PROFILE
BJÖRN ZACHRISSON Dedicated to promoting Swedish racing To sit down with Swedish racing’s great innovator, Björn Zachrisson, is to be magically transported to different eras, different places, and enjoy countless introductions to new friends, long departed. One has only to listen. Zachrisson has a wealth of stories to sweep you up and take you along for the ride.
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WORDS: LISSA OLIVER PHOTOS: SCANDINAVIAN RACING BUREAU ARCHIVES
ORN in 1935 in the idyllic Stockholm suburb of Djursholm, Björn Zachrisson still lives in the same family home where he was raised with his two younger brothers and two younger sisters. “From early on we were exposed to various sports endeavours by our dad,” he recalls. “About half a mile from where I live is the riding academy, where I was first hoisted onto a horse, at the age of six.” Small ponies, he says, were not “â la mode” in 1941, so it’s safe to say he started big. “I was the first paying pupil and I just went around a lunging ring with the old Sergeant Ek, the owner of the establishment, hollering to me from where he stood in the middle. We soon became a group of students, in those days nearly all boys. Nowadays 95% of young riders are girls and there are practically no boys riding,” he points out. Horses have opened many doors for Zachrisson, but the first and most cherished was when introducing him, at a tender age, to one of his three idols: “Count Clarence von Rosen, who died in 1953, aged 88,” he reveals. “He was the father of the Swedish Derby and the Swedish Criterion (Svenskt Kriterium) in 1918. He put up most of the money himself to get the races off the ground. He was also the main force responsible for getting the equestrian games included in the Olympics programme from 1912 (Stockholm) and onwards. He was elected to the board of directors on the International Olympic Committee as a result of this and remained there for life. I admired his work and consider him the greatest innovator of sports in Swedish history.
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“He lived right across the street from where I lived and where we actually still live. When I was seven my father suggested one day it was time I rode a big horse around the block, alone, for the first time. When Uarda, with me onboard, walked by his house, he was just returning on foot with his dogs on his daily tour. ‘Ho ho my boy, this looks very nice and I think you’re worth a little penny,’ he exclaimed and came up with a krona that he gave me, and patted the mare’s neck. I have come to cherish that moment very much.” It wasn’t long before Zachrisson moved up a level again when it came to horses. “There was a racecourse in Stockholm at that time, Ulriksdal (1919-1959), not
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I had to waste extremely hard to make 58kg, only to finish dead last!
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quite near, but one could cycle there in just under one hour. A friend of mine from the riding school said one day, ‘Come with me, I’m allowed to ride out in a training stable there,’ so I did and that’s how I started in racing, in the chilly winter of 1950.” The training establishment was run by the up-and-coming Margareta Cronhielm, one of Sweden’s first lady trainers. She soon became immensely successful, both as a trainer and later, with husband Allan Wettermark, a thoroughbred breeder.
Margareta Wettermark became Kirsten Rausing’s (of Lanwades Stud fame) mentor after having annexed all five Classics in Sweden and trained the two most famous Swedish-bred racehorses of last century, Hurricane (by Husson) and Stratos (by Darbhanga), also establishing the prominent Vasaholm Stud. “Nothing of this was known to me as being of such great importance to my own sort of zig-zag and haphazard ‘education’ in one of the historically most important and great sports the world has seen,” admits Zachrisson, “when I ‘helped’ with the riding out during weekends at her stable in 1950.” Two years later, in August 1952, he got his first ride in public, as an amateur rider. “I had to waste extremely hard to make 58kg, only to finish dead last! My equine companion was Faruk, bred by Allan Wettermark, out of the 1945 Swedish Derby winner Fatima, who had been ridden by Danish-born multiple champion jockey in Sweden, Kay E. Jensen. “To add an ironic twist to this humble beginning, it so turned out that after my 15-year amateur race-riding career, that saw three national championship titles (including one over jumps) and 54 winners in all, old man Faruk (having been sold in 1953 soon after his short and unsuccessful racing career to the Djursholm Riding Academy) could still look me in the eye, ears flopped backwards, from his stall up there in the same riding school where it all started. It happened every time I was up there with two of our children, Carl-Fredrik and Lalla, close to some three decades later! Faruk had outstayed my race-riding career by a comfortable margin!”