“We were starting to get a little nervy because not much was going right but we thought we had the numbers to get there,” Steve told the Herald.
“But it is a relief. It would have been not much fun heading to the last meeting of the season at Alexandra Park on Wednesday needing to get a winner to break the record.”
As it was the clincher came at a Westport grass track meeting at which probably few of the holiday crowd realised what they were witnessing and with Steve Telfer lucky to even see it.
“We actually had a power outage here [Ardmore] today since about 11am but I managed to watch the win on my phone ‘cause I had two bars of coverage left.”
It may not have been Alexandra Park or Addington on a glamour day but you don’t train 169 winners in a year only at the big tracks.
Which is why the Telfers, backed by Stonewall Stud owner Steve Stockman, are so important to New Zealand harness racing.
Not only is the business about big breeders and the leading buyers at the yearling sales but they support meetings right across the country, bringing eyeballs and turnover to meetings in the deep south, Cambridge and even Manawatū and the West Coast this month.
“It is important to support those clubs so to get the record at Westport, a meeting I have never been to but would love to go to, it’s all right by us,” says Telfer.
The seeds of that record were sewn over the last five years when Stockman has been fearless at the yearling sales and they started to germinate during the winter when smart planning laid the foundation for what has now been achieved.
The Telfers decided to go at winter racing hard, realising that the stakes for graded races were more or less the same as summer but many of their elite training rivals powered down at that time of the year.
The winter weekends they won sometimes seven or eight races all helped add up to 169 today, two days after Steve Telfer celebrated his 55th birthday.
On Sunday he also celebrated, with a very rare fist pump from a man who enjoys his wins but keeps his emotions private.
He started to list off those who deserved thanks in the minutes after Elektra King’s record setter then stopped.
“You know, there are too many people to thank, from all our staff to farriers and all sorts of people and of course Steve and Jill,” says Telfer.
“But they all made this happen and they will know that.”
So is 169, or a few more, the limit?
“We like to set new goals and I think inside the next 24 months a 200-win season isn’t impossible,” he suggests.
“We are thinking of racing more of the team, maybe as much as 75% of them, in the South Island heading forward because there are so many racing opportunities.
“There are meetings down there we didn’t go to this year which maybe next year we will.”
Team Telfer would only need one winner at most of those South Island mid-weekers they often ignored this year to have a real shot at 200 wins in season.
And that would bring the overall New Zealand record for a horse trainer of 203 wins set by Mark Walker in 2023 into play.
Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.