Bryce Stanaway - back from the dead - literally!
- Bruce Clark
- Jun 5
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 8
Who’d have thought Bryce Stanaway was a Snoopy kind of guy.
You know that mostly loveable beagle from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip and films, Charlie Brown’s relatively loyal mate.
Snoopy that is, not Bryce, he’s that colorful and still oh so passionate horseman. (So “popular” he has a couple of fake X accounts, still endlessly direct, politically challenging, and happily unsuccessful if you simply count winners as a measure.)
But Bryce, jumps jockey turned trainer - 40 years in the game - he’s battled (and beaten) cancer, slow horses, social media furphies, racing officialdom, yet the last 10 weeks has been spent in life and death times, in hospital with a raft of serious illnesses, mostly under the umbrella of osteomyelitis, a potentially deadly bone infection.
It’s not hyperbole to add, Stanaway has been found unresponsive in intensive care at times, as doctors have worked his troubling case as though they are dealing with some script of fiction.
“I’ve been to hell and back,” he says today, almost half the man he used to be, around 80kg, but still with his racing and horse dream alive. Apparently, he looked at saddles last week thinking he'd be back in one soon.
Excruciating pain, vomiting blood, serios kidney issues, immobilised, moved only by a bed lift, abscesses, bowel obstructions, recurring infections, and that’s just a Reader’s Digest version of it all.
“I feel like I’ve been a guinea pig.”
The full Bryce Stanaway back-story: BRYCE STANAWAY: “I’m f***ed, they haven’t broken me – but I reckon I’m finished!”
A load of antibiotic pills, endless tests, dubious diagnosis and prescribed treatments, while some cheeky Aloe Vera Juice surreptitiously delivered (well it kept a household cat alive for 31 years so why not, that’s typical Bryce), have all been part of the latest chapter in the remarkable Stanaway journey.
Not surprisingly, you might agree, Bryce would hardly be the best of patients at the best of times, but these have been at his worst.
A “nil by mouth” note above his bed today shows the seriousness of it all but perhaps resonates as something Bryce could have adopted elsewhere in a long career in and around racing.
He got out of Geelong Hospital, finally on Thursday, for a hospital at home, but it's his home - there is a long and winding road ahead, but a mere pothole to a man whose racing highway has been well ravined and without a lot of steady bitumen.
So, we are talking after Bryce had typically (fed-up) checked himself out of hospital last weekend, only to find out he needed to be back in, rightly so. Monday, when they added a twisted bowel to his ugly laundry list of baffling diseases.
Now, after all he has been through, Stanaway remains positively upbeat and for the simple reason that has filled his life - his horses.
And more so, that means, now that his "time is up", can reapply to train them again.
“It’s kept me alive,” he can say now when over the last 10 weeks, there were thoughts his real time was up.
“Not the paperwork, that looks bloody hard work, but surely they can’t keep that from me now.”
And as we agree to keep that dream burnished, Stanaway then sends a Snoopy and Charlie Brown meme, the pair looking surprisingly optimistic under thunderous skies in a leaky boat, the message:
“Everyone has bad days. Don’t give up. Pause. Rest. Rest. Restart. But, never quit.”
Stanaway hasn’t had a runner as a trainer since he had four of his always reliable soldiers at Sandown back at Sandown in February 2022. (They were Ozymandias, Faltonius, Hanakai Warrior and Twelve Gauge.)
His last winner was Special Privilege at Yarra Valley, that January, but he’s only ever had about 200 career winners, and of course he doesn’t measure success by numbers, his best season - 16 winners in 2012/13.
He’d feed a horse before himself. He has.
“I’ve made a living out of slow horses,” he told me some years back, but he admits the industry has financially crippled him before this illness and since a high-profile disqualification. “I’m fucked, they haven’t broken me, but I reckon I’m finished," he said at the time.
That’s when Stanaway was given a three year disqualification, Stanaway got his time for misconduct (or the way he spoke to stewards, vets and a Raceday official) - under the rules - Bryce in typical defiance still maintains a “kangaroo court” at the Victorian Racing Tribunal, his defence he was only out to look after his horse’s welfare, that being Moorabool back at Bendigo in October 2020.
Walking out of hearings, finding former Racing Australia chair Frances Nelson to represent him, it was costly theatre but ultimately personally draining. (For the record, his time finished last August.)
A typical horseman - Stanaway spent his enforced sabbatical breaking, shoeing, pre-training, scrapping, working with his and other’s animals and always looking forward to getting back until nature disqualified him again.
“This isn’t going to kill me or stop me,” he said this week, not realising the physical challenges of recuperation, before the cumbersome logistics of paperwork again, not something that Stanaway embraces.
“It almost did. Sometimes I think I’ve been to heaven and back when it seems I have been in hell all this time.”
“I’d been on my back for ages; I was able to walk on my own for the first time the other week. I went for a shower, then a walk and it took the security guards two hours to find me. They weren’t happy.”
What does make him happy is those horses, as many as 42 at his Torquay property as the disqualification ran, and Stanaway continually ranted at the injustice, yet kept endlessly working to make it work.
More than two months in hospital wouldn’t cover the days off Stanaway has given himself in a career of more than 40 years in racing.
He was unaware a GoFundMe page was set-up to assist, some $13,000 raised and the list of donors, real racing people like Kath Durden, Frank Salanitri, Anthony Cosgriff, Tommy Ryan, Henry Dwyer, Reece Goodwin, Declan Bates, Gavin Bedggood, even Pride Of Jenni’s strapper Sammie Watters, you get the feel. He’s well-loved and sorry for those left out here.
Bryce’s daughter Anita has held the farm together and marvels at the help provided, not just by the public, but like vital feed donations from Aussie Hay Runners, in times of national drought, some 32 bales delivered to keep the horses healthy.
There’s even a yearling half-sister out of the mother of Australian Guineas winner Feroce, Stanaway bought online from Gavel House for $500. It’s not for sale.
Stanaway’s horses are not just his business. They are his friends and his army. They race well-loved and are retired more so, and it’s part of the Stanaway psyche today.
Twelve Gauge, Stanaway bought as a yearling, is with Stepehen and Samantha Noble, a 41-start maiden, yet on the campaign trail. Knucklemanna, is a rising 18-year-old, now eventing for Colac trainer Carly Cook (he had 123 starts for six wins).
Ozymandias won one of 36 but remains a servant for young kids learning how to ride.
He’s best known (well for horses) for Crafty Cruiser, a $1m earner who won 13 of 159 and Bold Bard ran in Makybe Diva’s first Melbourne Cup, sure he was $401 and perhaps some irony was ridden by Reece Wheeler, who would join the Racing Victoria steward’s panel.
“I’ve given my whole life to racing, all the money I’ve had or made, I’ve put it back into the horses,” Stanaway says.
“Ok I might have abused someone, but you shouldn’t be kicked out of racing for that, I have only ever been concerned about the horses and their welfare. I’m not a criminal.”
“All my horses are special to me.”
Maybe even Snoopy could sense that.
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