Story – Chris Hector & Photos – Roz Neave and Werner Ernst
For all Greg McDermott has the image of the rugged shearer from Wagga, it turns out that a formative influence was that most classical of horsemen, Franz Mairinger, the first Australian team coach – and trainer of the gold medal winning team at Rome.
“My mother’s mother lived at Bowral and Franz Mairinger used to stay at her place when he taught there. My mother and her mother never spoke after she married my father until I was 13 or 14. I went there and met her, and she said, you should come and stay. So Mum drove me there with the float and my horse, and I used to jump round the training cross-country course. Franz saw me jumping, and asked me to come up and join into his lesson – he was working with the eventers.”
“I went back a few times, he started me off the right way. I was pretty wild when I met him. I went back for a few clinics and stayed with my Nan – he taught me the basics… then my next lesson was with George Morris, when the Olympic squad was picked for Seoul in 1988.”
“I took Shrimpy to the clinic which was at George Sanna’s place, and I really got on with George. He wanted me to go back to the States with him – he liked me because he knew that if he said, go jump that shed, I would try to do it. If he told me to do three strides down a six stride line, I’d try to do it. We’ve become good friends with George. When I was in Europe, he was with the American team, and he’d walk the course with them, then he’d come and find me, and walk the course with me.”
Last month, we left Greg McDermott just as he started riding Mr Shrimpton, the horse that was to take him to the international stage. The gelding had lost confidence, but a run of little Queensland shows saw him back and firing, and Greg was ready to take on the world:
“We were sent over to New Zealand, to the Horse of the Year. Rod Brown and Slinky and myself. The selectors didn’t really know me, and selection was a bit of a Sydney thing then. So they sent me to New Zealand to see if I could handle the pressure. I won every major event except the Horse of the Year, and I was second in that.”
Greg and Shrimpy in New Zealand
“So off we went to Seoul, for the Olympic Games. He was jumping sensationally when we went to the Games. Jeff McVean was in the team, and he knew all the European riders, and they used to come down to watch Shrimpy when I practice jumped him – he had people coming from miles away. He was so spectacular.”
“In the warm-up class, I came equal first. In the second event, there was a really, really long double. George Morris was helping me, I said I can do it in two, he said, no you can’t, anyone who does it in two will be in trouble. I tried it, he half took off, had the fence down, I finished the course, went to break into trot, and had to walk out of the arena. He had done his tendon. Fifth in the event, but as soon as I backed off, he just carried his leg. There was a German vet, and he came to see me. I can get you to the end of the event but we decided we didn’t want to jump him – we brought him home. We had two reserves, Vicki Roycroft and George Sanna, and they were fighting something terrible, because one of them was going to miss out. I said to them, you don’t have to fight any more, I’m pulling out.”
“We took him to Europe, and he had a carbon fibre tendon inserted and brought him home.”
Mr Shrimpton at Aachen 1990
“Then in 1990 we took him to Europe again, to the World Cup final, he was 20th. We went on to Aachen, down to Rome and then at Fontainebleau, when back to Susanne Bond’s place near Gatwick, he wasn’t well although the leg was good. We had to come home, and left him there with Suzanne’s groom for the 30-day quarantine. George Morris went to visit him and said he was fretting. He got colic really bad, they tried to operate, but he died. They did a biopsy and found that his liver had been badly damaged by Patterson’s Curse poisoning. Even though he had been on hard feed since he was a four-year-old, the damage had been done before that. It was such a sad time for us, he was always meant to come home.”
The Australian team in Rome: Greg McDermott, Suzanne Bond and Colleen Brook
“Back in Australia, we had Navi Rellah, a big Buckskin horse. The selectors came and told me, you are on the next team to go away. I knew he wasn’t good enough, and he had an issue with water. I said, no I don’t want to go – and so I completely gave it up, and went racehorse training.”
Why racing?
