Cover image courtesy of Scone Vet Dynasty
There wouldn’t be a proper horseman the length of Australian racing that didn’t know the name of Percy Sykes. A veterinarian, gentleman and genius, Sykes was the genesis of Randwick Equine Centre (REC).
However, this is simplifying a rich and complex life because Dr Percy Sykes not only left a peerless legacy when he died in January 2014; he had been leaving that legacy all his life.
Sykes was born in Sudan in 1920 and educated in England. Even then, he was a high-achieving youngster in such disciplines as cricket, hockey and rugby.
At the time of leaving school, World War II had a tight grip on Europe and, putting aside ambitions in human medicine due to the shortage of vets, he enrolled at the Royal Veterinary College of London in 1937.
Percy Sykes | Image courtesy of Randwick Equine Centre
Sykes graduated in 1943, after which he was posted to India. They were violent years around the world but rich in experience for the young vet. In Calcutta, he was an honorary veterinary surgeon for the Calcutta Turf Club, which was probably his earliest introduction to thoroughbred racing. What followed was a life married to thoroughbred medicine.
In 1951, Sykes and his young family migrated to the warm climate of New South Wales. In Sydney, Sykes politely muscled into the racing business, soaking up how horses were trained and how things were done. It took just two years for his name to be where it mattered – in the yards of TJ Smith, Bart Cummings and Jack Denham.
By 1954, Sykes had set up a practice in the Eastern Suburbs. The physiology of training fascinated him, and his brilliance made him a very close ally of Randwick’s biggest names. He worked on Tulloch in the 1950s and Kingston Town (Bletchingly) in the 1980s, and the 1958 Melbourne Cup winner Baystone (Brimstone {GB}) was patched up by Sykes after breaking his jaw in a barrier accident.
Tulloch | Image courtesy of Racing Victoria
The hit list of good horses saved was long and illustrious in Syke’s life, and it wasn’t contained to just Sydney. He was a confidant for Robert Sangster and a good friend of John Messara, the Arrowfield master crediting Sykes as ‘capable of diagnosing a condition more accurately via telephone than the attending vet’.
For a short time in the early 1960s, Sykes had a partnership with the equally brilliant Murray Bain around Scone, but ‘Percy was not too keen on the bush circuit and much preferred the suave, sophisticated and debonair ambience of the Champagne Bar at Royal Randwick’.
The city suited Sykes, who dressed like a dandy and ran a tight ship in town. Few worked as hard as he in Sydney racing.
In 1975, he bought a stable block in Randwick and, in 1983, he built a specialist practice in the suburb’s Church Lane. By 1989 he was involved in a larger equine hospital with a specialist laboratory and it was this facility, completed in 1990 and flanking the Newmarket complex of William Inglis & Son, that became the modern Randwick Equine Centre.
Modern Randwick Equine Centre | Image courtesy of Randwick Equine Centre
Today, REC is located on five acres of cutting-edge facilities at Horsley Park, albeit Sykes didn’t live to see it open in 2020. At the good age of 93, just six years earlier, he died in a Sydney hospital.
He was awarded an Order of Australia in 2003 and, in 2006, he was inducted into the Australian Racing Hall of Fame. However, these aren’t the legacies that Percy Sykes left behind.
Instead, down the shed rows of Randwick and across racing in general, he will always be the man who pioneered upright gelding-procedures and the use of penicillin, along with the first equine blood-count laboratory.
Sykes had an impeccable work ethic and, in his own words, “as ye sow, so shall ye reap”.
