From gypsies to a Gordon Rothacker Medal, Jim O’Sullivan’s lived an extraordinary harness racing life and the legend of the sport with Paul Campbell to share his story.
The son of a blacksmith was working a horse from age 15, holidayed in Queensland, became the foreman for trainer Sam Zammit “and it went from there”.
“I was winning 100 races a year when we only used to race two meetings a week, maybe three at the most.
“I had a handy couple of horses, Margaret Shannon was one of them, unfortunately she couldn’t go around right-handed at Albion Park.
“That’s the reason I took her to Sydney and she won about nine at Harold Park, she was really a superstar there. We come down (to Victoria) for about a month with four horses. It turned into about 12 weeks and I won more money with four horses than I did winning a 100 races in Brisbane. The money used to be, in them days, about three times what we race for in Brisbane.
“It was a no-brainer, when I got home I said ‘I I think I might move to Melbourne’. They said ‘you’re mad, you’re winning 100-odd races here’. But I knew that’s where the place was, was Melbourne.
“We left Brisbane and it was 28 (degrees), I got to Melbourne … and it was five degrees. It was spring, it was September, and you used to get the winds coming over from Ballarat … with a bit of hail and that and I thought, ‘what the heck am I doing here’.”
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