On the eve of the Inter Dominion at Melton in December 2018, Matt Stewart spoke to Gavin Lang about life, luck and Lang's endless quest to win the pacers final.
GAVIN LANG – HERO OF THE HARNESS HEARTLAND
When I was about 19, I worked for a year or so at a stock feed store in Bacchus Marsh.
It was owned by the late great Alan Tubbs whose funeral earlier this year at Tabcorp Park Melton attracted a harness racing who’s-who and proof not only of the revered status of “Tubbsy” but also the status of harness racing in a region the tourist signs once wrongly dubbed “thoroughbred country.’’
Through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, the Melton-Bacchus Marsh area was “harness country’’. Still is. Fly into Tullamarine and you will see dozens of circular things that look like crop circles but are actually standardbred training tracks from Lara to Lancefield.
Back when Tubbsy and I were plonking bales of Lucerne on to the boots of Fords and Holdens – where blokes tended to put the German shepherd in the passenger seat and girlfriends in the back – the region had one uber-famous harness figure.
One of my father David’s proudest proclamations was that he delivered Gavin and Anita Lang’s daughters Danielle and Courtney.
“Gavin’’ was the biggest celebrity in town. He’d occasionally wander into the feed store to have a yak to Tubbsy and I’d be deadest starstruck.
Gavin Lang was the young megastar of a sport that was prominent Australia-wide but the lifeblood of Bacchus Marsh and Melton. Every second customer at the feed store seemed to have a pacer and a ploughed graded track.
Back then, horses like Maoris Idol were celebrities. Lang remembers the night of the 1985 Inter Dominion Final at Moonee Valley where Preux Chevalier attracted the biggest ever crowd to the track; gallops or harness. Lang time-trialled his father Graeme’s great trotter Scotch Notch early in the night. “They were hanging over the fence. The feeling was electric. The hair was standing up on my neck,’’ he said.
In the 1980s, it was Gavin and Vin Knight. Gavin was Paul Newman – cool, calculated – and Vinny the unharnessed wild man.
The stock feed is long gone and Tubbsy, who went on to become a leading trainer, is also gone. Harness racing is still so big in Melton that they built a monument to it and called it Tabcorp Park.
Gavin remains, the sport’s constant force; the man with the mind-boggling stats but a glaring space in the trophy cabinet.
Lang, 60, has won 6086 races, boosted just days ago via a treble, from just three drives, at Melton. He has driven in 32,485 races, a big number that reflects his sheer longevity. His drives have collected $46.9 million, a figure that seems spectacular but when stretched over a career that dates back to the Showgrounds, it’s more a drip feed than a king’s ransom.
Even harness racing’s heroes, like Lang, lead blue-collar lives of constant toil, constant travel. “Every day is like groundhog day,’’ he says.
One night is different from the rest.
The Inter Dominion is the sport’s most famous event. “It’s the pinnacle,’’ Lang says.
The problem is Australia’s most famous driver has never won it. Not the pacing version anyway. Lang has won the trotters final three times – True Roman, Game Bid, Somethingaboutmaori – but never the pacer’s race.
Nothing ever seemed to go right.
One year he picked up the late drive on Kiwi superstar Auckland Reactor and the horse fizzed up and ran nowhere. Lang drove Robin Hood twice, for two tenths behind Blacks A Fake. “Feet problems. Like having a flat tyre,’’ Lang said. Philadelphia Man won two heats in Perth and had a great trail in the final “but the series caught up with him and he ran nowhere’’ and Restrepo drew badly one year and ran fifth.
Inter Dominions are unique. Great drivers like Lang don’t always get a gig. Many horses, even the champions, are driven by their trainers. Lang drove in only one final in the 1990s.
Great horses miss finals because of bad luck and bad draws and great horses lose finals for the same reasons. Popular Alm, for instance, never won one and he was pacing Pegasus.
“Much of the time there’s only so much you can do …’’ Lang says of the myriad of Inter Dominion factors.
Saturday night might be the most significant in Lang’s monumental career because there’s more to it than catching that elusive pacing Grand Final behind Im Pats Delight, a $5 pop drawn gate three and “a pretty good chance in a very even race.’’
After a decade of driving and not training, Lang has built up a boutique squad of 15 near the State Forest and many are trotters; a nod to the Lang family’s great love affair with trotters, particularly the immortal Scotch Notch.
One of those trotters is Save Our Pennys, a $15 in the trotting final who will be driven by Gavin and owned – courtesy of a recent adjustment – by his ageing father Graeme.
Stewards don’t normally adhere to change of ownership requests midway through an Inter Dominion but “they understood what we were doing and agreed to let me out Dad in the ownership.’’
Back in the old stock feed days, Gavin was indeed the megastar but Graeme was the godfather of harness racing in the Shire Of Melton. Down in the main street, he was known as “Daddy Lang.’’
Pushed, Lang said he’d probably rather win the trotting final, even though he’s never won the pacing one and is running out of chances.
“For dad, of course, but I’ve always preferred the trotters. Their action is so … pure,’’ he said.
When Lang reflects on his career, there are many touch points; the halcyon days of the 1980s “that I never probably appreciated as much as I should have’’ and a growing industry preoccupation with the punt that Lang says has contributed to harness racing’s drift from the mainstream.
He marvels at how much faster horses have become via faster tracks and flash American bloodlines but wonders if they’re better; at least his father does. “He always says “the horses I was training 30 years ago were better than the ones now but I’m buggered if I know how they’re so much faster.’’
“One day we might breed the best trotter in the world. That would be something,’’ he said, adding there’s only one horse he never drove that he wished he had. “Maoris Idol. There’s never been one like him,’’ he said.
Lang says it annoys him occasionally that his opportunities aren’t what they used to be “because I reckon I still go all right at it’’ and says it’s probably time the sport took a more professional turn.
“You’re getting drivers who don’t do the hard yards of training as well but maybe it’s time we moved to a more professional era of specialist drivers, specialist trainers,’’ he said, adding the relentless slog of the sport can take its toll.
“It put me in hospital once,’’ he said. “You get up early, work the horses you need to work, no time for brekkie, stop half-way to somewhere and get something greasy, get home too late for dinner, maybe 9 o’clock after nearly running into some kangaroos, so you get half a dozen stubbies and some peanuts.
“It catches up with you. When I was working, I was fine but once you stop it can hit you.’’
Lang says he’d planned a few years ago to wean himself of the sport that had consumed and defined his life. The plan was to stop buying yearlings, so he’d simply run out of horses.
Then the usual thing happened. One or two good ones came along. “Makes it hard to stop,’’ he said.
There’s also that thing missing on the trophy cabinet, that thrill of the chase. “It’s still an achievement to win a race. And the Inter Dominion is the pinnacle. It’s not just any race. Put it this way, to win either race on Saturday night would be very, very satisfactory.’’