
It might have taken the Golden Snake mare another 12 starts to break her maiden but it’s advice Binney is forever grateful for.
While Diamonda’s tale of a mating from a giveaway mare with a local stallion is the stuff of dreams, the story of her trainer is equally as fascinating.
Binney’s great grandfather John Perkins rode in three of the first four Melbourne Cups and his own father began fielding as a bookmaker at the metropolitan tracks in 1911.
A young Mick, one of 12 children, at five years of age would attend Flemington, Caulfield and Moonee Valley racecourses and sell pencils to punters at the turnstiles.
“We sold them for five cents and picked them up for a penny at Coles,” he recalls.
“I knew all the race colours in the racebook before I knew my arithmetic.”
Binney had dreams of becoming an apprentice but admits they were short lived.
“In my first ride in a pony race at Drouin I finished 100 yards last,” he says.
“And then at my first ride at Balnarring the saddled slipped and I fell off… I ended up jumping back on but by the time I came into the straight there were kids on the track because they thought the race was over!”
While Mick’s riding record at Balnarring might be nothing to gloat about, his contribution at the track goes far further than any amount of winners.
He remembers first heading along to the picturesque track located within the Emu Plains Reserve in 1960. It’s a racecourse he would later do 28 years of service at on the Club’s committee and later become a life member. Many of those years spent as track manager and the local club steward.
And don’t think Binney’s local contribution stops at the gates of the racetrack.
You’d be hard-pressed walking down the main strip of the small seaside town to find someone who doesn’t know him.
28 years at the Crib Point Football Club as president, treasure, secretary or trainer will do that and he was also awarded Citizen of the Year in 1996 for saving the towns rail line.
In more recent years he has taken up the voluntary role of an Independent Third Person for the intellectually impaired at the local police station hearing everything from murder, to fraud and burglary cases.
Throw in work for St Vincent de Paul and you now understand there is much more to training racehorses to Mick Binney.
In fact, he spent his youth selling newspapers on the corner of Flinders Street Station watching the world go by.
But Binney has never let the grass grow under his feet.
He worked for several racing stables in his youth recalling the names of Alec Munro, Mick Wilson and later Tom Alderson.
He remembers going to Wright Stevenson and paying a whopping $75 for a horse in 1969 that he had no idea what he was going to do with.
So instead, he went and got himself a trainer’s license and prepared his first winner at the Woolamai picnics in 1976. The same course Diamanda broke the modern-day weight carrying record for a mare only a fortnight ago – 74 kilos if you don’t mind.
This weekend en-route to the Balnarring Cup she and rider Shaun Cooper will try and break their own record attempting to win back-to-back Healesville Cups but this time with 75.5 kilograms.
It’s any wonder in over half a century of training racehorses he says he has never quite had one like the horse he simply calls “Rhonda”.
“She’s been the best I’ve had by far,” he professes.
“She carries 70 plus kilograms in the sand everyday with me and a saddle and that’s why the weight doesn’t bother her.
“I’m the only one who rides her and I can still spring off them like you wouldn’t believe … it’s a work of art I land on my feet every time.
“She’s the most lovely horse and the most photographed horse at Balnarring Beach.
“She sits down like a puppy on the sand before we go home and lays flat on her side and has a roll and gets up.”
Binney bred Diamanda himself after gifting a 10 per cent share in an unraced Clarry Conners-trained mare to his son for his 21st birthday.
While Miss Glitter might have retired a 48-start maiden that birthday present is now paying off some 25 years later once he was gifted the mare in retirement.
Without a permit to train at nearby racecourses, Binney has had to be inventive over the years as to how he trains his horses.
He carved out his own track in a paddock at the back of his house in Bittern - 1700 metres round with an eight metre rise which is a mixture of grass and sand.
Don’t think that means any less work – Binney’s Fitbit tells him the nine-year-old clocked up 904 kilometres last year – 104 kilometres in December alone.
And on alternative days they’ll use the pristine Balnarring beach - where there is always a special visitor waiting for him.
“A local girl with special needs Karen has taken a liking to her over the years and comes down most mornings to pat her with her carer,” he explained.
“She has such an incredible knowledge of horses and she just loves her.
“It’s such great therapy and Diamanda is just lets them pat her… she is just the most gentle horse.”
Diamanda races in the specially designed silks by Binney’s late wife Margaret. Binney says the colours will also retire when the time comes for his mare to call it a day.
Not that anybody is calling for that anytime soon.
Binney hasn’t had a city winner in 52 years of training and last year he came agonisingly close when Diamanda was runner-up at Moonee Valley.
With that would have come a pay cheque of $33,000. A win in the Balnarring Cup later this month would return $4,600.
But there isn’t a second of hesitation when asked the race he’d rather win.
“It would mean a hell of a lot to win a Balnarring Cup… it would take pride of place.”
So there might not be a paperboy selling pencils at the front gate on Australia Day at Balnarring or a young rider slipping out of the saddle – but that same man on that same stretch of turf he manicured for decades is standing proof that some dreams don’t fade — they wait.
