by Helen Thomas
Published by Nero,
an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd
Level 1, 221 Drummond Street
Carlton VIC 3053 Australia
[email protected]
www.nerobooks.com
Copyright © Helen Thomas 2016
Helen Thomas asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Thomas, Helen, 1955– author.
Moods: the Peter Moody saga / Helen Thomas.
9781863958776 (paperback)
9781925435283 (ebook)
Moody, Peter. Racehorse trainers—Australia—Biography.
Race horses—Training—Australia.
798.40092
Front cover photograph by Quinn Rooney/Getty
Back cover photograph by Bronwen Healy
Cover design by Peter Long
Text design & typesetting by Tristan Main
For Jeune
‘Show me your horse, and I will tell you what you are.’
—English proverb
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Picture Section
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
PROLOGUE
ONE NIGHT IN Melbourne, as March slipped away and autumn nudged at the city’s long summer, around 5000 people gathered at Moonee Valley Racecourse to witness one of Australian sport’s strangest exits.
It was Holy Thursday 2016, and while there had been no promotional blitz to lure racegoers through the gate, most knew that the main race on the card, the William Reid Stakes, was the last Group 1 event for the Victorian racing season. They had also come to see a contemporary giant of the turf bow out, a trainer who had nurtured the rarest of athletes – an unvanquished competitor – and in the process become a household name himself. And they cheered and cheered again as the horseman, surrounded by family, savoured his third victory in the elite event, this time with an unheralded horse whose staunchest supporters could only have prayed might win.
Such a reception would normally thrill racing officials, desperate as they are these days to conjure such engagement and fill their grandstands. But on this night, the authorities were in a bind. The celebrated trainer was quitting the caper that had been his life – and the industry’s officials had helped drive him to the decision, through their dogged pursuit of a sport free from substance abuse. Rather than sit through a significant period of suspension, he was choosing to close his stable and walk away, wearied by charges of effective blood doping yet somehow unbowed.
As the jubilant crowd cheered Peter Gordon Moody’s winning horse – the stable stalwart Flamberge – back to the mounting yard, it must have been clear to every administrator around the country that they were losing more than a popular drawcard, one of the track’s best-known characters. An era of Australian turf lore was ending, one that would never be repeated. Moody had won 2402 races, including 25 straight with his celebrated mare Black Caviar, and just on $113 million in prize money, and was now putting it all behind him.
In one of the night’s many strange nuances, the little horse who had dived for the Group 1 victory at odds of 10/1 was owned by David Moodie, the chairman of Racing Victoria, the authority that brought the misconduct charges against the trainer. Sometimes a true story really is stranger than fiction.
And sometimes an end is also a beginning. For Peter Moody, this might be one of those times.
*
Four days before his final victory, he had written to his stable’s owners to say he had made the hardest call of his life: ‘the ultimate decision that, at this point in time, I will not be returning to the training of racehorses in the foreseeable future’. It was an abrupt finale to a passion play for which even an industry steeped in 400 years of drama and theatrics was unready.
‘I would like to thank you very much for your patronage, your loyalty and the opportunity to train for you over the last 16 years that I have held my trainer licence – it has been a wonderful ride,’ Moody’s letter read. ‘I have had a lot of good times, enjoyed a lot of success and shared this with you and you never know, one day the opportunity may arise again. But I would rather put this proposition to you and cause as little grief as possible, than have us not be able to work successfully in this period that has been placed in front of me.’
Even those who knew him well were astonished by the move. He was leaving behind more than lucrative professional relationships. He was walking away from the only job he had ever known, the enduring love of his life. The man who became the face of Australian racing – without winning one of its four ‘majors’, a Melbourne Cup, a Cox Plate, a Golden Slipper or a Caulfield Cup – was leaving the training track, a customary hat pulled down over his eyes.
How had it come to this? Between 2009 and 2013, Peter Moody had navigated Black Caviar through her exceptional winning spree across two hemispheres, although her last half-dozen races were probably as stressful as they were joyful for all concerned. He was revered for sharing Black Caviar – his ‘grand mare’ – with racing fans around the nation, and as a boy from the bush he lent the industry a distinctly Aussie shine. He had also produced five of the last six Australian Horses of the Year, and topped the Victorian training table four times. Yet he always remained an outsider to horse racing’s establishment; perhaps that was part of his appeal.
Moody was the bloke all racing fans felt they knew: he looked like us, or how we imagined we might look if we had lived and worked with horses all our lives. He talked like us – direct, and just that little bit droll. He was the man who had snapped up the horse of a lifetime in a crowded auction ring, a dream come true most could appreciate.
But as Black Caviar was coming to the end of her reign as Queen of the Turf, a young stallion called Lidari took up residence in a nearby stall. He was a brat of a horse, unpredictable in nature, and often so vicious in reflex that one vet refused to treat him without assistance. He was also a talented middle-distance galloper: his connections hoped he would eventually compete and win at Australia’s favourite distance, two miles (3200 metres).
