It was a weekly ritual. Darren Gauci, a very bright scholar at the local primary school, had become engrossed in racing but more importantly, had developed a fixation for the racehorse and craved for every opportunity to be with them.

Gauci, just 13, and the son of a Melbourne wharfie, would leave school of a Friday afternoon and make his way across Melbourne to Caulfield. Home work would often be done in a hay loft before day break of a Monday morning.

The countless number of stops made the youngster impatient but he new that his older brother Mick Gauci, a jockey but also a mentor and a friend, could guide Gauci through the pitfalls of what lay ahead if he chose riding as a vocation.

"After my 13th birthday, I would leave school on a Friday, where I'd bunk in with my brother Mick and work at the stables during the weekend." Gauci recalls. "In the early days, it wasn't easy. I was pretty small and the horses were pretty big. But Mick was a fabulous older brother, always looking after me ..."

Last weekend Darren Gauci, 51, revealed he has elected to give riding up and concentrate on passing his valuable experience to younger jockeys

However, it would be wrong not to honour the career of Darren Gauci.

Gauci became the template of how young jockeys should control large race horses. His unique riding style, his ability to quicken and slow his mounts without them breaking stride, was in essence the genius of Gauci.

He could control a race from an uncanny sense of timing rarely seen. D Gauci had it all.

On his first visit to a racing stable the strappers would laugh as Gauci dragged an empty water bucket to a horses stable, stood on it, so he could just reach the horse's head and then put the head collar over its head.

Some years later Gauci had the last laugh when he would arrive at those same stables driving his new Mercedes Benz.

Gauci rode over 500 winners during his short but remarkable apprenticeship, an Australian record. He rode 2500 winners overall and rode in nearly every racing nation in the world. He was feted by Racing and Sporting royalty.

Many believed that he was a superhuman jockey who could do anything on a horse. And they were nearly right.

Some days at Sandown racecourse, a track he made his own, he would regularly carve out a record numbers of winners. He handled the stewards inquiries like he was a junior QC. Slow horses went quicker and bad horses became kinder.

He was an excellent sportsman and teachers at secondary school urged him to pursue a tertiary education.

"I was best and fairest in the under 9s, 10s and 11s at soccer and I was chosen to represent Victoria," he said. "I knew I was quite good at it, but I realised that every training session, they got taller and I didn't."

Trainers such as Cummings, Murphy and Hayes would fight tooth and nail to have the youngster. Ambitions spilt over when Colin Hayes tried to secure Gauci to a contract as his stable rider but the jockeys master Frank King had the deal aborted.

In 1983 Gauci rode 18 consecutive winners between March and June in Melbourne.

Gauci was unmoved by the attention. He made it clear that those trainers from the bush that had allowed him to cut his teeth on their horses would never be forgotten.

"And neither they should be, they stuck their neck out on a green, silly kid, I was lucky enough to learn from those rides so when they came to Melbourne and I was going well they were first on my list".

If the new students that he takes under his wings in the coming years are half as good in the saddle, as passionate about the racehorse, and as generous with their time for charity, as D Gauci, you will have a pretty special jockey.