Kyneton Racecourse on a Tuesday afternoon. Brilliant autumn sunshine bathes the elm and oak trees, and Damian Lane is basking in a pair of winners from his only two rides for the day. It's the perfect setting to reflect that his life is about to change, big time.
"I enjoy these meetings, it's quite cruisy," the 21-year-old says. As a widely touted future premier jockey, he gets good rides when he goes bush. "That makes the job a lot easier."
A fortnight ago, when the Hong Kong Jockey Club shocked his socks off by granting him a three-month licence, Lane knew nothing of the former British colony or its heralded racing scene. It unnerves him a little now to realise that, at Sha Tin racetrack later this month, when a trainer he'll have only just met legs him up on a horse he's never ridden for owners he doesn't know, life will be anything but easy.
In racing, Hong Kong is Sinatra's New York. As Craig Williams says, "If you're lucky enough to be successful in Hong Kong, it leads to everything."
Williams should know; his first stint, in the late 1990s, amounted to 11 winners and an impression so profound he would return for three years and take his race wins into triple figures. For many other big names - Kieren Fallon, Richard Hughes, Mikael Barzalona, Kerrin McEvoy among them - Hong Kong has been a miserably hard nut to crack. All rode barely a couple of winners during their first contract.
Lane would settle for three to five. He's been swotting up, watching replays, studying the names of trainers and horses, getting his head around the challenge. "It's easy to remember Mark Kavanagh," he smiles. "It's harder to remember Michael Chang Chun-wai."
The important thing is that through his actions and how he carries himself, Chang Chun-wai, his fellow trainers and the owners of the HKJC's 1200 racehorses remember Lane. Whatever happens, he's about to go on a three-month ride he'll never forget.
His manager, Dean Hawkes, will provide a welcome soft landing. Hawkes first experienced Hong Kong racing in the mid-90s and has an ongoing link buying horses in Australia and New Zealand for trainer Ricky Yiu. He will be with Lane for the first 10 days of his stay, acting as ice-breaker on all fronts.
"It's always been a pretty daunting place for a new person," says Hawkes, who managed Steven King when he rode there almost 20 years ago. "It can be a lonely place. People are there to make money and do as well as they can, so you don't have the interaction with other jockeys and trainers as much on a friendship level. It's pretty dog-eat-dog."
First-timers such as Lane have access to a club-employed intermediary who helps book rides. So begins the tricky business; Brazilian Joao Moreira rode six of the 10 winners at Sha Tin last Sunday, and Hawkes says he pretty much gets on whatever mount he chooses. Thirteen-times champion jockey Douglas Whyte isn't far behind him, while established Australian riders Zac Purton and Brett Prebble get a good look-in too.
After they've gobbled up the prime horses in each race it's a lottery. Betting turnover is similar in a class five - equivalent to a midweek Kyneton maiden - as a feature race; a rookie jockey's eagerness often runs contrary to the ability of the horse beneath them.
Michael Rodd, who first rode there when Lane's age, once likened the scrap for the next-best mount to a dozen jockeys standing around a ring and someone throws a chook in. Hawkes says you're introduced to the trainers, "then it's basically catch and kill your own".
Bloodstock guru David Price told Lane that reputations are "one million per cent irrelevant", everyone is viewed as an apprentice starting out. Williams agrees, up to a point; he says there's a window where a promising rider such as Lane might get an early leg-up, but it closes fast. "You will get opportunities from the word go, but if you don't have success in the first two weeks, it doesn't matter what reputation you had, that no longer exists."
Superstition pervades horse racing, not least in China. King told him the locals "just sit back and watch and watch and watch" first-time jockeys; only if you're good enough to get invited back do they step forward to offer decent rides. Jockeys — even the young and reserved — must come out of themselves and become networkers.
"It comes down to selling yourself - getting to know people, earning their trust, and hopefully one day getting a reward from it," Lane says. Lunch, dinner, tea and coffee dates become as vital as trackwork and barrier trials; Williams notes that the process is complicated by those you're selling yourself to being among the most powerful business people in Hong Kong.
Lane doesn't shy away from hard work, but admits schmoozing connections is an area of his profession that he's trying to build on. "I'm definitely getting better at it."
Hong Kong racing can feel like a closed shop, rigidly bound in numbers – 25 licences for jockeys, 28 for trainers, 400 permits for owners chosen from around 5000 club member applications. (Hawkes likens the status of owning a racehorse there to having a Mercedes and a house in Toorak here.) Racing is Wednesday and Saturday or Sunday, trackwork six days a week (screened on television). The rest of your time is your own, which presents the next challenge.
Michael Walker was a record-breaking teenager when he landed from New Zealand in the early 2000s, and remembers being painfully lonely. Contracted jockeys have their own apartment in a complex at Sha Tin, and he soon tired of staring at the walls.
"I did it wrong, but I was just too young," Walker says. "You can only shop so much." He and Lane are close, and the latter laughs at the advice he'll take with him. "He said, 'Anything you need to know, ask me. Because I did everything you shouldn't do.'"
Williams has advised that establishing a routine is crucial. He regularly went mountain-biking with expats who worked at the club, played competition tennis on Monday nights with Price and wife Jenny Chapman, took lessons each Thursday with a bloke they called "Strop" after Paul Hogan's off-sider. If he went back now — single rather than a father of four — he'd use the time to study or learn a language.
Immersing yourself too deeply in your work can be dangerous. Hugh Bowman told Lane his brain worked so hard studying the form that it hurt. Lane reckons he might have to take up golf.
He recently posted a photo on social media of the Hong Kong night skyline. The city's swallow-you-whole enormity is another potential knee-trembler for a kid from Bunbury who was overawed when he moved to Melbourne four years ago. Hawkes notes they'll arrive to find as many skyscrfapers at the airport as there are in the Melbourne CBD, and that's nothing on the city itself, 35 kilometres away.
A visiting jockey's contract includes a monthly stipend and a car, which some veterans have told him to leave in the garage. Williams blanches, recalling the advice of Shane Dye: "Get in the car on a day when you're not riding and just go and get lost." He did, and soon he wasn't getting lost anymore.
Lane has been overseas only once, driving around New Zealand's south island with a friend last year during a break from riding. He didn't watch a single race, didn't even turn on his phone, soon grew to like the freedom. His second taste of the world beyond our shores promises to be something else.
He admits it's daunting, but is tantalised by what everyone who's been before tells him: no matter how it pans out, you'll come back a better jockey. Williams says it's where he learnt to aspire to perfection - how to do your homework, to go not too slow but not too fast for the class of horse beneath you, how tracks play when the rail is moved, the idiosyncrasies of each jockey. "It teaches you to be the best professional - on and off the track."
Lane says the opportunity laid at his feet still hasn't sunk in, especially not when his routine still includes booting home winners beneath Kyneton's elms and oaks. He's listened to what everyone has said, that Hong Kong is a hard place that will wear a young jockey down. He's ready to take it on.
"I think I've got what it takes."
