Kerryn Manning was tonight inducted into the Caduceus Club of Victoria’s Living Legends, the first female to be bestowed the harness racing honour.
The most winning female reinswoman/jockey in the world, Manning was born into the sport and helped change its landscape, with her deep list of achievements celebrated at the MCG tonight as part of the Del-Re National A. G. Hunter Cup barrier draw.
The 27th award inductee, Manning joins her father, Peter, who was inducted in 2006.
“You work hard and get some results and that helps you each day to do what you love,” Manning said.
“I’d just like to thank everybody who helps me. My husband, Grant, who’s a big part of Allbenz Park. He’s the backbone and without him I couldn’t do what I do.
“All my staff, all my owners and all my family – my father who’s taught me everything that I needed to know early in life.”
Manning left school after Year 10 to work on her father’s Great Western farm, driving her first winner on Gorgeous Gambit in Ararat at age 16 and then the following year won on her metropolitan debut steering Scotty Wiper.
They were a sign of things to come, with Manning since amassing 3825 victories from 16,126 starts in the sulky, in addition to launching a training career from 2003-04 that has accounted for 922 wins from 3831 starts.
There have been many peaks in her storied career which still, at age 42, has many heights to scale.
Chief among them is her Scandinavian tour with Knight Pistol in 1996, when the 21-year-old reinswoman and 10-year-old pacing-bred trotter would overcome their torrid 56-hour trip to win the Norway Harley Davidson Trot, galvanising the pair instant celebrity status among Europe’s trotting-mad audience that would remain today.
“I was pretty young and excitable,” Manning said. “I wasn’t expecting to win that day, I was just hoping to trot all the way and it was a bit of a dream come true. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“You couldn’t get a tougher horse than he was, such a trier. He wanted to get out and do it.”
International success came again in 2016 when she crossed the Tasman with 2015 A. G. Hunter Cup winner Arden Rooney, leading all the way to win the 2016 New Zealand Trotting Cup, the first women to achieve such a feat.