Industry Mentors: Greg Carpenter

There comes a point in the lives of most career specialists when being mentored gives way to mentoring. Usually, it’s after a long time in the game, and it’s safe to say that Greg Carpenter is probably there.

It’s been 40 years this week since the man known as ‘Carps’ took his first gig in the industry – a junior’s role at the racing desk of the Western Australian Turf Club (WATC) – and since then he has climbed into the spidery girders of racing royalty. Carpenter is now the Executive General Manager of Racing for Racing Victoria (RV) and, more famously, its chief handicapper.

It’s been a long and illustrious few decades, time that has seen him work in Perth, Southeast Asia and Melbourne. For a boy from Albany in regional Western Australia, it’s been a high-achieving career.

Carpenter is impeccably mannered and well-liked across racing, and he also has little trouble recalling the many people that have mentored him across 40 years in the game.

Uncle Ken Dawson

“Most of the mentors I’ve had in my life are from many, many years ago,” Carpenter said. “On November 16, 1981, I started as a junior in the WATC, and that was my first job, straight into the workforce at the Turf Club. But the earliest influences in my life were from back home in Albany, where my father was a racing fan and my uncle a country trainer.”

Carpenter’s uncle was Ken Dawson, who is still kicking along aged 90 as a life member of the Albany Racing Club (one of only eight).

Dawson trained from the 1960s through almost 50 years, and he only recently let it go when his last old mare, Dame Penny (Bold Invader), passed away.

“Uncle Ken always had four to six horses in work, and he won races in the city,” Carpenter said. “His biggest win was probably an Easter Cup with Mini Top in 1974, where he beat the first two out of that year’s Perth Cup in Allegation and Kabooki. That was Mini Top's fifth city win on end.

"He also won a Listed Australia Day S. a number of years later (1988) with a sprinter he had called Winterlude, so my first introduction to racing, other than my dad and following the races, was certainly my uncle, Ken Dawson.”

As a teenager, Carpenter was mucking boxes and lending a hand at his uncle’s yard. When he headed to the races, he soaked up all the clamour and glamour that comes with a day at the track, even in seasonal Albany.

“It was very much colour and movement of the racetrack for me,” he said. “But it was also the interaction with the horses, and I quite often say the best time to be involved in horse racing is at the stables in the morning, down the beach and swimming the horses, so it was definitely the interaction with the animal for me.”

That ‘colour and movement’ hasn’t changed much for Carpenter in all these years. He said that be it Sydney, Melbourne or in Western Australia, the races themselves still intrigue him.

“Once you have that love of racing, it rarely leaves you,” he said.

Thanks to football

If anyone influenced Carpenter’s early analytical skills, those things that would lead him into handicapping, it was probably his father.

“Through my father, I had a penchant for maths, statistics and problem solving,” he said. “In the old days, the racing results used to come out in monthly volumes, and I used to turn from the front page right through to the end page and look at all the results of the major race meetings around Australia, imagining what all the tracks would be like and the classes of horses and jockeys. The whole history of it, I found fascinating.”

At just 12 years old, Carpenter entered a public speaking competition at school, and the topic of his speech was the Melbourne Cup so, without question, a career in racing was only logical.

However, that first junior’s position in the WATC came incidentally because Carpenter’s first ambition in early life was to play Australian Rules football in Perth.

At age 17, he moved to the capital city to study politics at university, all the while becoming more successful at football. In the off-season, his coach encouraged him to get a job as a brick labourer and, when he peeled open the Sunday Times to look at the classifieds, he instead saw a job advertised for the WATC.

It’s a story that Carpenter recounts in most of his public-speaking appearances, and it was as simple as that. From November 1981, he was employed at the WATC while juggling commitments to football.

They were important, formative years.

Carpenter said that if he had to really pin them down, most of the greatest mentors in his life occurred during those years, and largely from the football code.

“The greatest influences and mentors came from my football career,” he said. “It provided lessons that I, and many of us in that group from that time, have been able to apply to become successful at what we do – hard work, respect, discipline, team work, lead by example, be supportive.

“These are all things that people perhaps take for granted now, but they were all things instilled in myself through my involvement in football.”

Carpenter mentions Trevor Nisbett, who is now the CEO of the West Coast Eagles, plus Haydn Bunton Jr, a legendary football coach under whom he played. He also mentions the late Eddie Pitter.

“Those three people were key to defining the person that I became,” Carpenter said, “and also they were key to the things that I have applied successfully, not just in work, but in life generally.”

Ken Hill

For eight years, Carpenter juggled his football career with his job at the WATC (he gave up university after two years).

It wasn’t easy, with Saturdays in particular proving a problem. Carpenter had one eye on the racing results much of the time but, speaking to the press, he said his role at the Turf Club would afford him better opportunities when his playing days were over.

It did, and eventually football gave way to horse racing.

During those formative years at the WATC, Carpenter recalls two people especially as mentors. They were Ken Hill, a long-time chief handicapper in Western Australia, and the late trailblazer Marjorie Charleson.