“I broke in a lot of horses, that’s what I did. I broke in for really good trainers, like Tommy Smith. A guy called Stan Dumbrell, he was a cousin or something to Tommy Smith, and he had all these horses up in Sydney. He bought a property between Junee and Wagga. They got me to break some horses in for them. Tommy bought the horses at the Easter Sales and they sent them down to me to break in…”
“Then they got me to pre-train a few, and then Stan said, I might leave some down here, you should get a trainer’s license. They put in a racetrack on their property, and I was the private trainer. I think I won the premiership the first year… I was getting difficult horses, bad barrier rogues from all the good trainers, horses that bucked or bolted. It was good then because I was getting good horses that I had to fix up, but I actually got a reputation, of getting bad horses going. I was never getting a good horse. I was getting horses with all these problems, and they are so frustrating.”
“It got too big. Junee is 25 miles from Wagga, and sometimes when we had to gallop them, we’d be taking two truck loads up in the morning. We decided we’d sell our 20 acres at Junee and move to Wagga. I got stables on the course, and we trained for 21 years.”
But there were a new players in the McDermott saga, two new faces, their children, Stephanie and Tom. Let their mum, Jenny take up the tale:
“When we moved to Wagga, we moved to town – our kids weren’t going to ride horses. Stephanie is 21 now, she is 17 months older than Tom. We bought them a little pony just to have something – it was tethered down at the stables, and Stephanie would come down sometimes and ride it. Tom really wasn’t interested, he was an outdoors kid, he didn’t want a computer, or Nintendo or anything like that.”
Tom, Greg and Stephanie – Winter 1997
Conversations with Greg and Jenny tend to shift around, with each one often finishing the other’s sentence, Greg is talking now:
“Stephanie would bring her friends home and go riding ponies, and Tom was left by himself, so he said, ‘I’m going with them to ride the horses, I’m not going to be left out,’ and that’s what started it. Then we moved out of town, but we wouldn’t get them a pony until they could saddle it themselves and get on it. We weren’t pushy parents and we weren’t into taking them to a show and leading them around. That’s where he started.”
“Stephanie was quite a good rider – she was fourth in that FEI World Children’s event – she was far more polished than Tom at that stage. She was starting to jump 1.30m, but she was studying all week, and Tom was working her horses for her, and she was coming to the show at the weekend. I said, that doesn’t work. Because she was competitive, I said, it is not going to work, you just riding at the weekends, you are going to get cranky because you are not going to be able to go to the show and win. She gave it up, hasn’t been on a horse ever since.”
Tom started to get serious?
“Tom got very serious. We went to the Australian Championships in Sale, when he was 12. He had only just started riding and he won the Junior Championship, that was basically his first big show. From then on, he has just got stronger and stronger and stronger…”
Tom at the Wodonga Showjumping Spectacular 2005
You were saying there was a period when you couldn’t teach and you had to get Olivia Bunn to teach him for you…
“We’ve had plenty of arguments. We don’t have a lot of arguments but even if he wins the Australian Championship, when he comes out the gate, I’ll tell him what I thought of the ride – and sometimes mother and son don’t like that. That’s just me, I’ve always been like that, and I think that is the only way you can improve. People criticise me for saying to him after he has won a championship – why did you do six down there when you should have done seven? Deep down he takes it in. He learns to cope a little more now, he just sucks it up, and let’s me say my bit. But we get on really well now, we’ve sort of worked out, how we do the warm-up at the shows, we’ve got it down pretty pat, we’ve got a system and it works.”
Interestingly, Tom has learnt a lot from Greg’s mentor, George Morris, and once again, Greg appreciates George’s help:
“George has been very encouraging, he said to us, any time Tom wants to go to America, just ring him, he’ll get him in with Beezie, whoever he wants to go and work with, he’ll get him in. Tom really doesn’t want to do that at the moment. He thinks the German thing is the best way for him to go at the moment. It was a big thing for him not to go to George last time he was in Australia. Don’t get me wrong, Tom learnt heaps from George and really respects him, just at the moment he wants to stick with Gilbert’s [Böckmann] system and really get on top of it.”
“There is more of a family atmosphere at Gilly’s stables and that’s where we want him. And we don’t want him to be used; Tom would happily ride 16-18 horses a day if you let him, so we have to be careful where he goes. You don’t really learn anything doing that. Tom really likes how Marcus Ehning rides, and you think if you get into a stable like that, you are going to learn a lot – but Marcus is not going to be there from Tuesday through to Sunday, so that is not a lot of use unless they have a really good trainer who stays at home all the time. Gilly came out here in April of last year and Tom went to the clinic, we talked about it, and Tom went over there in May. Everyone said, you won’t get to ride at shows, but Gilly had him at a show the first weekend.”
