Natasha Faithfull: Courage Personified
Small in stature, but herculean in heart.
Natasha Faithfull’s comeback from a near-death experience after a freak trackwork accident is a testament to the Great Southern jockey’s courage, determination and genuine love for the racing industry.
The diminutive 26-year-old received horrific injuries when a horse she was riding at a local Albany beach spooked, causing it to fall backwards down a two-metre sand bank, trapping and crushing Faithfull in the process.
Only 12 months on from the frightening incident, Faithfull continued her successful return to the saddle when riding a winning treble—including the featured $100,000 Mungrup Stud Sprint—at last Sunday’s Albany meeting.
In an ironic twist, the job that inadvertently saved Faithfull from tough times in her youth, nearly killed her.
However, it hasn’t dampened her passion for the career that, despite having no family connection to horses growing up, she says she had always dreamed of.
“I’m from Perth but I moved to Albany with my Mum when I was about 13,” Faithfull said.
“I finished school pretty early, in about year nine.
“I always hated school because I always got really badly bullied, so I just never wanted to go.
“I always said that I wanted a career with horses and we don’t know why, but I just knew that I loved horses and I wanted to do something with them.
“I was driving Mum mad about getting one when I was about 12 and she eventually said, ‘alright, we’ll get you something cheap that you can potter around on’, because Mum and Dad didn’t have a lot of money at the time.”
12 months after getting her first horse, a retired galloper, Faithfull acquired a job working for veteran thoroughbred trainer Frank Maynard in the Swan Valley.
In an incredible coincidence, a turn of events saw the then-13-year-old move towns and begin her racing journey with the trainer of the horse whom she scored her career-best win aboard in last Sunday’s Mungrup Stud Sprint, Joanne Leeson.
“I did a little bit of riding at Frank Maynard’s, but not much because I was very small and couldn’t hold anything,” Faithfull said.
“They struggled to find racehorses that I could ride there.
“Then when Mum packed up and moved to Albany, I went with her.
“We were living in the outskirts of Albany and I was too young to have my driver’s licence, so I got a job with Jo Leeson.
“She was about 30 kilometres out of town, near where we were living.”
After starting out doing groundwork, Faithfull later progressed to riding and says Leeson had an instrumental impact on her early learnings.
“I started on the ponies at Jo’s and then moved up and they taught me how to hang on to the racehorses around the bush tracks,” she said.
“Jo and her partner at the time helped me a lot and taught me my times out in the bush.
“Then Mum moved into town and, because I didn’t have my driver’s licence, I had to stop working there.”
Not content to go back to school, another relocation meant another job search for Faithfull.
Enter the trainer of the Great Southern’s most powerful racing operation, Steve Wolfe.
“I ended up getting a job at Wolfey’s because he was based in town,” Faithfull said.
“I worked there for a while and kept talking about becoming an apprentice but he thought I was a bit small, then after about a year he thought I was sitting on good enough and said, ‘you won’t stop talking about it, so you might as well have a crack at it’.
“It was really hard work, but I’m glad that I did my apprenticeship with Wolfey because he’s a bit of an old-school hard nut to work for.
“In the long run it made me toughen up, which I think you need in this industry, because it’s not easy.
“He definitely taught me to toughen up a bit and be able to take things on the chin and cop criticism.”
Faithfull had her first race ride in June 2011, at the age of 17, and completed her apprenticeship three-and-a-half years later.
Over the past five years she has split her time between Perth and Albany, basing herself in the metropolitan area during the winter months before relocating to Albany for its summer racing season, whilst also working for her former boss, Wolfe.
It was during a routine trackwork morning in Albany in January 2019 that she suffered the horrifying fall that almost cost the in-form hoop her life, only a day after riding a winning double.
“Where we work onto the beach is kind of a sand dune, you have to go up and over to get onto the beach,” Faithfull said.
“It’s quite a busy beach there and a lot of holidayers use it.
“Someone had left their bike on the path and, as we came around the corner, my horse saw it and ran backwards really quickly.
“Because the track isn’t very wide and there’s a two-to-three metre drop each side of the dune, my horse ended up flipping over backwards down the bank.
“It was just one of those freak accidents.”
As she laid crushed underneath the half-tonne animal, Faithfull was unaware that she had suffered punctured and collapsed lungs, a lacerated liver, three fractured vertebrae, six broken ribs and a broken shoulder in two places.
However, that all changed over the coming minutes.
“I’d broken my ankle before that, but I’d never broken my ribs or punctured my lungs or anything,” she said.
“As soon as my horse fell, he scrambled because it’s quite a steep drop.
“He got up and as he ran off, the first thing I thought was, ‘thank God he’s off me’, but then straight away I could feel the blood coming out of my mouth when I was trying to breathe.
“I’ve heard jockeys talk about it before, they say that puncturing your lung is the worst pain you can have being a jockey, and I knew straight away that’s what had happened.