“Ken was the chief handicapper in Western Australia for many years, and later in his career he also became racing manager,” Carpenter said. “After I took over as chief handicapper, Ken became the CEO of the WATC for three years before he retired, which is when I moved to the role of racing manager and chief handicapper.”

Carpenter credits Ken Hill with much of his learning the art of handicapping. Those judgement decisions, eye for detail and the priority to explain decisions logically to people, plus knowing when he’s not right... Carpenter said he learned it all from Hill.

“He was a very positive man,” he said. “Ken loved racing, loved the fact that we were all so lucky to be involved with it and thought we had a duty to do the best we could for racing.”

Carpenter is unsure if Hill imparted all that wisdom intentionally, but he soaked it up nevertheless. There are elements of it on show in Carpenter’s everyday behaviour still, in particular the way he interacts with racing fans on social platforms, almost always patient, polite and transparent.

“There are many different styles of handicappers,” he said. “But I felt it was a responsibility right from the start to explain the work we did to people so that they could better understand it, and to be as transparent as possible. Everyone is deeply invested in racing emotionally with their horses, plus the financial commitment. They all deserve to have decisions explained to them.”

Marjorie Charleson

In Western Australia, the late Marjorie Charleson inspired more than her share of people.

Charleson is often quipped as the ‘first lady of Western Australian racing’ and, through an era dominated by male voices and bias, she was the first female public relations officer appointed to any thoroughbred club in the country.

She was also a heavy influence on Greg Carpenter.

“Marjorie was ahead of her time,” he said. “On reflection, there is still no female administrator that has made a bigger contribution to an administrative role than Marjorie. Between her and Harry Bolton, who unfortunately passed away before I started at the Club, they redefined and refashioned the summer carnival in Perth.”

Charleson was critical in coaxing the biggest eastern names to the west in high summer, the likes of Bart Cummings, Colin Hayes and Tommy Smith.

She got Kingston Town (Bletchingly) across in 1982 and, nearly a decade before in the 1974/75 summer carnival, she attracted a record 28 interstate horses, which is not likely to be bettered.

“She was another person who felt that if you didn’t have anything positive to say about racing, don’t say anything at all,” Carpenter said. “She also thought that if you couldn’t find anything positive, then you really shouldn’t be involved because there were always positive stories in racing. Marjorie was very dynamic and she worked very hard.”

Within 12 months of entering the front doors of the WATC, Carpenter had welcomed Kingston Town to the Club after a third Cox Plate. He mentions Vo Rogue (Ivor Prince {USA}), Think Big (NZ), Reckless and Better Loosen Up, all of whom flew to Perth in that excellent era.

“It was a very exciting time, and even when I moved overseas and still to this day, I have a great affection for Western Australian racing,” he said.

The student becomes the master

Carpenter spent just under 15 years at what is now Perth Racing. Thereafter, he was appointed head of handicapping for the Malayan Racing Association (MRA), which began a five-year stint in Southeast Asia.

“That was a brilliant experience,” Carpenter said. “Jockeys, trainers and horses came from all around the world, so it wasn’t as it would be here in Australia. The horses were trained in the styles of Europe, South America, South Africa, New Zealand, wherever the people came from. So it was a wonderful working experience to see that the Australian way wasn’t the only way to do things.”

By that point, Carpenter had held significant roles in racing administration and handicapping. His career was moving away from being mentored and towards a mentor’s position, and it’s gone that way ever since.

He spent five years with the MRA, leaving on the best of terms in the year 2000, and he spent a further five years at home in Perth before relocating to Melbourne in January 2005. From then until now, he’s had one of the most coveted jobs in international handicapping, a role that brings him to full prominence on the first Tuesday of each November.

“Anyone who has been a handicapper aspires to becoming the handicapper of the Melbourne Cup,” Carpenter said. “There have been only nine people to have done the job since the Cup was first run (in 1861).”

Passing it forward

After 40 years, Carpenter is now a mentor himself.

Among his annual speaking engagements is one with the Godolphin Flying Start internees, and he takes great pride in a few of them checking in with him for later advice as they progress through the program around the world.

Carpenter is reluctant to big-note his own mentoring responsibility, but it's there nonetheless.

“It’s something I take very seriously,” he said. “I hope it’s something I’ve been able to do for many years in a number of jurisdictions. When I was head of handicapping in Singapore and Malaysia, one of the cadet handicappers was Rosalind Lin, and I worked really closely with her for five years. I’m really happy to say she’s been the head of handicapping in Malaysia for more than 20 years now.”

There are others too.

Carpenter mentions Neil Jennings, whom he worked with for close to a decade and who held a senior position in Dubai. Jennings is now head of handicapping for New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing.

“Whether it has been young apprentices, young jockeys or trainers, I hope that I’ve been able to support and give advice to people along the way,” Carpenter said. “Certainly, I hope that I’ve been able to do that reasonably successfully with people I’ve worked with.

“One of our responsibilities is not just to be the best people we can be, but also to ensure the people that we work with, the people that we're able to assist along the journey, also have the potential to fulfill their dreams and be as successful as they can be.”