Kate Goodrich

The irony is probably not lost on race horse trainer Kate Goodrich that her last winner (that’s March 2020 at Wodonga) is called Too Hard To Handle.

It’s been the only horse she has had run in the last two years; it ran last week too (finishing sixth at Ararat).

Before that there was Too Dark To See, before that Turf Wars, before that Isa Realist and The Poison Tree.

No, this isn’t a conspiracy theory, but as Racing Victoria strives to bring long running cobalt cases to heed, it settles in for another expensive Supreme Court stoush with the girl who won’t go away in Kate Goodrich.

So Goodrich will have her day in court, well she has already had plenty of them, from failed mediations, to the Racing Appeals and Disciplinary Board Tribunal (so long ago it’s now disbanded) to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) to the Supreme Court, to the Court of Appeal and now following a ruling last week – back to the Supreme Court for discovery, mediation with a directions hearing listed for May 27.

And you can throw in trips to Victoria’s racing Independent Integrity commissioner Sal Perna (past) and Sean Carroll (present).

But this is not a story about the legal positions on the young trainer who was found by an independent commission (FBIS) to have been bullied and threatened and a decision to dismiss her from training at Kilmore back in 2013 as flawed and unjustified.

There have been show cause notices and refusal of nominations along that journey since. The Supreme Court is well placed to serve the justice that Goodrich desires.

This is a story about the young girl who dreamt of horses and becoming a trainer and ended up on the verge of ending it all.

You can call Goodrich tough, you can call her a dogged litigant. But neither fully explains Kate Goodrich.

Why should you even be reading about a person in a sport that craves success and stories of the big stars, while nodding to diversity, welfare and inclusiveness. She has trained four winners in five years, only 45 in her career. She’d rather have you not reading about it either, but that she has got this far is a story in itself.

“All I wanted to do was be with horses, but I don’t know how many times through all this that I thought I was done,” she said.

“Yes, I have had suicidal thoughts, many times that I felt I couldn’t keep going. The medication has probably kept me alive, it’s kept me putting on weight that’s one thing, but it shouldn’t be about that.

“There have been days I just couldn’t get out of bed, sure there might be people who don’t like me but they don’t know me, this is all just bullgelati what I have been through and no one should go through that. But then I have had messages of support from people from all over the world.

“When I read things, it’s like a knife twisting in your heart, it’s just re-hurting you. Sometimes I just don’t know, I have been so f..ked, mentally f..ked, I have been so spent, you don’t know what they are capable of and the smallest things trigger thoughts and I am back to where I started, the lowest points.

“Sometimes life has been too hard and it’s impossible to deal with the pain, you dread every day, no one will ever know what it’s like, you feel dead, and you wonder how you get passed that and reprogram the brain.

“I don’t know if I ever will be the person I was. But riding horses again has been so good for me, I’m trying to be better and they have made me better. I know I just could never keep going without them, or having to end it for them either.”

For Goodrich it is simply about accountability. Mediation came with financial offers to go away but with strings attached to shut up. This is the female version of David v Goliath. But Kate keeps on going, even with her Dennis Denuto like team (and that’s no disrespect to her brilliant lawyer Ragu Appudurai, just a scene setter for you) as she takes on an army of industry supported QC’s like Paul Holdensen, who represented the likes of Novak Djokovic recently.

But more so it is about the horses she misses. The girl who as a toddler would ask her parents to pull the car over if they ever drove past a horse in a paddock. She just wanted to pat it.

The girl who saved up her Christmas and birthday money to buy a pony and then needed to get mum and dad to buy a property that wasn’t the old suburban plot, but land that could keep the horses. They did.

“They weren’t horse people, my grandad was an SP bookie, he’d punt like a mad man (I thought that’s what his clients did), and he’d take me to the races, mostly jumps races, I just love them.”

So there was a Welsh mountain pony – “it was as mad as a hatter” – when she was five, it was barred from riding school when he climbed a tennis court fence at school and needed to be retrained. It lived, loved, until 30.

“I loved competing, I was competing from as young as I can remember, all sorts of horses, I was a pretty good rider back in my day.

She was rehoming horses before rehoming was an industry focus when just 13.

She learned from two-time Olympic champion Gillian Rolton and proudly has ridden Gillian’s Olympic champion Peppermint Grove, remember the horse she won gold on with a broken collarbone.

But Kate goes back to her early favourites like Lwana – her first off the tracker – it was three, Goodrich was 13 and they ended up open eyed at the Hurstbridge Pony Club finding out what came next.

Or the grey Cassie, who gave Goodrich a broken back, not Cassie’s fault she says, or another problem horse like Presto, who even her father, a builder by trade, would learn to ride on.

Being involved as an equestrian required a lot of money, the Goodrich family didn’t have that.

But the horses led her to experience with local trainer Lee Hope before the proudest day in her life – telling her parents she was a licensed racehorse trainer. That was 2002, the first winner took some time, 2007 Strikin’ Rich at Kilmore but for Goodrich it has always been about the horses.

On the track, and they are all family favourites who stay in the family, the best will be “Socksie”, Signor Socks who won eight races and over $220,000, sure, hardly an icon of the racing turf, but everything is relative.

Or its older half-sister Isa Halo is a better story perhaps, and punters love these stories.

It’s a Friday night at The Valley in 2008, Isa Halo is first-up.

“We had no money, but she was flying, we had a $50 quaddie,” she said.

Their Kilmore mate and clerk of the course Bobby Challis had Doosra Diamond in the first leg. A 3000m race, one out, fell in by an inch.

Load up the second leg with seven and Anyways in a 1500m slog for Shane Nichols wins at $15, beating a $100 shot she didn’t have. Still alive!

Only two in the third leg, and yes Crabs wins for Craig Williams at $4 in another tight finish.

Isa Halo is $41 one out in the last, Dean Yendall up, lasts by an inch and happy days.

“It paid $11862 (still remembers that) and we had it seven times for our $50 bet (that was when it was a 50 cent divvie). We got around $20,000 in cash and the rest as a cheque.”

“It was scary. It wasn’t even the money, we needed it, it was that we pulled it off for $50.”

Part of that $50 bank was her long-term partner, former AFL footballer Jon Hassall, a 50-game player with Collingwood and 44 with Hawthorn.

“I was working as a waitress in a restaurant in Kangaroo Ground in my late 20s when I met Jon. I never wanted to get married, I never wanted to have kids, I never thought I’d be good at that, I had my horses and Jon.”

And she still has her horses and Jon, and her dreams of better days ahead. And a day in court that gives her those better days.