Cape Town trainer Ronnie Sheehan died on Sunday evening after a long battle with emphysema. He was 82.

The son of a trainer in Bulawayo, he rode over 200 winners in what was then Rhodesia before increasing weight forced him to call it a day.

Ronnie Sheehan (hamishNIVENPhotography)

He was already developing the colourful character that made him such a favourite with almost everyone he met and he was to recall: “I was taking off 12lb in a week and soon I was a good advert for Belsen. But one day, despite walking seven miles, I found I could take off nothing so I told my father I couldn’t carry on riding.”

He took over the stables the next day but his career was nomadic to say the least. When Zambia started racing in 1963 he was invited to move there and he enjoyed considerable success. He returned to Bulawayo in 1967 but he and his wife weren’t happy there in the war years – “every time you went anywhere you had to drive in convoys with machine guns behind you.”

He didn’t like Johannesburg either when he moved south in 1975 and he switched to Port Elizabeth for a decade – “I won everything there but we were only racing for two grand a race.” In 1986 he moved to Cape Town before deciding to try Zimbabwe once more. “I trained there for seven years but they started to go mad pinching farms and, when I had to pay 1.3 trillion dollars for a beer, I knew it was time to get out.”

That was when he set up shop at Milnerton. His last big race winner was Captain Chaos in the 2015 Cape Nursery but the one who captured punters’ hearts was Isidingo, a horse with blistering speed who could never quite last home at Kenilworth but was almost unbeatable at Durbanville.

By Michael Clower