Joe Public might receive the name Kerryn Gath with a quizzical look, but, inside the equine industry, she’s far from obscure. How could she be? She is, simply, the best-performed harness driver Australia has ever seen.

In a sport that was always traditionally male-dominated when it shouldn’t have been, Kerryn Gath has transcended condescending claptrap about being able to “mix it with the men”.

Given the fact that there’s no reason why men should be better drivers than women, Gath is happy to see so many women come through the system. When her mother won a novelty race at the Melbourne showgrounds in the 1970s, women were still a long way from being allowed to compete at the top level. The future looks decidedly different. “Most of the kids competing now in the pony trots (children’s events) are girls, not boys.”

In a sporting world that has narrowed all performance down to stats such as “strike rates”, Gath sends the numbers nerds into the sorts of rapturous comparisons provoked by a Bradman or a Barry Bonds. She wins once for every three drives. She finishes in the top three 60% of the time.

The 27-year-old from Great Western, in country Victoria, has lived and breathed horses all her life. Her career, with the help of her father, training guru Peter Manning, and her husband, trainer Andy Gath, has been successful since she began at age 17, when she bought herself a pacer called Allbenz for $500 and proceeded to win $196,000 on her.

In 1997-98, she got 55 wins. The next year, 126. She hasn’t stopped setting records since. She attributes this incredible leap in wins to an increase in rides, and to the fitness of her father’s and husband’s horses. “The track they run them on is different to other people’s. It goes up hill and down dale, and through trees. It’s just so different.” But that astounding strike rate contradicts her modest self-assessment.

In September last year, Kerryn was awarded the coveted 2000 Vin Knight Medal for excellence – the Brownlow or Rothman’s Medal of harness racing.

The horses she’s guided to wins have won more money than any other. She’s the only woman to win a National Driver’s Championship, and she’s done it the last three times, competing against some of the best reinsmen in the world to achieve it, including our own Chris Alford and Gavin Lang, who were her childhood heroes.

At the elite level, her record is outstanding, and she regularly wins feature races. She has dominated the Metropolitan circuit as much as she’s dominated country meets. During 2000-01 Kerryn drove 74 winners at Metropolitan meetings in Victoria. Her nearest rival, Daryl Douglas, drove 25. Lang and Alford drove 19 and 16 respectively. Gath still holds the record as the youngest female group one winner ever. In 2000, she won the famous Chariots of Fire on Lombo Rapida.

Gath’s life consists only of driving, training and travelling, although she’s only been overseas once. On a tour of Europe in 1997-98, she steered Knight Pistol to win the $100,000 (US) Momarken Grand Prix at Kristanssand, Norway. “It was a surprise. It was only his second start.” Gath was received “like a rock star – thirty thousand people were cheering me down the home straight. I was like Madonna or something. It’s a huge sport over there.

“I was invited back for a match race against their best driver, but it was around September 11, and I felt safer at home.” She likes actually riding horses for leisure, as a change from sitting behind them, but rarely gets the chance. So busy is her life that a day at home watching TV is, for her, a holiday. She races all year round, but she does it because she loves it, not because she requires volume of races to set records.

In 2000-2001 she obliterated Alford’s season-wins record of 262 when she attained 288. Alford took 1,424 drives to set that record. She passed him at the 807 mark. She just finished this season with a staggering 371 wins, and became the first driver to surpass 300 when she steered No Soup For You to a win at Adelaide’s Globe Derby in July. The only thing that stopped her reaching 300 a year earlier was a bad fall at Nyah that kept her out of racing for a number of weeks.

Gath is now only 531 wins behind 61-year-old German Rita Dress’ world mark for a woman, and the way she’s going, she’ll need less than two seasons and half Dress’ time on this earth to attain it. But there’s such a sense of inevitability about Gath’s achievements, it’s conceivable that one day, every driver, regardless of gender, will be chasing her records.

Published in Inside Sport, April 2004[ebook_store ebook_id=”8002″]