Yet the horse had a problem that challenged even such tailored attention. His brittle feet required special care, and ultimately it was this that led to a stewards’ investigation and an arduous narrative that took nearly a year and a half to play out. As natural justice was strained to the point of absurdity, with Peter Moody’s career hanging in the balance, Lidari’s hooves almost took on a life of their own.
1
PETER MOODY CAN’T remember the first time he saw the bay horse whose dodgy hooves would change the course of his racing career. Nor can Tony Haydon, his stable foreman at the time. ‘He got under our guard,’ Haydon says simply.
It must have been early 2013, some months after both men had returned from Black Caviar’s breathtaking, heart-wrenching victory i
n the Diamond Jubilee Stakes at Royal Ascot. Queen Elizabeth – a great horsewoman in her own right, and a renowned thoroughbred breeder – had watched as Moody’s valiant mare, far from sound and ridden as kindly as a jockey could ride a horse in any race, took victory a breath in front of three-year-old filly Moonlight Cloud.
Was the narrow win, unusual for a horse who regularly dominated fields, a sign that the world was turning against the stable? It hardly seemed the case, as the trainer and his small Australian entourage gathered around their gallant warrior and met the Queen. If anything, the opposite seemed true, as international media pressed for their attention, and fans from around the globe sent their congratulations. Moody’s team was surfing a tsunami of adoration, much of it genuine, some of it concocted by racing’s spin-doctors.
So Lidari’s arrival at Moody Racing’s yard back in Melbourne some months later was business as usual. The bay with the touch of white on his forehead and a dusting of pink on his nose was the latest purchase by OTI Racing, a successful syndicate the trainer knew well. He had trained several horses for them, and this one certainly met their careful criteria. The syndicate’s members were hunting far and wide for a horse who had the physical and genetic potential to win a Melbourne Cup.
They found Lidari in the south of France, where he’d made his racing debut in the care of Jean-Claude Rouget. His new trainer, however, recognised immediately that his hooves would not stand up to racing on the firmer, faster Australian tracks without special care. They had to be built up before they could withstand the new pressures to which they would be subjected.
This was something Moody was used to handling, a particular trait of European thoroughbreds. He knew it could be managed, having done it before with success. ‘I wouldn’t say [Lidari] specifically had terrible feet,’ the trainer recalls. ‘But we found with most of these Europeans, because they’re probably used to the softer ground, they come out here on the hard ground and they struggle, and end up with a lot of bruising, a lot of inflammation.’
This management involved a supplement in powder form that could be mixed into his daily feed. ‘I would say 90 per cent of the European horses we’ve trained, we’ve put them on the same regime,’ Moody says.
Not so typical was Lidari’s lack of manners. ‘He was just a cheeky European, spoilt colt, which they all tend to be when they get here,’ Moody explains, without rancour. ‘He always had an attitude, but you sort of knock it out of them when they get into our regime. But he always had a bit of a hot streak in him. We run into these horses from time to time, and [with] most of them, you get them worked and handled so much, they come out of it. But he was always a bit of a pig of a horse. And you know, the vets struggled to inject him. They couldn’t scope him, they couldn’t tube him. He was just a dickhead of a horse.’
With this attitude the young stallion should probably have been gelded, Moody says, but his good performances suggested he might have a future as a sire. If he could fulfil his potential on the track, he could earn good money for his owners at one of the lush stud farms in New South Wales or Victoria, and pump muchneeded staying blood back into Australia’s thoroughbred population. So he continued to be ‘a prick of a horse, and dangerous in the wrong hands’, Moody says.
These traits were unknown to the members of OTI Racing when they were the successful bidders for Lidari at the sale held on the eve of the 2012 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. What Terry Henderson, the group’s co-racing manager, still remembers about buying the horse is a sense of satisfaction, as the purchase represented the conclusion of a dogged pursuit: OTI had tried to buy him from Rouget’s stable months earlier.
The sale held on the eve of Europe’s greatest race had been a happy hunting ground for Henderson and his partners in the past. This time, they secured Lidari ‘for a relatively modest price’, Henderson says. ‘It might have been 150,000 Euro or thereabouts.’ Not bad for a competitor who had won five of his 11 starts so far.
The horse was dispatched to Peter Moody’s stable at Caulfield. He was already one of OTI’s main trainers: he’d had success with another of their French-bred ‘internationals’, the popular grey gelding Manighar. The two horses even shared a link in their family trees, with Linamix – Manighar’s sire – showing up as Lidari’s maternal grandfather.
Terry Henderson had known Moody for more than a decade. He’d been recommended to the trainer by one of Moody’s own competitors. ‘I said to Mick Price one day, who I’ve got a tremendous amount of respect for, as a guy and as a trainer, “Do you want this horse, Mick?” And he said, “You should probably be giving some to this guy. He’s bloody good.” And that’s how my relationship started with Moody.’
