On the windswept coastal farmland around Streaky Bay, a small town on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, the McEvoy family has been handling horses for generations. It was here that the six McEvoy boys learned the language of horses, riding work for trainer Bill Holland, one of the most successful trainers in the region. Their father, Charlie, was a ‘rough rider’ and mother, Connie (now 96) took them to horse shows and encouraged them to get back on the horse whenever they fell off.
The boys had the racing bug, and Tony and Philip signed on as apprentices as soon as they were old enough. Phillip carved out a 23-year career in the saddle, winning features across the Eyre Peninsula. Tony headed south to Adelaide and began working for the most powerful racing operation in the country – the legendary CS Hayes stable at Lindsay Park. He rode more than 100 winners as an apprentice jockey from 1975, before his weight forced him out of the saddle and into the training ranks.
TONY: FROM SADDLE TO STABLE
The transition from jockey to trainer is not always easy, but Tony McEvoy had the ideal education. Under CS Hayes – a man whose training philosophy was built on the simple instruction “look at your animal, he will tell you everything you want to know” – he absorbed a lifetime of horsemanship during the Hayes dynasty’s most powerful years.
When CS retired and eldest son Peter took over at Lindsay Park, Tony stayed on. Then came the tragedy that would change his career permanently. In 2001, Peter Hayes was killed in a light plane crash while travelling to collect a kit plane he had purchased in Queensland. David Hayes was in Hong Kong. Tony McEvoy, almost overnight, was the head trainer of one of Australia’s great racing stables.
He did not merely hold the fort. In 2003, he trained Fields Of Omagh to win the first of two consecutive Cox Plates – performances that announced to Australian racing that Tony McEvoy was a genuine talent in his own right. He remained as head trainer until David Hayes returned from Hong Kong in 2005.
After leaving Lindsay Park, Tony established McEvoy Mitchell Racing in 2011 in partnership with Melbourne businessman Wayne Mitchell, setting up his own operation at Kildalton Park in the Barossa Valley. The stable during this period was home to some genuine stars of the turf.
Sunlight won the Coolmore Stud Stakes, the Newmarket Handicap and the William Reid Stakes, eventually selling as a broodmare for a record $4.2 million. Hey Doc won four Group 1 races. Despatch took the Group 1 Goodwood. By the time Calvin joined the operation formally in 2019, Tony had accumulated 17 Group 1 wins as a trainer. He was inducted into the South Australian Thoroughbred Hall of Fame in 2025, 50 years after first riding as an apprentice jockey.