“It was hard because Gilly’s head rider had been there a fair while, and Gilly wouldn’t let him ride his good horses. Tom was there a week and he was riding the good horses, so there was a real fallout. He thought Tom was going to stay there and take his job. Tom was upset, no one would talk to him. I said, tell them you hate the place and you are not staying…”
“Gilly must have worked it out, because he sent them away to a show together. They had to help each other, and he realised that Tom wasn’t after his job, and turned out to be a nice bloke. Tom qualified three or four horses for the Bundeschampionate, but he had to come home and ride at the Australian Championships.”
When he was growing up was it a little tough in that Tom was part of that group of young riders, where quite a few of them were riding very fancy imported horses, and Tom was re-cycling the ones you found were too slow?
“Yeah but I think it made him a better rider in the end. He made most of his horses. Lots of times we’d come home from shows when he was younger, and there were tears – I’m going against Emily, or so and so, and they are riding a million dollar horse, and the one I’m riding cost $200 – but we got around it. He could still be competitive with them. Even now, we can’t afford to go and buy an expensive horse for him; nearly every horse he’s got is a throw away from someone. It’s a bit like I was with the racehorses, once you have the reputation of getting broken-down ones going, you get all the problem ones.”
The WARM-UPs
Sit back and watch the action as Greg helps Tom work in Statford Delight (aka Ricky) and Romantic Dream (aka Pinky) before the Grand Prix of Sydney at SIEC…
At the Grand Prix of Sydney, Tom rode two very different horses. Statford Delight, better known as Ricky, was purchased from the Butcher twins and when Tom first rode him at Canberra Show, they advised Tom that if the grey took off, he was to stand in the stirrups and should ‘Whoa Ricky!’ It sort of worked, but in the ensuing years that the horse has been in his stables, Tom has been trying for a somewhat more scientific means of control, with varying degrees of success.
Tom explains the differences between the two warm-ups:
“Obviously Ricky is quite different, everyone knows that. We just try to keep him very quiet in the warm-up. I trot over a few crosses because you can’t canter over crosses with him or he gets strong and boisterous. We also try and make him try a bit harder in the warm-up, to make him think a bit more, lots of low, wide oxers. He is a Daley K, and they can be a little bit slow sometimes. He jumps well in the indoor, it makes him suck back a little bit. Comparing him to Pinky, when I warm her up, you have to buzz her up a lot more than you do Ricky.”
“We finish off with a little bit taller vertical to make him jump up, so he goes into the ring jumping up a bit, and listening more to me.”
“With Ricky it is a day-to-day question what bit to use. We have to change the bit every day. At the start of the show we had a curb chain on him and he was really good, but towards the end of the show, he got quite strong and forward, so we thought we might take the curb off in the practice arena and see if that is any better. He was still a little strong, so we put it back on, and it was too much bit, and just before we went into the ring, we took it off. You have to take a gamble with him sometimes, sometimes we even put him in a normal snaffle. I quite like him being a little bit strong. He does his own thing in the ring – I’ve tried everything under the sun to make him rounder and more rideable but he likes to go his own way. It’s a bit American, but not American, it’s a bit of both, you have to get him slow and together, but you have to let him do his thing with his head sometimes. People ask me, when you are coming to a jump with his head up in the air, what do you do? You can only stick with him and let him do what he can do, because he is super careful and he is scopey enough to help me out every so often.”
“With Pinky I just use a snaffle, people say she is hot, quite amazing on the flat, but she is quite sensitive in the mouth. You can’t put anything strong on her, just a simple snaffle.”
“Obviously with Pinky you have to motivate her, she is a bit of a fatty sometimes. You have to make her a bit more buzzy. She jumps a bit better when you make her sharper. You need to get her thinking about the jumps.”
Do you try to get a rail?
“Not with Pinky, she’s too careful anyway. We don’t do any wide oxers with her, just try to keep her confident. A lot of people say why don’t we jump her bigger in the warm-up arenas but we know they are all careful horses and we just want to make them as confident as we can.”
This article originally appeared in the September 2013 edition of The Horse Magazine.