Henderson came to trust Moody deeply. ‘He has a King Kong–type appearance when he first confronts you,’ the owner says. ‘But you know, his relationship with his family – [and] I’ve seen the way he’s treated the young guys that work for him, his young riders and his staff – he really is a caring person.’
Having been importing Cup hopefuls for years, Henderson and his colleagues knew the risks involved. ‘One of the things you find from these horses is that we have a vision for [each] horse,’ he muses. ‘What the vision ends up being is usually totally different.’
They thought Manighar would be a Melbourne Cup horse, but he struggled at 3200 metres, the Holy Grail of Australian racing. ‘He was a really good 2000-metres horse that could run a mile and a half [2400 metres]. So they change so much under our regime over here.’
They believed their new acquisition could triumph over those extra 800 metres. ‘He’d won over a mile and a half in France when we bought him, at a listed level, which is a pretty good level. So there was every reason to believe that he could make Cup class.’
This was where Peter Moody came into play. ‘Pete was equal to our number one trainers, you know,’ Henderson says. ‘And he was the top trainer. He’d had Manighar. He’d shown that he could train French horses. It was the logical place for [Lidari] to go.’
The training track where Moody was based, however, was not. ‘I’m not convinced that Caulfield’s the best place to train stayers,’ Henderson argues. ‘History says it’s not. They’ve had, I think, one Caulfield Cup winner, one Cox Plate winner and one Melbourne Cup winner in the last 50 years. It’s not [good]. It’s an indictment. But as a training facility, it’s clearly excellent for horses up to a short distance, a mile or 2000 metres.’
Nevertheless, Moody coaxed Lidari towards the 2014 Melbourne Cup, plotting his path through the lead-up races that spring with care, and keeping the owners in the loop along the way. One of those races was the Group 1 Turnbull Stakes, a well-worn stepping stone to the major events.
History shows that if a horse performs well in this early spring feature, they might have the ability to progress to the harder, more lucrative contests. And if they were really good, they could become part of Australian racing’s great yarns, one of the heroes of Flemington, and Caulfield and Moonee Valley.
So the limelight certainly loomed for Lidari. No one could have predicted, though, that it would have a blue hue.
2
EVERYTHING ABOUT PETER Moody is big, and always had been. His personality. His intelligence. His friendships. His influence. His appetite. Big is one of the first words most use to describe him.
Both friends and those not close to the horseman agree he is larger than life, as bold as can be. Yet his makeup contains contradictions. A natural leader, Moody can be kind, yet overbearing; he’s a man’s man but his closest allies, at home and at work, are women.
His backstory is brash, as only the Australian terrain can make it. General belief says he was born and raised in Charleville, in western Queensland. While it’s true he was born at Charleville Hospital in 1969, he and his mother, father and three older sisters lived at Alpha Station, five miles out of Wyandra, far enough in the state’s south-west to border the outback.
The young Peter Moody enjoyed a ‘boy’s own’ life outs
ide, in spaces wider than city folk can comprehend. Horses were always in the frame. His first was an old taffy pony called Boy, or more formally Boy Luke, whom his father gained in a trade with a family friend across the river, offering a two-year-old colt in return. He arrived on the scene when the youngest Moody was three or four.
Jan Moody, Peter’s mother, guesses that the pony was at least 25 at the time, yet he still had enough vigour to teach her son how to ride. ‘I never knew how old he was when I got him,’ she recalls. ‘And so he was more or less foolproof. You put a child on him, they hung on and he did everything else.’
Together, old Boy and his young rider went to pony club with the Moody girls, and when Peter outgrew the old taffy, ‘he progressed from there to some of his sisters’ horses. They went on to have a bigger horse, or to boarding school.’
Jan and Garth Moody, his hard-living, horse-wrangling father, always had a few racehorses on the go; they actually bought five while on their honeymoon. They trained the slower ones themselves for the picnic races around the region, while the more promising types were sent to a trainer in Charleville.
‘We always had horses,’ Jan Moody says. ‘Motorbikes didn’t come in until later in life, and [we] probably had horses a lot longer than other people did, because we enjoyed riding. And when Mr and Mrs Moody senior had their time, we just carried on with [their] horses. There was always horse work.’
Jan’s youngest child loved all the family’s horses, and pony club was his passion. ‘He was more interested in pony club, rather than race horses,’ his mother comments. ‘[That] was just something Dad did.’ But the races at Wyandra were a big deal for the whole family; Wyandra’s Autumn Amateur Race Club Cup, which Garth Moody won three times, now takes pride of place on his son’s office mantelpiece. Racing became more of a focus a few years later, when his parents separated and his mother moved off Alpha Station to Charleville; there, he fell under the spell of Frank Cavanough, an old trainer who lived in a caravan off the local racecourse. With his father now living in Brisbane, Jan was happy her son was helping Cavanough, as well as working with horses. ‘He always had a great interest in horses,’ she says. ‘He loved horses.’
