Jockey Martin Harley will be back in the thick of the action at Eagle Farm on Saturday after spending a month on the sidelines.
“I had a little incident in the stalls a month ago at Ipswich,” explained Harley. ‘I just got a bit of a knock on my head and my neck. Then, on the way back the horse hit me on my head and sent me back in the saddle.
“The muscles just tightened up for a week to ten days … but, I’ve had scans now and everything is one hundred percent.
“I rode work on Saturday at the Gold Coast, and I was back at trackwork with eight or nine horses at Eagle Farm on Tuesday.
“Hopefully I can get a good, clean run now and get a few winners going into the carnival.
“I did need to take the time off for things to settle but, like I said, it was just a little incident.”
You can see why Harley referred to his latest setback as ‘just a little incident.’
In January last year, Harley, who was champion apprentice in the UK in 2011 and who has five Group 1’s wins behind his name, including a King Stand victory at Royal Ascot, suffered a brutal fall at Doomben which resulted in injuries with included a broken shoulder and three broken vertebra in my neck.
That was a big deal, but Harley didn’t blink.
His well documented, quite phenomenal road to recovery … few will have worked harder to get back on track … and his subsequent highly charged victory on Abounding in the $3 million Magic Millions Guineas, just twelve months after he hit the deck with those serious injury consequences, will forever stand to his credit.
Clearly, Harley puts adversity … big or small … behind him as quickly as possible, focusses on moving forward … and comes back strong.
You wouldn’t expect anything less this time around.
