But, for King, he had to earn his stripes, and while an apprentice to Meagher, he\u00a0had to go through his grades, so to speak, before taking the next step.<\/p>\n
\u201cI rode a lot around the Gippsland and South Gippsland areas and outrode my\u00a0provincial claim before I rode my first winner in the Melbourne metropolitan area.<\/p>\n
\u201cJohn made you ride work six mornings a week, and I suppose I developed a\u00a0strong work ethic from those days,\u201d he added.\u00a0King\u2019s availability at the track and, no doubt, natural ability drew the attention of\u00a0other trainers, and before long, doors started to open.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was getting good opportunities, but when John Meagher moved from Epsom to\u00a0Flemington, the doors really opened \u2026 in particular with Bart (Cummings).<\/p>\n
\u201cI rode a little bit for Bart in the early part, as I got on well with Leon Corstens\u00a0(Bart\u2019s Melbourne foreman at the time), and before long I was getting offered\u00a0better rides,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
This newfound connection with Bart was only the beginning of the most influential\u00a0chapter in King\u2019s career. Enter \u2013 Let\u2019s Elope. A big, long-striding daughter of\u00a0Nassipour, King was asked to ride the very relaxed mare.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I rode her in track work, to be honest, she was not that impressive.<\/p>\n
She was quite a lazy track worker and only did what was asked of her, but when I got to ride her in the Turnbull Stakes leading towards the Cups, I saw a different horse.<\/p>\n
\u201cI gave her one tap to encourage her to come into the race about three furlongs\u00a0from home (600m), and I don\u2019t think I had felt that sort of acceleration on a horse.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe found three lengths in a blink and won running away. I knew she was pretty\u00a0special at that point,\u201d King added.<\/p>\n
Next start was in the Caulfield Cup, and the pressure, if it wasn\u2019t already, was\u00a0starting to build.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But, for King, he had to earn his stripes, and while an apprentice to Meagher, he\u00a0had to go…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178379,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[3004,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-178378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-racing","tag-racing","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}