A Safe Passage for Muzi at Durban July – Smallest jockey guns for the biggest race

The 2022 Hollywoodbets Durban July is bound to be a huge celebration – with a big crowd allowed back into Greyville racecourse after lockdown and the racing game back onto its feet after a near-death experience.

And if three-year-old Safe Passage wins the country’s most famous horse race, excitement levels will be cranked up several notches further. Not only is legendary trainer Mike de Kock’s gelding the favourite in the betting market, but he will be ridden by the most popular jockey in the country.

Muzi Yeni is a firm favourite among punters – a charismatic character with uncommon talent on horseback. The cliché about dynamite and small packages is often used when people talk about this guy. Yeni is small, even for a jockey, and has no struggle keeping his riding weight down to 52kg.

This allows him to ride all runners, massively boosting his winning chances. He has capitalised on this advantage in no uncertain terms, racking up nearly 2 000 wins on tracks around the country since first swinging into the racing irons in the early 2000s. He has won many Grade 1 races and come close to the national jockey championship on a couple of occasions.

He was 10 times Northern Cape champion rider, ruling the roost on the Kimberley sand until Covid stopped racing in its tracks.

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Fierce determination, ferocious competitiveness and a relentless work ethic have been Yeni’s hallmarks. His size might be at the root of all this.

As a kid, his height had every “clever Dick” around asking if he was already a jockey.

Ridicule about the vertical challenge forged a fighting spirit: “I used to stand up to those who picked on me and I got into a lot of fights as a kid.”

The son of a truck driver, Yeni was born and bred in Durban’s Claremont township and attended Pinetown Junior School and Hunt Road Secondary before taking the hint – and his father’s advice – and enrolling at the SA Jockey Academy at Summerveld. He’d never sat on a horse before he got to the academy at age 15.

“I’d seen these small people riding big horses and I thought, ‘I can do that’,” he told me.

His size and bubbly personality gets Yeni noticed – and one of the first to take an interest in the youngster was Natie Kotzen, then an assistant to De Kock, a trainer in his pomp making an international name for himself.

On only his 12th ride as a new apprentice jockey, Yeni got his first win – on De Kock Storm King at the old Clairwood racecourse. Could the story come full circle today as De Kock gives the little fella a leg up on Safe Passage? Punters and bookmakers reckon so pinning the Gaynor Rupert-owned horse to the top of the betting boards at 4-1.

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After winning the recent Daily News 2000 on Safe Passage, Yeni commented that the son of Silvano “gave me goosebumps”, so electrifying was his turn of foot. De Kock has described the gelding as “a proper racehorse” and a “real athlete”.

They should know.

Yeni landed his first Grade 1 victory in the 2011 Champion’s Challenge at Turffontein – on a horse called Happy Landing, for trainer Joey Soma. In 2021, he guided the super filly War of Athena to a Triple Tiara.

In the past month, he added two Grade 1s to the collection. He currently lies fifth on the jockey’s log, with 145 wins over 11 months, but has not made a concerted assault on the championship this season – unlike in 2018/19 when he worked at it like a demon, but fell just three wins short of Lyle Hewitson.

He has needed a break from that relentless work and travel – to spend more time with partner Kim and daughters, and to conserve strength for big races like today’s. A victory would make Yeni only the second black jockey, after friend S’Manga Khumalo, to win Africa’s greatest race.

The Greyville grandstand roof would rattle.

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