“I didn’t know it was to the extent that they had collapsed, but I knew that I’d definitely punctured my lungs.”
Faithfull was the last of three riders crossing the bank at the time of the accident and, after hearing the mayhem, one of her trackwork partners soon rushed back to her aid.
“She grabbed me to turn me on my side a bit, because I was struggling to breathe, and there was blood coming out of my mouth,” Faithfull said.
“She grabbed me by the shoulder before I realised I had broken it, then I was starting to get quite panicky because I was struggling to get any oxygen at all.
“I was down there for so long because it was such a steep drop and they couldn’t get me out.
“Even when the ambulance finally got there, they had to call the fire brigade and they had to climb down to try to lift me up.”
Faithfull was then air-lifted to Royal Perth Hospital by the Royal Flying Doctors and, after spending some anxious moments in the intensive care unit, she awoke the next day and was able to breathe on her own.
Lucky to be alive, she was set to endure a gruelling next six months on a long road to recovery.
“I was in hospital for about a week,” Faithfull said.
“I was still in a lot of pain and pretty much couldn’t do anything for a fair while.
“I couldn’t sleep for a long time, either, because of the broken ribs and punctured lung.
“I had surgery on my shoulder and had a plate put in for two-and-a-half months, then that came out.
“Once that came out it was a lot better.”
Unable to do any physical exercise without quickly losing her breath, Faithfull’s lungs began to heal as time went on.
Despite the painful and sleepless nights, as well as her mother, local Albany trainer Samantha Faithfull, having to assist her in getting dressed for a prolonged period, she says her desire to return to the jockey ranks never wavered.
“I don’t know why, but it didn’t,” Faithfull said.
“I missed riding pretty much straight away.
“I just look at it that it was a freak accident and it’s just one of those things.
“When I was in the ICU, there was a guy there that had been on holidays with his family and something came off the back of their trailer and smashed into their car and he ended up dying.
“It really put things into perspective and I think it doesn’t matter what you do in life, you can get hurt doing anything.”
Widely-regarded as being one of the hardest workers in the jockey room, Faithfull started groundwork at Wolfe’s stable within seven months of her fall to maintain her sanity.
Still unable to be cleared to ride, she kept herself busy by mucking out yards and completing general stablehand duties, tasks the vast majority of senior jockeys would scoff at.
A few weeks later she was given the green light to start riding trackwork and, in a script similar to that of a fairy-tale, on October 19 she steered Minus Looks to an Ascot Saturday victory at her first race-meeting back.
In emotional scenes, the Wolfe-trained galloper dead-heated with Peter Fernie’s Little Fish, providing Faithfull and her supporters with an unforgettable moment that finally signalled the end of a traumatic period.
“It was definitely good to get the monkey off my back that early after having so long off,” she said.
“You always worry that if you get back and can’t get going straight away, people start making their own opinions, so it was good to get the support from Wolfey like that and repay him for it straight away.
“He’s given me a lot of opportunities along the way.
“He got pretty emotional about it afterwards and that made me get a bit emotional about it.
“We have a love-hate relationship, we get along like I’m his daughter and, at times we clash heads, but I always seem to be working for him so it can’t be that bad!”
Fast-forward three months to the day and Faithfull, who had already booted home 13 winners since making her remarkable comeback, experienced her best day in the saddle to date when bringing up an Albany treble.
With victories aboard Vital Boom ($26) and Mass Effect ($3.70) in support races on the nine-event Mungrup Stud Sprint day card, Faithfull also took out the $100,000 feature when guiding Baraki Beats ($8) to an all-the-way victory for the trainer who has been there from the very beginning, Joanne Leeson.
As well as having immense sentimental value, she says the home-town win is without doubt the highlight of her career so far.
“Especially getting it for Jo,” Faithfull said.
“It’s crazy to think I was 14 and about 32 kilos when I started working for her and then to see where we are now.
“It’s pretty surreal, really.
“I can’t believe that was all happening this time last year and this is where I am now.
“It just goes to show that, in this industry, you never know where you’re going to be.
“You might be down in the dumps and think it’s getting a bit hard then, all of a sudden, something like this happens.”
After enduring a whirlwind 12 months and having already completed an incredibly-inspiring comeback to race-riding, Faithfull still isn’t ready to rest on her laurels.
She has her sights firmly set on continuing to ride her wave of momentum over the coming months to hopefully land a special achievement.
“My main thing at the moment is to focus on Albany,” she said.
“It’s my home track and I’d really like to get leading rider down here.
“It probably doesn’t seem like much of an achievement but, for me, it would be a nice thing because I’m based down here and it’s where my mum lives.
“I think I’m the leading rider at the moment and I think I am at Esperance, too, so if I can get those two that would be nice and then I can go from there going into the winter.”
MICHAEL HEATON