Leap To Fame winning the 2025 Race By Betcha
A MACADAMIA farmer from Germany is one of the secrets behind champion pacer Leap To Fame.
Owner Kevin Seymour credits Tobias (Tobi) Raeth with helping nurse a then nervous and raw Leap To Fame through the breaking-in before handing him over to his champion trainer-driver Grant Dixon for a career which ranks him alongside the greatest of all time.
“Tobi is such a big part of this success story and that’s why we make sure he shares every step of the way,” Seymour said.
“His patience to help shape ‘Larry’ (Leap To Fame’s stable name) into a racehorse was invaluable and laid the foundations for what we see today.”
Leap To Fame will surpass another great Queenslander, Blacks A Fake, and become the all-time richest prize money earner in Australasian harness history with a win in tomorrow night’s $1 million Ladbrokes Inter Dominion final.
It’s far cry from the day Raeth watched Leap To Fame, a $47,500 yearling from the 2020 Australian Gold Sydney sale, walk into Seymour’s Egmont Park farm.
“He wasn’t the sort of horse you’d give a second look to. Unremarkable is the best way of putting it,” Raeth said. “So many of the great champions have had a real presence, like Christian Cullen, Lazarus and more recently, King Of Swing, but not this horse.
“I guess you’d call him blue collar. He just goes out there and gets the job done.”
Raeth remembers the crop that year (2020) more than Leap To Fame individually.
“It was exciting because I knew we had some really nice babies. Tims A Trooper and Future Assured were in that same crop,” he said.
“Tims A Trooper was more exciting, and flashy. Leap To Fame was fidgety and more workmanlike. You’d have picked Tims A Trooper to become the star, but it goes to show champion qualities come in many different forms.
“The key with Larry, or any young horse for that matter, is patience. Just like kids, sometimes you have to be patient while they work their own way through things, rather than rush them or force them.”
Raeth, who has been head-breaker at Egmont for a decade, grew up in a small village an hour south of Stuttgart in Germany.
As a teenager, he spent his spare time helping a hobby trainer in the next village to re-educate retired harness horses for rehoming.
“He’d re-train 50 a year and keep the odd one to race as a hobby. We’d train them by riding them through the forest trails, we had no track,” Raeth recalled. “I went from there to have six months working for a trainer in Sweden where trotting is huge and then, after finishing university (studying agriculture), I had work experience in Australia. I loved it … the place, the people and the weather.”
As soon as he could, Raeth and his wife Daniela, made Australia home, but it was a long time before he was reunited with horses.
“We knew friends in Australia who told us Macadamia farming was the way to go, so we had a farm in NSW, near Lismore, and ran that for nine years, but it didn’t make a lot of money” he said.
“When we had our second child, Daniela said ‘okay, it’s time to get a real job now.’ I saw an advertisement to work at Egmont, was lucky enough to get it and I’ve been there for 10 years.
“We had nice horses from the start, headed by Colt Thirty One (51 wins and almost $1.1 million in prize money), but to then have Leap To Fame come along is the stuff dreams are made of.
“How can this kid from a small village in Germany end up part of this story?
“Of course you feel part of it when you do the early work with them and Kevin (Seymour) had been amazing in taking me along for the ride, including for that amazing night at Cambridge (Race by Betcha) in April, which I think is Larry’s best win so far and as big a win as I’ve seen from any horse.
“I’ll be there again Saturday night, proud of the horse Larry’s become and cheering for him to create more history.”
