Joe Soma

JOE Soma was born for a career in thoroughbred racing. He’s a horseman through and through, an avid racegoer even on days when he doesn’t have runners entered, a purist with a passion for “racing as it should be” and a people’s person, sympathetic to the game’s ground-level participants including small stables, new owners and die-hard punters.

Moments after Soma had won the Grade 1 R2-million President’s Champions Challenge over 2000m on Champions Day with 55-1 outsider Happy Landing, his many racing friends from Turffontein’s grandstand flocked to the parade ring fence to congratulate the trainer who sits among them at most Gauteng meetings, enjoying race after race and helping them to pick winners.

Joe Soma.

An emotional Soma touched hands here, there and everywhere, not unlike jockey Doug Whyte when the former SA jockey walks alongside the Sha-Tin parade ring in Hong Kong after his feature wins.

There weren’t near as many people at the Johannesburg track to witness Soma’s biggest success, but this happy Saturday crowd is said to have been in the region of 10,000 strong.  He recalls:  “There were so many young people there with their kids. It was like being back in the 1970s and 1980s. It felt nice to be part of it and I was fortunate to have won a Grade 1 race again.”

Soma believes that his “return to the grandstand” coupled with a personal commitment to stop betting, has turned his life around.

In the early part of 2010 he found himself frustrated, fighting with himself and just about going nowhere. “I had issues I was battling to cope with and I came to a fork in the road. I had to make a choice between training Maidens and E Division horses and battling forever, or changing my perspectives on life, racing and gambling. I quietly new that punting horses had always been my problem, but I had to acknowledge this fact first.

“It happened one Sunday evening after I’d had another losing day at the races. I blew about R30,000 on a meeting at Scottsville and for once decided to take stock of my wins and losses. This exercise was an eye-opener, it came as a shock. Punters are creatures of a kind, generally, they win some bets and they lose more. They always convince themselves that they’re winners in the long run, which most of them are not!

“I decided to turn up betting and I started focusing on my stable. I cut the string from 40 to 22 horses and got involved in my yard again. I’ve always done what I had to do, I’ve run my string well, but when betting becomes your master you lose focus without noticing it and everything else is affected.”

He adds: “I suffered some withdrawal symptoms for a few weeks, but things turned remarkably. I felt close to my horses again, I noticed the little things I’d missed for a while and the stable’s track results improved significantly.

“I decided to close my private suite at Turffontein. It’s a wonderful social vehicle but lends itself to betting heavily with owners and friends and I didn’t want that. I returned to the place where I started racing 35 years ago – the grandstand at Turffontein. I picked up my old habit of going to the parade ring, watching the contenders close-up, marking my race guide and watching them run, a wonderful pleasure I’d almost forgotten.”

Soma tells that his known ability to select good yearlings from among many at the various sales, stems from his early years spent with his late father, Gabriel (“Gabby”) and his cousin, Gary Soma.

“We attended most sales and per custom selected six colts and four fillies after studying them close up. Over the years we became very good at it. I wanted to train from an early age and my dad warned me never to combine training and betting.

“I followed his advice in my first two years as a trainer, 1992-1994, and we saddled seven feature winners, including our classic champion, Special Preview. After that I started throwing money at various bets and it showed it my results. It’s taken me more than 15 years to stop, but here we are, things have changed for the good!”

He rates Special Preview as the best two-year-old ever to race in South Africa and explains: “He won the Bloodline Million, the SA Nursery and the Smirnoff Plate within a period of three months, with a month in between each run. No two-year-old before him or after him has done that. He had an ability rating of 120, six points below Horse Chestnut and two points more than Jet Master. He was a star who went wrong as an older horse because we saved him to be a stallion, but he was a great horse nonetheless.”

Soma picked other track stars and trained a few too, including Queen’s Plate winner Divine Force, who was taken away from him after a single run, and he says: “Not many big owners like to give the small stables a fair chance. So often they give a horse to a small stable and when they don’t show at two or three years old they take it to a trainer at the top of the log. The horse comes right and the small trainer looks an idiot.”

This is why, Soma says, he has the utmost respect for Markus Jooste, who owns Happy Landing.

“Markus is patient and understanding. I predicted that Happy Landing would be a top horse the moment he came into my yard and Markus allowed me to prove it. My advice to owners is to stick to their trainers!”

Soma’s been openly accused of “taking sweeteners” from Jooste to change sides in the erstwhile “Concerned Owners” revolt against the Racing Association and Phumelela. He responds: “At the time I was a member of the group of concerned owners, but after speaking to Markus and Chris van Niekerk I felt that our issues had been adequately addressed. Markus did not offer me anything to smooth matters over, so to speak. I was happy with negotiations and eventually things drew to close.

“The next year, at the National Yearling Sale, I liked two lots and I knew they’d go for more money that I could afford, so I decided on my own accord to phone Markus and offer him a prospective purchase. I had  Happy Landing marked down and also a smart colt by Jet Master. The Jet Master went too high, over R800,000, which was my limit on him, but Happy Landing looked a buy at R525,000 and I raised my hand to secure him. There is nothing untoward about my acquisition of Happy Landing. In fact, Markus skipped a year before buying me a few more. There was and is nothing to hide.”

Soma still has strong views on the management of racing in general and he comments: “As things stand today there are old and new matters that concern me, but I don’t want to be involved in the politics again. I’d say the best way to deal with pressing issues would be to address them one or two at a time until they are solved. Get some people together, present a single issue or perhaps two to, for example, the Racing Association, and get those solved before moving on to others.”

While that happens, Joe Soma will be focusing on sending out winners and he concludes: “Everyone wants to be as good as Mike de Kock but we can’t be, he’s a phenomenon. We can learn from him though and apply some of his methods. I’m a young and sprightly 52 years of age, I have a new vision and there is a slice of the pie for me and other trainers. I look forward to the rest of my career!”

- (From Parade Magazine, July 2011).