Cover image courtesy of the Queensland Turf Club by Helen Couglan and Noel Pascoe
Australian racing has its share of monuments dedicated to its best trainers, and they’re races that carry the names of some of the great men that have handled the great horses down through history.
Think Bart Cummings, Colin Hayes, Angus Armanasco and TJ Smith… they all have Group races dotted the length of Australia. In Queensland, the equivalent is the long-living Jim Atkins, or JJ Atkins, as he was known.
Atkins died in Toowoomba in August 2010, aged 94 and pried away from his stables in only the final stages of his life. As a dottering old man, he still had a horseman’s way about him, his narrow blue eyes filled with decades of achievement and memories.
He had trained horses like Dalrello and Grey Affair (Lumley Road {GB}), while Prince Ruling (NZ) was his unluckiest to run into Kingston Town (Bletchingly) at the turn into the 1980s. He also had the AJC Oaks winner Just Now (Semipalatinsk {USA}).
Dalrello | Image courtesy of Clifford Park Racecourse
Atkins clocked over 3000 winners during his career, won five Brisbane premierships, was an inaugural inductee into the Queensland Racing Hall of Fame (and in 2010 into the Australian Racing Hall of Fame), and the pattern of his brilliance was lifelong.
He was, however, a New South Welshman by birth, born in Grafton in April 1916. He was one of 12, and his father, Bill Atkins, was a respected horse trainer in the Northern Rivers district until his son uptook his ticket in 1936.
At first, Atkins trained out of Brisbane, but after three years of serving in the Second World War, he made his way to Toowoomba’s racing scene. It was hard yakka in 1943 getting fuel enough to float his horses west by truck, so he and his brother rode them from Ipswich “to the foot of the Great Dividing Range at Helidon”, and from there onto Toowoomba, where he remained for the next 69 years.
Jim Atkins | Image courtesy of Kevin Farmer
Among Atkins’ loyal set of owners were the Singaporean Jack Krygsman, Ron Wicks who owned Grey Affair, and Alfred Grant of Gainsborough Lodge. Atkins also trained for broadcaster Wayne Wilson and politicians Norm Lee and Sir James Killen, and it mattered little that he was a fellow of few words behind public men of many words.
Late in his life, he influenced the likes of current trainer Barry Baldwin, who credits him with sage advice.
“I remember what the late Jim Atkins once told me,” Baldwin recounted last year. “He said never sack a horse until you try two things… start them at the old sand track at Albion Park, which no longer exists, and then try blinkers.”
“I remember what the late Jim Atkins once told me. He said never sack a horse until you try two things… start them at the old sand track at Albion Park, which no longer exists, and then try blinkers.” - Barry Baldwin
For a man that said little, Atkins was far-reaching. His horses did all the talking, and it was a great shame that he died only months shy of his induction into the Australian Racing Hall of Fame.
Some years after his death, he was inducted into the Toowoomba Regional Sports Hall of Fame alongside league and union stars, and Olympian Glynis Nunn-Cearns.
The race in his honour at Eagle Farm was recoined the JJ Atkins S. in 2013, but in its other guises, it has been continual since 1893.
Sheeza Belter winning the 2022 G1 JJ Atkins S. | Image courtesy of Michael McInally
In fact, Atkins himself won it in 1985 with Tristram’s Edition (NZ), and, at the time, the newspapers reported it was the ‘biggest win of his career’. Today, it is the premier juvenile event of the Queensland winter.
